ReenX
Banned
Seeing as that he was Lord of the Admiralty before he became PM I don't think he could survive the political backlash. The very thought that the RN is not the superior tactical force would rip the last safety blanket out from under the british people. It was only the fact that in OTL the Bismarck was sunk that prevented total moral collapse on the sinking of the Hood, and even then it was not pretty.
I think we can assume that the Germans would go for the capture if at all possible. (Those supplies would be very useful on the Axis side as well.)
So Churchill is essentially a scapegoat, to be blamed for failures and in order to portray the events as failure of one man instead of weakness of the RN? Seems shitty. Who could have replaced him though? Would his potential replacements have his bulldog mentality to continue the war regardless?
Capture would be ideal but that is pushing it tbh. There's no way Bismarck crew can handle 20k men, perhaps more considering the crews of other ships, and operate said ships without severely hampering the Bismarck, alongside the fact that would slow Bismarck down to a crawl, in the 8-12kt range, unless it would abandon the captured ships and let them find it's own way to friendly ports. The moment Bismarck does something as incredible as sink two battleships, then sink another one guarding a convoy, then wreck a convoy and thousands of men, disregarding even the thousands that would have died on the hood and PoW, RN would put everything from fishing boats to battleships into hunting Bismarck.