Bismarck vs Hood
They were the two most powerful ships in the Atlantic, and their guns were all but identical. The difference between them was twenty years — and it was decided in five minutes.
On paper this is the closest of all the great duels. HMS Hood and KMS Bismarck carried the same number of guns of almost exactly the same calibre — eight 15-inch against eight 38 cm — on hulls of nearly the same size and speed. When they sighted each other in the Denmark Strait on the morning of 24 May 1941, the Royal Navy expected its most famous warship to win.
But Hood was laid down in 1916 and completed in 1920: a battlecruiser, built to the bargain of her age — battleship guns and battleship speed, paid for with the one thing that could not be seen from the deck. Bismarck was twenty years newer. The gap between them was not firepower. It was the roof over the magazines.
| KMS Bismarck | HMS Hood | |
|---|---|---|
| Main battery | 8× 38 cm /47 SK C/34 | 8× 15-inch /42 Mk I |
| Belt armour | up to 320 mm | up to 305 mm |
| Deck armour | 50 + 80–120 mm (layered) | 76 mm (over magazines) |
| Full-load displacement | ~50,300 t | ~48,000 t |
| Max speed | ~30 knots | ~31 knots |
| Range | ~8,500 nmi at 19 kn | ~5,300 nmi at 20 kn |
| Commissioned | August 1940 | May 1920 |
| Crew | ~2,200 | ~1,418 |
| Fate | Sunk 27 May 1941 | Sunk 24 May 1941 |
The narrowest column of all. Hood’s eight 15-inch Mk I guns and Bismarck’s eight 38 cm SK C/34 were within a millimetre of each other in calibre, and Hood’s heavier shell gave her a broadside that was, if anything, marginally weightier. What separated them was the twenty years between the two fire-control systems: Bismarck’s higher-velocity guns, superb stereoscopic rangefinders and radar-assisted ranging made her gunnery faster to find the target. Both ships could kill the other with a single well-placed salvo — and that is exactly what settled it.
This is the whole battle. A battlecruiser bought its speed by thinning the one kind of armour that stops a shell falling from the top of its arc — the deck. Hood carried just 76 mm over her magazines, and that only in patches; the lesson of Jutland, where three British battlecruisers blew up exactly this way in 1916, had been learned but not yet built into her. A reconstruction to thicken her decks was scheduled for 1939–40 and cancelled when the war came. Bismarck’s layered 50 mm + 80–120 mm armoured deck — rated by post-war British tests as the equal of a single 150 mm plate — was of a different generation entirely.
Hood was the faster ship, at about 31 knots to Bismarck’s 30 — and that was the point of her. She was built to run down anything she could not out-fight and out-fight anything she could not run from, and for two decades between the wars she was the largest warship in the world, the pride of the Royal Navy on show in every port. But her speed was not free. It was bought with the deck armour she did not have, and in the Denmark Strait the bargain came due.
At 05:52 Hood opened fire at about 24,000 m; the Germans replied three minutes later. Both sides straddled quickly. Then, at around 06:00, a salvo from Bismarck’s guns fell on Hood — a shell plunging through her thin deck into the after magazines. She erupted in a column of flame and broke apart, sinking in roughly three minutes. Of her 1,418 men, three survived. Bismarck had fired for barely five minutes and destroyed the most famous warship afloat.
Bismarck won the duel completely, and it killed her. Sinking the Hood turned her into the most hunted ship in the world overnight: the entire Home Fleet converged on her, and though she had shaken off her pursuers, a single Swordfish torpedo jammed her rudder on the evening of 26 May and left her steaming in a slow circle. On the morning of 27 May 1941 — three days after Hood — she was battered into a wreck and sank. The two mightiest ships in the Atlantic were both on the bottom within seventy-two hours.
So the comparison has no comfortable winner. Hood was not out-gunned; she was out-dated, lost to a weakness her own navy knew about and had run out of time to fix. Bismarck was not the invincible ship of the legend either — one lucky biplane ended her — and her one great victory was precisely what sealed her fate. What the Denmark Strait really measured was not two ships but two decades: the price a 1920 hull paid for meeting a 1940 one, and the price a raider paid for winning too famous a battle.
- Robert J. Winklareth, The Bismarck Chase: New Light on a Famous Engagement (Naval Institute Press).
- Ludovic Kennedy, Pursuit: The Sinking of the Bismarck (William Collins).
- Antony Preston, The World’s Worst Warships (Conway) — on the battlecruiser bargain.
- Robert D. Ballard, The Discovery of the Bismarck (Warner/Madison Press).