HMS Hood

HMS Hood was the last and greatest of the battlecruisers — a type that had been the great gamble of the pre-war Royal Navy. Battlecruisers carried the heavy guns of a battleship but traded away armour for speed, on the theory that they could outrun anything they could not outfight. The Battle of Jutland in 1916 exposed the flaw in that bargain with horrifying clarity: three British battlecruisers blew up and sank with appalling loss of life when plunging shells reached their magazines.

Hood was already being designed when Jutland was fought, the lead ship of the planned four-strong Admiral class. The disaster prompted a hurried revision, and extra armour was worked into her design — but she remained at heart a fast, lightly-protected battlecruiser, not a true battleship. Her three sisters were cancelled at the end of the First World War, and Hood alone was completed, commissioned in 1920 as the largest warship in the world.

Hood was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful warships ever built — long, low and graceful, her power and elegance making her the very image of British sea power between the wars. She mounted eight 15-inch (381 mm) guns in four twin turrets, the same superb weapon carried by the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, and at around 31 knots she was fast enough to go almost anywhere and impress everyone.

But beneath the graceful lines lay the battlecruiser's fatal compromise. Her armour, though improved after Jutland, was a patchwork that left her deck protection dangerously thin against the long-range, steeply-plunging shellfire that defined modern naval gunnery. As guns and ranges grew through the 1920s and 30s, this weakness became ever more acute — and a planned major reconstruction to fix it was repeatedly postponed and then overtaken by the outbreak of war.

By 1939 Hood was a tired ship. Two decades of hard steaming as the Royal Navy's premier showpiece had worn her machinery, and the modernisation that might have thickened her decks and renewed her engines had never come. She went to war in 1939 with the deck protection of a ship laid down in 1916, and with the reconstruction meant to correct it still unbuilt.

Everyone knows what killed Hood: a plunging German shell through her thin deck armour and into a magazine. It is in every account of the Denmark Strait, it was the working assumption of the second board of enquiry, and it is almost certainly not what happened. The deck figures alone should give pause. Over the magazines Hood carried three separate decks — 51 mm on the upper, 76 mm on the main, 51 mm on the lower — which is a great deal of steel by the standards of 1916, though laminating it across three layers is a far weaker arrangement than putting the same weight into one plate. That, and not the total, is the real design fault, and the reconstruction that would have corrected it was cancelled by the outbreak of war.

The technical re-examination of the loss, published by William Jurens in Warship International in 1987, starts from the geometry. At the range at which Hood was hit — the first board of enquiry put it at 16,500 yards, about 15,100 m — Bismarck's shells were arriving at an angle of fall of no more than about 14 degrees. That is so flat that penetration of horizontal armour at that angle falls off the end of the contemporary German penetration charts entirely. A shell that shallow does not plunge through a deck; it arrives almost level. And when Jurens generated sections of the ship to trace the possible paths, a shell coming in at 14° could not reach an after magazine at all without first passing through some part of the belt.

What he does conclude is that the loss was almost certainly precipitated by the detonation of a 4-inch magazine, which then propagated; several routes could have initiated it, and he rules out two of the popular candidates, the fire burning on the boat deck and the ship's own torpedo warheads. The distinction matters because it changes what the disaster proves. Hood did not die because a battlecruiser's deck was thin against long-range plunging fire; she died at close range, to a flat-trajectory shell, in the part of the ship a battleship is supposed to be armoured against. She was hit by the fifth salvo Bismarck fired at her, and of 1,418 men aboard, three were pulled out of the water.

For twenty years Hood was the most famous warship in the world — the embodiment of the Royal Navy and of British imperial power. In 1923–24 she led the "Empire Cruise," a circumnavigation of the globe that showed the flag in ports across the Empire and made her familiar to millions. To the British public she was simply "The Mighty Hood," a symbol of naval supremacy that seemed permanent and unchallengeable.

That very fame would magnify the shock of her loss. When war came she served with the Home Fleet and at Force H, taking part in the painful action against the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940. But her destiny lay in the North Atlantic, where in May 1941 she was sent to intercept the most dangerous warship Germany had yet sent to sea.

In May 1941 the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen broke out into the Atlantic to raid the convoys. Hood, flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland, was dispatched with the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales to intercept them. On the morning of 24 May 1941, the two forces met in the icy waters of the Denmark Strait.

The British closed the range head-on to shorten the time their thin-decked flagship was exposed to plunging fire — but it was not enough. After only a few minutes of firing, a salvo from Bismarck straddled Hood. A shell is believed to have plunged through her deck armour and detonated a main magazine. In an instant the great ship was torn apart by a cataclysmic explosion, broke in two, and sank in around three minutes.

Of her company of 1,418 men, only three survived. The destruction of the Royal Navy's most famous and beloved warship, in minutes and almost without warning, sent a profound shock through Britain — and turned the hunt for the Bismarck into a national obsession that would not rest until the German battleship was herself sent to the bottom three days later.

The loss was as much psychological as material. For a generation Hood had been the living symbol of the Royal Navy — shown off in ports around the world, known to every schoolchild in Britain. To see her annihilated in three minutes by a single German salvo struck at the nation’s very sense of itself, and the Admiralty’s response was blunt: “Sink the Bismarck.” The Royal Navy would spend the next three days doing exactly that.

HMS Hood was the proudest warship of her age and, for a generation, the very symbol of British naval might — beautiful, fast, heavily armed and seemingly invincible. Her sudden annihilation in the Denmark Strait was one of the most shocking moments of the war at sea, a blow to British morale out of all proportion to the loss of a single ship.

Her fate was the final, terrible verdict on the battlecruiser concept: that speed and big guns could never make up for armour too thin to survive a modern shell. The wreck, discovered in 2001, lies broken on the floor of the Denmark Strait and is protected as a war grave for the 1,415 men who died with her.

• Roger Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946 (Conway Maritime Press).
• Bruce Taylor, The Battlecruiser HMS Hood: An Illustrated Biography 1916–1941 (Seaforth Publishing).
• William J. Jurens, “The Loss of HMS Hood — A Re-Examination”, Warship International 24/2 (1987).
• John Roberts, Battlecruisers (Chatham Publishing).