Key Points and Summary – HMS Hood, the Royal Navy’s most famous battlecruiser, combined speed, heavy guns, and substantial armor—but entered WWII overdue for modernization.
-On 24 May 1941, Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales engaged Bismarck and Prinz Eugen in the Denmark Strait.
-After initial hits ignited ready ammunition on deck, a Bismarck 15-inch shell penetrated Hood’s protection and detonated her aft magazines.
-The ship broke in two and sank in under three minutes; only three of 1,418 crew survived as suction dragged others under.
-The catastrophe shocked Britain, underscored vulnerabilities in legacy designs, and spurred the relentless pursuit and sinking of Bismarck days later.
The Tragic History Of HMS Hood, Britain’s Battlecruiser
The HMS Hood was a symbol of the UK’s Royal Navy, an immense battlecruiser with advanced armaments and armor. But she was sunk in 1941 during the Battle of the Denmark Straits against the German battleship Bismarck.
The loss of the HMS Hood was profoundly tragic due to the massive loss of life, the unprecedented speed of the sinking, and the symbolic blow to British naval power, mainly since it occurred so soon after its launch and at a time when it was considered the pride of the fleet.
The rapid destruction of the ship in just three minutes, with only three survivors from a crew of 1,418, made it the largest loss of life for a single Royal Navy warship in World War II, leaving a deep impact on families and national morale.
HMS Hood, Pride of the Admiral Class
The Hood was the first of the Royal Navy’s Admiral class of battlecruisers. This class was Britain’s answer to the Imperial German Navy’s Mackensen-class battlecruisers, the last German ships built during World War I.
These ships were larger and more heavily armed than the British battlecruisers in service at the time, prompting the Admiralty to focus on the design of the Hood.
Construction of the HMS Hood began in 1916 at the John Brown & Company shipyards in Clydebank, Scotland. After several revisions of the plans during its construction, the ship was finally launched in 1918.
HMS Hood measured 860 feet (260 meters) long and displaced more than 42,000 tons. It was one of the largest ships built for the Royal Navy until 2014, when the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth was built. During sea trials, the Hood reached speeds of 32 knots, and its more than 4,000 tons of armor provided the best protection available at the time.
HMS Hood’s Armament
The main battery of the Admiral-class ships consisted of eight BL 15-inch (381 mm) Mk I guns in hydraulically powered twin gun turrets. The turrets were designated ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘X’, and ‘Y’ from bow to stern, and 120 shells were carried for each gun.
The ship’s secondary armament consisted of twelve BL 5.5-inch (140 mm) Mk I guns, each with 200 rounds. They were shipped on shielded single-pivot mounts fitted along the upper deck and the forward shelter deck. This high position allowed them to be used during heavy weather, as they were less affected by waves and spray compared with the casemate mounts of earlier British capital ships.
Two of these guns on the shelter deck were temporarily replaced by QF 4-inch (102 mm) Mk V anti-aircraft (AA) guns between 1938 and 1939. All the 5.5-inch guns were removed during another refit in 1940. For anti-aircraft defense, the Hood carried three octuple two-pounder (40 mm) AA guns, four × quadruple 0.5 in (12.7 mm) MGs, and five × 20-barrel “Unrotated Projectile” mounts
The Admirals were fitted with six fixed 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, three on each broadside. About 28 torpedoes were carried.
The Royal Navy’s “Largest Submarine”
During the Hood’s construction, it was decided to add extra armor belts to the Hood as a result of the Battle of Jutland.
The added weight of these armored belts caused the Hood to ride low in the water, where heavy seas in the North Atlantic routinely washed across the foredeck and into vents, flooding mess decks and berthings and earning her the moniker “the largest submarine in the Navy.”
HMS Hood was not commissioned until August 1918, so she wasn’t able to see any action during the First World War. But it became the flagship of the Battlecruiser Squadron.
The Hood had been refitted during the interwar years. By 1939, the Hood was in increasingly dire need of further retrofits and repairs. However, the outbreak of war with Nazi Germany meant that its refit was delayed indefinitely. Over the next two years, “The Mighty Hood,” as it was known, was used in support operations of Allied forces in Norway and Algeria.
The Sinking Of HMS Hood
On May 24, 1941, the Hood and the HMS Prince of Wales were ordered to intercept two German warships, the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen, 300 miles off the coast of Iceland in the northern Atlantic.
The British ships were dispatched to stop the Bismarck from reaching the open ocean. The Hood and Prince of Wales raced to close the distance to the German ships, firing continuously as they moved.
Prinz Eugen’s high-explosive shells ripped into the Hood’s boat deck near the main mast, setting off vast quantities of “ready ammunition” stored on deck during battles. The resultant fires claimed the lives of several deck crew members.
About ten minutes into the engagement, Hood turned hard to port to bring her guns to bear on the Bismarck. It was at this time that a 15-inch shell from Bismarck pierced Hood’s armor and exploded the ship’s aft 15-inch magazines, causing them to rapidly burn or detonate, causing the area of the ship between “Y” turret and just aft of the second funnel to be violently devastated.
The fire was so intense that it likely caused the instant deaths of the majority of the crew in the affected areas of the hull and at upper/aft action stations. As well as the main explosion aft, there are indications that the ship’s interior may have been swept by fire, followed by a second explosion forward.
An expedition to the wreck site in 2001 confirmed that the massive explosion split the ship in two, twisting the ship with the intact stern turning upward, where it sank nearly immediately.
The entire ship sank in less than three minutes, and as it was going down, it created such a suction that any survivors were immediately pulled down with the ship. So great was this suction that only three survivors, Ted Briggs, William Dundas, and Bob Tilburn out of a crew of 1,418 were saved.
There were no dead crew members found on the surface, as the suction was so great. They were pulled down with the ship.
It was the largest loss of life in a single action ever in the Royal Navy’s history.
About the Author: Steve Balestrieri
Steve Balestrieri is a National Security Columnist. He served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer. In addition to writing on defense, he covers the NFL for PatsFans.com and is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA). His work was regularly featured in many military publications.
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