HMS Hood

The Vessel

HMS Hood was the sole ship of a class of four battlecruisers ordered by the Admiralty in April 1916. Her three sisters, Anson, Howe, and Rodney, were cancelled after Jutland, when the Royal Navy concluded that the lightly-armoured battlecruiser concept had been disproven. Hood was too far advanced in her build to cancel; she was modified during construction with additional deck and belt armour, and was commissioned on 15 May 1920 as a hybrid battlecruiser-battleship, the largest warship in the world.

She displaced 47,430 tons, was 262 metres long, and carried eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets. Her Parsons geared steam turbines produced 151,000 shaft horsepower on four shafts, giving her 32 knots at full speed, faster than any battleship afloat. She was the physical embodiment of interwar British sea power, the pride of the Royal Navy, the ship every British schoolchild knew by name. She spent the 1920s on "Empire cruises" showing the flag, and the 1930s on the Home and Mediterranean stations.

Her deck armour remained the vulnerability that Jutland had identified in her class. The Admiralty had planned a full refit to upgrade it, but the refit was deferred four times in the 1930s under Treasury pressure and the priority given to King George V-class construction. She sailed in May 1941 with the armour scheme of a 1920 battlecruiser, designed to survive flat-trajectory fire at standard ranges, not the plunging fire at long range that the new German 38 cm gun could deliver.

The Voyage

On 21 May 1941 the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen sortied from Gotenhafen into the North Atlantic on Operation Rheinübung, a commerce raid against the Atlantic convoy system. Swedish intelligence, British Ultra decrypts, and RAF Coastal Command reconnaissance tracked her north from the Kiel Canal into the Norwegian fjords and then, on the evening of 21-22 May, out into the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland.

The Royal Navy's response was Admiral Sir John Tovey's Home Fleet, converging from Scapa Flow. The interception force dispatched to the Denmark Strait was Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland's battlecruiser squadron: Hood (flagship) and Prince of Wales, the newly commissioned King George V-class battleship still working up with civilian Vickers-Armstrong technicians aboard because her main turrets were not yet fully reliable.

Holland closed the range through the night of 23-24 May on a converging course. His tactical plan was to cross Bismarck's T at dawn at 12,000 metres, a range at which Hood's armour was calculated to survive Bismarck's shells and Bismarck's armour would be vulnerable to Hood's. At 05:52 on 24 May 1941 the two British ships opened fire at a range of 24,000 metres, 12,000 metres further out than Holland's plan. He had been held away from his desired range by the formation of the two German ships.

The Disaster

Hood fired her first salvo at Prinz Eugen, having confused the two German ships' silhouettes in the poor dawn light. Prince of Wales fired at Bismarck. Both German ships fired at Hood. Bismarck's first and second salvos straddled her; her third, at 06:00, found her aft. A shell from Bismarck either penetrated Hood's aft deck at a shallow angle and detonated in the 4-inch magazine, or ignited propellant in the 15-inch magazine, or both in sequence. The precise shell path has been the subject of survey after survey of her wreck.

The resulting explosion lifted the stern three-quarters of the ship into the air in a single pillar of flame and smoke. She broke in half. The forward section, still moving forward, disappeared under the surface in thirty seconds. The aft section followed at once. The total elapsed time between the fatal salvo and her disappearance was under three minutes.

Of her crew of 1,418, three survived: Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn, and Bill Dundas. All three had been on the upper bridge or topside when she blew up and were thrown clear. They were picked up by HMS Electra at 08:00. Admiral Holland, Captain Ralph Kerr, and 1,415 men of the Royal Navy went down with her.

The Legacy

The loss of the Hood was the greatest single blow to British naval morale in the Second World War. For a generation of British subjects she had been the visible guarantor of the Royal Navy's superiority; for her to have been destroyed in minutes by a German ship that was not yet six months old was a psychological shock that reached into every British household. Churchill's ordered response, the signal "Sink the Bismarck" sent to the Home Fleet that same morning, was political as much as naval; the Bismarck's destruction three days later was a matter of state.

The first Board of Inquiry, held aboard HMS Hood's flagship replacement HMS King George V on 2 June 1941, concluded that a shell from Bismarck had penetrated to her 4-inch magazine. A second Board of Inquiry in September 1941, reviewing forensic analysis of the three survivors' testimony, revised the conclusion to a detonation in the aft 15-inch magazine. The distinction has exercised naval historians and engineers for eighty years.

The wreck was located on 20 July 2001 by a Channel 4 expedition led by the British wreck researcher David Mearns, working with the Royal Navy's full cooperation and the formal consent of the HMS Hood Association. She lies at 2,800 metres in the Denmark Strait, broken into three sections across a debris field two kilometres long. Her forward section is lying on her port side, her bow intact and the leading edge of her forward turrets visible. The amidships section, where the magazine detonated, is the most disrupted. Her stern, separated from the rest, lies on her port side with her propellers still visible.

She is a protected war grave under the Military Remains Act 1986. The HMS Hood Association, founded by Ted Briggs in 1975, maintains the memorial roll of the 1,415 dead. Briggs died in 2008, Tilburn in 1995, Dundas in 1965. There are now no survivors of HMS Hood living.