HMS Hood

1. Lead

HMS Hood was the largest warship in the world for twenty years, and the pride of the Royal Navy. Launched in 1918 and commissioned in 1920, she was a battlecruiser of 47,000 tons, armed with eight 15-inch guns, capable of 31 knots, and so large and so impressive that she became a symbol of British sea power, the ship that every schoolboy knew and that every foreign navy measured itself against. Hood spent the interwar years as the flagship of the Atlantic Fleet and of the Mediterranean Fleet, showing the flag in ports around the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Singapore, and she was the ship that the British public associated with the Navy itself. On 24 May 1941, in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, Hood met the German battleship Bismarck in battle, and in less than ten minutes she was gone: a shell from Bismarck penetrated her thin deck armour, detonated her magazines, and the ship broke in two and sank, taking 1,415 of her 1,418 crew with her. Only three men survived. The loss of the Hood was a shock that reverberated around the world, and it remains the greatest single loss of life in the history of the Royal Navy in a single ship. Hood’s story is the story of a ship that was magnificent and obsolete at the same time, a symbol of an age of naval power that ended in a few terrible minutes in the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

2. Key Facts

The table below summarises HMS Hood as completed in 1920, with the main figures for the ship.

Type	Battlecruiser
Country of origin	United Kingdom (John Brown & Co., Clydebank) / Anh (John Brown & Co., Clydebank)
Laid down	1 September 1916
Launched	22 August 1918
Commissioned	15 May 1920
Displacement	About 47,000 tons full load
Length	860 ft (262 m) / 262 m
Beam	104 ft (32 m) / 32 m
Draught	About 32 ft (9.8 m)
Propulsion	4 steam turbines, 144,000 shp, 4 shafts
Speed	31 knots (57 km/h)
Range	About 7,500 nautical miles at 14 knots
Complement	1,418 officers and men (1941)
Main armament	8 × 15 in (381 mm) guns in four twin turrets
Secondary armament	12 × 5.5 in (140 mm) guns; anti-aircraft guns
Armour / Giáp	Belt 12 in (305 mm); deck 3 in (76 mm); turrets 15 in (381 mm)
Fate	Sunk by Bismarck, 24 May 1941; 3 survivors of 1,418

3. Background

3.1. The battlecruiser idea

HMS Hood was a battlecruiser, a type of warship that had been invented by Admiral Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, in the years before the First World War. Fisher’s idea was simple: a ship with the guns of a battleship and the speed of a cruiser, which could outrun anything it could not outfight and outfight anything it could not outrun. The battlecruiser sacrificed armour for speed, on the theory that speed was itself a form of protection, because a fast ship could choose when and where to fight and could escape from a superior enemy. The idea was tested at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, where three British battlecruisers — Invincible, Indefatigable and Queen Mary — were destroyed by German battleships, with the loss of almost all their crews, in explosions that were caused by the penetration of their thin armour and the detonation of their magazines. The disaster at Jutland showed that the battlecruiser’s armour was too thin, and Hood was designed in the aftermath of Jutland, with thicker armour than any previous battlecruiser, in an attempt to correct the type’s fatal flaw. Hood’s belt armour was 12 inches thick, against the 6 to 9 inches of the earlier battlecruisers, and her deck armour was 3 inches thick, which was thicker than her predecessors’ but which was still thin by battleship standards, and which would prove to be her undoing.

3.2. Jutland and the redesign

Hood was laid down on 1 September 1916, while the Battle of Jutland was still fresh in the Admiralty’s mind, and her design was revised during construction to incorporate the lessons of the battle. The original design had a belt armour of 8 inches and a deck armour of 2 inches, but after Jutland the belt was increased to 12 inches and the deck to 3 inches, and the ship’s displacement grew from about 36,000 tons to about 47,000 tons, making her the largest warship in the world. The redesign also added a torpedo bulge to the hull, to protect against torpedoes, and it improved the subdivision of the ship’s interior, to limit flooding if the hull was breached. The changes delayed Hood’s completion, and she was not launched until August 1918 and not commissioned until May 1920, after the First World War had ended, which meant that she never fired her guns in anger in the war for which she had been built. The delay also meant that Hood was the only ship of her class to be completed: her sister ships Anson and Howe, which had been laid down in 1916, were cancelled in 1919, as part of the post-war reduction in naval construction, and the fourth ship of the class, Rodney, was cancelled before she was ever laid down, and Hood became a unique ship, the only one of her kind, and the largest warship in the world for the next twenty years.

3.3. The interwar flagship

For twenty years, Hood was the Royal Navy’s flagship and its public symbol, and her career in the interwar period was one of peacetime cruises, fleet exercises and diplomatic visits, rather than of combat. She served as the flagship of the Atlantic Fleet from 1920 to 1929, and of the Mediterranean Fleet from 1936 to 1939, and she visited ports in every ocean, from the Caribbean to the Far East, showing the flag and demonstrating British sea power. Hood’s most famous cruise was the world cruise of 1923–1924, when she sailed with the battlecruiser Repulse and a squadron of cruisers around the world, visiting Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, and covering more than 38,000 miles in ten months. The cruise was a triumph of public relations, and it fixed Hood’s image in the public mind as the embodiment of the Royal Navy. Hood’s peacetime career was not without incident: she collided with the battlecruiser Renown in 1935, she was damaged in a storm in the Bay of Biscay, and she was the target of a Spanish Republican air attack in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, when she was serving in the Mediterranean. But her peacetime service also meant that she was never modernised: her anti-aircraft armament was inadequate, her fire control was outdated, and her deck armour — the weakness that would kill her — was never thickened, because the Navy could not afford to take its flagship out of service for a long refit.

4. Design and Development

4.1. Size, speed and the 15-inch guns

Hood was 860 feet long and 104 feet wide, and she displaced about 47,000 tons at full load, which made her larger than any battleship in the Royal Navy and larger than any warship in the world until the Japanese Yamato was launched in 1940. Her propulsion plant consisted of four steam turbines producing 144,000 shaft horsepower, which drove her to 31 knots, a speed that was faster than any battleship of the period and that allowed her to operate with the fast cruisers and to run down any ship she was ordered to pursue. Her main armament consisted of eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets, two forward and two aft, which were the standard heavy guns of the Royal Navy and which fired a 1,920-pound shell to a range of about 18 miles. The 15-inch gun was one of the finest naval guns ever built, and it served in the Royal Navy from the First World War to the 1950s, in the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, in the Renown-class battlecruisers and in Hood herself. Hood’s secondary armament consisted of twelve 5.5-inch guns, which were mounted in casemates along the sides of the ship and which were intended to defend against destroyers and torpedo boats, and her anti-aircraft armament, which was inadequate by 1941, consisted of a small number of 4-inch guns and 2-pounder pom-poms.

4.1.1. The 15-inch gun

The 15-inch/42-calibre Mark I gun was the Royal Navy’s standard heavy gun, and it was one of the most successful naval guns in history. It was designed in 1912, it entered service in 1915, and it served in the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships at Jutland, in the Renown-class battlecruisers, in Hood, and in the Vanguard, the last British battleship, which was completed in 1946. The gun fired a 1,920-pound armour-piercing shell at a muzzle velocity of about 2,450 feet per second, to a maximum range of about 18 miles, and it could fire about two rounds per minute. The gun’s accuracy was excellent, and its shell was heavy enough to penetrate the armour of any battleship of the period, which made it a formidable weapon. The 15-inch gun’s longevity — it served for more than thirty years, from 1915 to the 1950s — was a testament to the soundness of its design, and it was the gun that Hood carried into her last battle, where she fired several salvos at the Bismarck before she was destroyed. The gun’s reputation was such that it became the symbol of British naval gunnery, and it is still remembered as one of the finest naval guns ever built.

4.2. Armour: the fatal compromise

Hood’s armour was the result of a compromise, and it was the compromise that killed her. Her belt armour was 12 inches thick, which was thick for a battlecruiser and which was sufficient to resist the 15-inch shells of a battleship at medium range, but her deck armour was only 3 inches thick, which was thin by battleship standards and which was vulnerable to plunging fire — shells that fell from a high angle and struck the deck rather than the belt. The thin deck armour was a consequence of Hood’s design as a battlecruiser: the ship’s speed required a light hull, and the weight saved by thinning the deck armour was used for the machinery and for the belt armour, on the theory that a fast ship could close the range quickly and fight at short range, where plunging fire was less of a threat. The theory was sound in 1916, when Hood was designed, but it was obsolete by 1941, when the Bismarck’s guns could fire accurately at long range and when Hood was forced to fight at a range where plunging fire was a real danger. Hood’s deck armour was never thickened, because the Navy could not afford to take the ship out of service for the long refit that would have been required, and the ship went into her last battle with the same thin deck armour that she had carried since 1920.

4.3. The missing modernisation

Hood’s greatest misfortune was that she was never modernised, and the reasons for that failure were financial and operational rather than technical. The Royal Navy had planned to modernise Hood in the late 1930s, with new anti-aircraft guns, new fire control and thicker deck armour, but the work was postponed, first because the Navy’s budget was limited and then because the outbreak of war in 1939 made it impossible to take the Navy’s most famous ship out of service for the two years that a full modernisation would have required. Hood received minor refits — new anti-aircraft guns and a radar set in 1940 — but her deck armour was never thickened, her fire control was never fully updated, and her secondary armament was never replaced. The result was that Hood went into the Denmark Strait in May 1941 as a ship of 1920 fighting a ship of 1940, with thinner deck armour, older fire control and weaker anti-aircraft guns than her opponent, and with a crew that had not had the opportunity to train together in the ship’s new configuration. The missing modernisation was not the fault of Hood’s officers or of her crew, but of a Navy that had too many commitments and too little money, and it was the missing modernisation that made Hood’s loss, if not inevitable, then at least far more likely.

5. Technical Specifications

5.1. Dimensions, displacement and speed

Hood displaced about 42,000 tons standard and about 47,000 tons at full load, measured 860 feet in length and 104 feet in beam, and drew about 32 feet of water. She was powered by four steam turbines producing 144,000 shaft horsepower, which drove her to 31 knots on trials and to about 29 knots in service in 1941, when her boilers were worn and her hull was fouled. Her range was about 7,500 nautical miles at 14 knots, which allowed her to operate across the Atlantic without refuelling, and her fuel capacity was about 4,000 tons of oil. Hood carried a crew of 1,418 officers and men in 1941, which was larger than the crew of any other British warship, and which reflected the ship’s size and the large number of men required to serve her eight 15-inch guns and her secondary armament. Hood’s size was a consequence of her design as a battlecruiser: she was built to be large and fast, and her displacement grew during construction as her armour was thickened, until she was the largest warship in the world, a distinction she held for twenty years.

5.2. Armour and protection

Hood’s protection was based on a belt of 12-inch armour, inclined at 12 degrees, which protected the magazines and the machinery spaces, and a deck of 3-inch armour over the vital spaces, which was intended to protect against plunging fire but which was too thin to stop the 15-inch shells of a modern battleship. The turrets were protected by 15 inches of armour on their faces, 12 inches on their sides and 5 inches on their roofs, and the conning tower was protected by 11 inches of armour. The ship’s underwater protection consisted of a torpedo bulge, a blister on the side of the hull that was designed to absorb the blast of a torpedo, and a system of liquid-loaded compartments that were intended to limit flooding. Hood’s protection was thicker than that of any previous battlecruiser, and it was sufficient to resist the guns of the ships she was designed to fight, but it was insufficient against the guns of the Bismarck, which could penetrate her deck armour at the range at which the Denmark Strait battle was fought. Hood’s armour was a product of 1916, and it was obsolete by 1941, a fact that the Admiralty understood but could not remedy without taking the ship out of service.

	HMS Hood / HMS Hood
Length	860 ft (262.1 m) / 262,1 m
Beam	104 ft (31.7 m) / 31,7 m
Draught	About 32 ft (9.8 m)
Displacement full load	About 47,000 tons
Power	144,000 shp
Speed	31 knots (57 km/h)
Range	About 7,500 nm at 14 knots
Main guns	8 × 15 in (381 mm)
Secondary guns	12 × 5.5 in (140 mm)
Belt armour	12 in (305 mm) / 305 mm
Deck armour / Giáp boong	3 in (76 mm) / 76 mm
Crew	1,418 (1941)

5.3. Fire control and radar

Hood’s fire control was based on two directors, one forward and one aft, each fitted with a 15-foot rangefinder and connected to a mechanical fire-control table, which calculated the firing solution and transmitted it to the turrets. The system was adequate for the 1920s, but it was outdated by 1941, when the Bismarck’s fire control, with its modern stereoscopic rangefinders and its radar, was far more accurate. Hood was fitted with a Type 279 air-warning radar in 1940, which could detect aircraft at long range, but she had no gunnery radar, which meant that her guns could not be aimed accurately in darkness or in bad weather, and which put her at a disadvantage against the Bismarck, whose radar allowed her to open fire accurately at long range. Hood’s fire control was also hampered by the ship’s age: her directors were worn, her rangefinders were less accurate than they had been, and her crew had not had the opportunity to train together in the ship’s new configuration. The fire-control system was one of the many areas in which Hood’s missing modernisation showed, and it was a factor in the Denmark Strait battle, where Hood’s early salvos missed the Bismarck and where the German ship’s early salvos found their target.

5.3.1. The gunnery radar gap

Hood’s lack of gunnery radar was one of the most serious consequences of her missing modernisation, and it deserves a closer look, because it illustrates the pace of technological change in naval warfare between 1920 and 1941. In 1920, when Hood was commissioned, gunnery radar did not exist, and the ship’s fire control was based on optical rangefinders and on mechanical computers, which were the state of the art. By 1941, gunnery radar was becoming standard in the Royal Navy’s newest ships, and it allowed a ship to aim its guns accurately in darkness, in fog and in bad weather, and to track a target at ranges that optical rangefinders could not match. The Bismarck was fitted with gunnery radar, and it used it to open fire accurately at long range in the Denmark Strait, while Hood, without gunnery radar, had to rely on her optical rangefinders, which were less accurate and which were hampered by the spray and the smoke of the battle. Hood’s lack of gunnery radar was not the cause of her loss, but it was a factor, and it was a reminder that a ship that is not modernised will fall behind, not just in armour and in guns, but in the invisible technologies that decide battles.

6. Variants

6.1. A class of one

Hood was a class of one, the only ship of her design to be completed, and her uniqueness was a consequence of the post-war naval reductions and of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which limited the construction of capital ships. Her sister ships Anson and Howe were laid down in 1916 but cancelled in 1919, before they were completed, and the fourth ship of the class, Rodney, was cancelled before she was ever laid down, and their materials were scrapped. Hood’s uniqueness meant that she had no sister ships to share her refits, her spare parts or her lessons, and it meant that the Royal Navy had only one ship of her type, a ship that was too famous to risk and too valuable to lose. Hood’s uniqueness also meant that her loss was irreplaceable: there was no other ship like her in the Royal Navy, and her sinking left a gap in the Navy’s order of battle that could not be filled. The Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the Royal Navy’s battleship tonnage, meant that Hood could not be replaced by a new ship of the same size, and the Navy had to make do with the ships it had, a constraint that shaped British naval policy for the next twenty years.

6.2. Refits and the aircraft catapult

Hood received a number of minor refits during her career, but none of them addressed her fundamental weaknesses. In the 1920s she received new anti-aircraft guns and a new aircraft catapult, which allowed her to launch a seaplane for reconnaissance, and in the 1930s she received a new fire-control system and a new radar set. The most significant refit was in 1940, when she received a Type 279 air-warning radar and a number of new anti-aircraft guns, but the refit did not thicken her deck armour, it did not replace her secondary armament, and it did not give her gunnery radar. Hood’s refits were a series of small improvements that kept the ship in service but that did not modernise her, and they were a reflection of the Navy’s dilemma: the ship was too famous to take out of service for a long refit, and too old to fight a modern battleship without one. Hood’s aircraft catapult, which was fitted in the 1920s and removed in the 1930s, was a reminder of the interwar period’s faith in the seaplane as a reconnaissance tool, a faith that was obsolete by 1941, when the aircraft carrier had replaced the seaplane as the fleet’s eyes.

7. Combat Service

7.1. The first year of war

Hood’s war service began in September 1939, when she was the flagship of the Home Fleet, and her first duties were the patrols of the North Sea and the Atlantic, hunting for German surface raiders and protecting the convoys that carried Britain’s supplies. In 1940 Hood took part in the Norwegian campaign, where she bombarded German positions ashore and where she was attacked by German aircraft, and she was present at the Battle of Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940, when the Royal Navy attacked the French fleet at Oran to prevent it from falling into German hands. At Mers-el-Kébir, Hood’s 15-inch guns fired on the French battleship Dunkerque and on the other French ships, and the action was a painful one for the Royal Navy, which had to fire on its former ally, but it was a demonstration of Hood’s firepower and of the Navy’s determination to prevent the French fleet from being used against Britain. Hood’s service in the first year of the war was a mixture of patrols, bombardments and fleet operations, and it was a reminder that the ship, though old and unmodernised, was still a formidable warship, and still the most famous ship in the Royal Navy.

7.2. The hunt for the Bismarck

In May 1941, the German battleship Bismarck, accompanied by the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, sailed from Norway into the Atlantic, on a mission to attack the British convoys that carried supplies from North America. The Royal Navy’s response was to send its most powerful ships to intercept the Germans, and Hood, as the flagship of Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland, sailed from Scapa Flow with the newly commissioned battleship Prince of Wales to meet the enemy in the Denmark Strait, the narrow passage between Greenland and Iceland. Holland’s plan was to close the range quickly, to prevent the Bismarck from using her superior fire control at long range, and to bring Hood’s 15-inch guns to bear at a range where her thin deck armour would be less vulnerable. The plan was sound, but it required Hood to close the range under fire, and it was during that approach that Hood was destroyed. The hunt for the Bismarck was the most famous naval operation of the war, and Hood’s part in it was the most famous and the most tragic, a reminder that the Navy’s most famous ship was sent to meet the enemy’s newest battleship, and that the meeting ended in disaster.

7.3. The Denmark Strait, 24 May 1941

The Battle of the Denmark Strait began at 05:52 on 24 May 1941, when the British ships sighted the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen, and it ended at 06:01, when Hood exploded and sank. The battle lasted less than ten minutes, and it was one of the shortest and most decisive naval battles in history. Hood opened fire first, at a range of about 25,000 yards, but her early salvos missed, and the Bismarck’s fifth salvo struck Hood, and a shell penetrated Hood’s thin deck armour and detonated the aft magazines, which contained the cordite propellant for the 15-inch guns; the explosion broke the ship in two. The exact cause of Hood’s destruction has been debated ever since, but this is the most widely accepted explanation. The ship sank in less than three minutes, and of her crew of 1,418, only three men survived: Ordinary Seaman Ted Briggs, Able Seaman Robert Tilburn and Midshipman William Dundas, who were picked up by the destroyer Electra. The Prince of Wales, which had also been hit, withdrew from the battle, and the Bismarck, though damaged, continued into the Atlantic, where she was hunted down and sunk three days later by the Royal Navy, in an operation that was driven in part by the desire to avenge Hood.

7.3.1. The three survivors

The three men who survived the sinking of the Hood were Ordinary Seaman Ted Briggs, Able Seaman Robert Tilburn and Midshipman William Dundas, and their survival was a matter of luck and of position. Briggs was on the compass platform, near the bridge, when the ship exploded, and he was thrown into the water by the blast, where he was picked up by the destroyer Electra after about three hours in the cold water. Tilburn was on the deck near the aft turrets, and he was also thrown into the water, where he clung to a raft until he was rescued. Dundas was on the bridge, and he was blown into the water by the explosion, where he was picked up by the Electra. The three men were the only survivors of a crew of 1,418, and their accounts of the sinking — the suddenness of the explosion, the ship breaking in two, the speed with which she sank — became the primary sources for the history of the battle. Briggs, who lived until 2008, became the president of the HMS Hood Association and the keeper of the ship’s memory, and he spent the rest of his life telling the story of his shipmates and of the ship that had been his home. The three survivors were a reminder that the loss of the Hood was not an abstraction but a human tragedy, in which 1,415 men died in a few terrible minutes.

8. Strengths and Weaknesses

8.1. Strengths

Hood’s strengths were her size, her speed and her guns, and they made her the most impressive warship in the world for twenty years. Her 15-inch guns were among the finest naval guns ever built, and they could destroy any ship in the world at long range. Her speed of 31 knots made her faster than any battleship and allowed her to operate with the fast cruisers and to run down any ship she was ordered to pursue. Her size made her a stable gun platform, and her long hull gave her a good seakeeping performance, which allowed her to operate in the rough waters of the North Atlantic. Her crew was large and well trained, and her officers were among the best in the Royal Navy, and the ship’s reputation as the Navy’s flagship gave her a moral authority that no other ship possessed. Hood’s strengths were the strengths of a ship designed for the First World War, and they were real, but they were also the strengths of a ship that was built for a kind of naval warfare that had passed, and that was vulnerable to the new kinds of warfare — the aircraft and the long-range gunnery — that had emerged by 1941.

8.2. Weaknesses

Hood’s weaknesses were the price of her speed and her age, and they were the reasons she was lost. Her deck armour was only 3 inches thick, which was too thin to resist the plunging fire of a modern battleship, and it was the weakness that killed her in the Denmark Strait. Her anti-aircraft armament was inadequate, and she could not defend herself against aircraft, a weakness that was exposed in the Norwegian campaign and that was never corrected. Her fire control was outdated, and she had no gunnery radar, which put her at a disadvantage against the Bismarck, whose radar allowed her to open fire accurately at long range. Her secondary armament was old and ineffective, and her machinery was worn, which reduced her speed from 31 knots to about 29 knots in 1941. Her size made her a large and conspicuous target, and her crew of 1,418 men meant that her loss was a human catastrophe as well as a naval one. Hood’s weaknesses were not the fault of her officers or her crew, but of a Navy that had not modernised her, and they were the reasons her loss, though a shock, was not a surprise to those who understood the ship’s condition.

9. Comparison with Rivals

9.1. Against the Bismarck

Hood’s most important comparison is with the Bismarck, the ship that sank her, and the comparison shows the gap between a ship of 1920 and a ship of 1940. The Bismarck displaced about 50,000 tons at full load, against Hood’s 47,000 tons, and she carried eight 15-inch guns, the same calibre as Hood’s, but her guns were newer, her fire control was more accurate, and her radar allowed her to open fire accurately at long range. The Bismarck’s belt armour was 12.6 inches thick, against Hood’s 12 inches, and her deck armour was 4.7 inches thick, against Hood’s 3 inches, which made her better protected against plunging fire. The Bismarck’s speed was 30 knots, against Hood’s 31 knots on trials and about 29 knots in service, which made the two ships roughly equal in speed. The Bismarck was a newer ship, with newer guns, newer fire control and thicker deck armour, and she was the better ship in the Denmark Strait, a fact that was demonstrated in less than ten minutes. The comparison is a reminder that Hood was a ship of the First World War fighting a ship of the Second, and that the twenty years between their designs had changed naval warfare more than any other twenty years in history.

9.2. Against the Iowa class

Against the American Iowa-class battleship, Hood’s limitations are even clearer, because the Iowa class was designed twenty years after Hood and incorporated all the lessons that Hood’s loss had taught. The Iowa displaced about 57,000 tons at full load, against Hood’s 47,000 tons, and she carried nine 16-inch guns, against Hood’s eight 15-inch guns, and she could make 33 knots, against Hood’s 31 knots on trials. The Iowa’s belt armour was 12.1 inches thick, against Hood’s 12 inches, and her deck armour was 6 inches thick, against Hood’s 3 inches, which made her far better protected against plunging fire. The Iowa’s fire control was based on radar and on analogue computers, which made her gunnery far more accurate than Hood’s, and her anti-aircraft armament was vastly superior. The Iowa class was the battleship that Hood might have become if she had been modernised, and the comparison is a measure of how far naval design had advanced in the twenty years between Hood’s completion and the Iowa’s, and of how much Hood’s loss had taught the world’s navies about the importance of deck armour and of modern fire control.

10. Legacy

10.1. The shock of the loss

The loss of the Hood was a shock that reverberated around the world, and it remains one of the most famous naval disasters in history. The British public, which had regarded Hood as invincible, was stunned by the news that the Navy’s most famous ship had been sunk in less than ten minutes, with the loss of almost all her crew, and the shock was compounded by the fact that the loss had been inflicted by a single German battleship, in a battle that had lasted less than ten minutes. The loss of the Hood was a blow to British morale, but it was also a spur to action: the Royal Navy’s determination to sink the Bismarck was driven in part by the desire to avenge Hood, and the Bismarck was hunted down and sunk three days later, in an operation that involved almost the entire Home Fleet. The loss of the Hood also taught the world’s navies a lesson about the importance of deck armour and of modern fire control, a lesson that was applied to the design of every battleship that followed. Hood’s loss was a tragedy, but it was a tragedy that changed naval design, and that is a part of her legacy.

10.2. The wreck, the memorials and the memory

Hood’s wreck was discovered in 2001 by the oceanographer David Mearns, lying in 2,800 metres of water in the Denmark Strait, broken into three main pieces and scattered over a wide area. The wreck was surveyed and photographed, and it confirmed the accepted explanation of the ship’s loss: the aft magazines had exploded, breaking the ship in two, and the ship had sunk quickly, with little time for her crew to escape. Hood’s wreck is a war grave, and it is protected by law, and it is visited only by remotely operated vehicles, which have photographed the ship’s guns, her propellers and her bell, which was recovered in 2012 and which is now displayed at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. Hood is remembered in memorials in Portsmouth, in Clydebank, where she was built, and in the churches and the towns of the men who served in her, and she is remembered by the HMS Hood Association, which was founded by the survivors and which keeps the ship’s memory alive. Hood’s place in popular memory is secure: she appears in books, in films and in the collections of every naval museum, and for many people she remains the visual shorthand for the Royal Navy itself, a ship that was magnificent and that died magnificently.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

How many men died when HMS Hood sank?
Of Hood’s crew of 1,418 officers and men, 1,415 were killed and only three survived: Ordinary Seaman Ted Briggs, Able Seaman Robert Tilburn and Midshipman William Dundas. It remains the greatest single loss of life in the history of the Royal Navy in a single ship.

How long did the Battle of the Denmark Strait last?
Less than ten minutes. The battle began at 05:52 on 24 May 1941, and Hood exploded and sank at about 06:01. The ship sank in less than three minutes after the explosion.

Why did HMS Hood sink so quickly?
A shell from the Bismarck penetrated Hood’s thin 3-inch deck armour and detonated the aft magazines, which contained the cordite propellant for the 15-inch guns. The explosion broke the ship in two, and she sank in less than three minutes.

Was HMS Hood the largest warship in the world?
Yes, for twenty years. From her commissioning in 1920 until the Japanese Yamato was launched in 1940, Hood was the largest warship in the world, at about 47,000 tons full load.

Where is the wreck of HMS Hood?
In the Denmark Strait, in about 2,800 metres of water, where it was discovered in 2001 by the oceanographer David Mearns. The wreck is a protected war grave, and Hood’s bell, recovered in 2012, is displayed at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.

Why was HMS Hood never modernised?
Because the Royal Navy could not afford to take its most famous ship out of service for the two years a full modernisation would have required, first for financial reasons and then because the outbreak of war in 1939 made it impossible. Hood received minor refits, but her thin deck armour was never thickened.

12. Sources

1. Wikipedia, “HMS Hood” — dimensions, the Denmark Strait battle, 1,415 killed and 3 survivors.
2. Naval History and Heritage Command and the HMS Hood Association, “HMS Hood” — the ship’s career, the world cruise and the loss.
3. National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth, HMS Hood collection — the recovered bell and the ship’s history.
4. Ernle Bradford, The Mighty Hood (World Publishing, 1959) — the classic account of the ship and her loss.
5. Robert Gardiner (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1906–1921 (Conway Maritime Press, 1985) — Hood’s design, the Jutland revisions and her specifications.
6. David Mearns, The Search for the Hood (unpublished survey reports, 2001) — the discovery of the wreck and the confirmation of the magazine explosion.

Further reading

• Bruce Taylor, The Battlecruiser HMS Hood (Seaforth, 2008).
• Alan Raven and John Roberts, British Battleships of World War Two (Arms and Armour Press, 1976).