HMS Hood (51): The Pride of the Fleet, Lost in Fifteen Minutes

The Mighty Hood

HMS Hood was laid down on 1 September 1916 at John Brown and Company's yard on the Clyde, ordered as an Admiral-class battlecruiser at a moment when the Battle of Jutland had just brutally exposed the vulnerability of Britain's existing battlecruiser design, prompting significant last-minute strengthening of her armour before completion.

Launched on 22 August 1918 and commissioned in May 1920, she displaced 46,680 tons at deep load and measured 860 feet in length, armed with eight 15-inch guns, and for two full decades was the largest warship in the world, a genuine symbol of British naval power and prestige between the wars, sent on high-profile flag-showing tours around the globe and universally known simply as 'the Mighty Hood'.

She was meant to have sisters, and the fact that she did not is the beginning of the problem. Four Admiral-class ships were ordered in 1916: Hood, Anson, Howe and Rodney. Then Jutland happened, three British battlecruisers blew up inside a single afternoon, and the Admiralty went back to the drawings with the strong suspicion that it had been building the wrong sort of ship for fifteen years. The class was redesigned with heavier protection, which meant the hull had to be strengthened to carry it, which meant Hood's keel was not laid until September 1916 and her displacement rose towards 42,000 tons. The other three were suspended and never resumed. Rodney was broken up at something like ten per cent complete; Anson and Howe sat on their slipways for years while the Admiralty spent money maintaining hulls it had no intention of finishing, which is a very Whitehall way of not making a decision. So the most famous warship in the world was a one-off, the sole survivor of a class conceived before the lesson that killed her had been learned, and by the time the extra armour went on she was already too far advanced to be redesigned from the keel up. She was, in the end, a 1916 ship that had to fight in 1941.

Two Decades as the Nation's Pride

HMS Hood spent the interwar years as arguably the most famous warship on Earth, a fixture of naval reviews, goodwill tours and public imagination alike, her sleek, powerful silhouette instantly recognisable and a source of genuine national pride.

That very fame, however, concealed a real and growing vulnerability: her armour, while extensively strengthened after Jutland, remained lighter than that of a true battleship, a compromise inherent to the battlecruiser concept that traded protection for speed, and one that would prove fatally significant when she finally faced a genuine modern opponent in combat. That same extra armour cost her dear in another way too: it deepened her draught by around four feet and ate into her freeboard, so that in anything but calm water she shipped seas over the quarterdeck and down her ventilation trunking into the messdecks below, earning her the sailors' backhanded nickname 'the largest submarine in the Navy', and a persistently damp, unhealthily tubercular lower deck to go with it.

None of this was a secret, and the Navy's own experts said so in writing. In 1938 the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Stanley Goodall, reported that Hood was in poor mechanical condition and that her deck armour was thin enough to make her, in his phrase, unfit for service. Everybody agreed. A full reconstruction was planned, on much the same lines as the one Renown had received between 1936 and 1939: new machinery, better subdivision, a rebuilt superstructure and, above all, a proper armoured deck. The estimate was two to three years in dockyard hands and as much as four and a half million pounds, and because there were other ships in worse condition and only so many slipways, the work was not scheduled to begin before the spring of 1942. She was sunk in May 1941. The Royal Navy sent its most famous ship into the Denmark Strait knowing precisely what was wrong with her, because the alternative was not sending her, and there was nothing else to send.

Flagship of Empire: Cruises, Patrols and a Rehearsal for War

Once the razzmatazz of commissioning had died down, Hood settled into her real job as flagship of the Battlecruiser Squadron, and it was in that role that she delivered her most celebrated peacetime performance. From 27 November 1923 to 28 September 1924, she led the Special Service Squadron, alongside HMS Repulse and a scattering of light cruisers, on a ten-month circumnavigation officially billed as the Empire Cruise and nicknamed, with the lower deck's usual candour, 'the World Booze'. Calling at ports across West Africa, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific and North America before steaming home via the Panama Canal, the voyage was judged by the Foreign Office to be the most successful exercise in imperial relations in the Royal Navy's history, and wherever she dropped anchor, crowds simply turned out to look at her.

A major 1935 refit saw almost every one of her eight 15-inch guns pulled out and relined, each swapped for a replacement from naval stores while the originals went away for repair, and her worn secondary armament thinned out in the process. Two of the guns removed that year found an unlikely second career: shipped out to Ascension Island, they were mounted in a coastal battery overlooking Georgetown, and in December 1941, seven months after Hood herself went down, they helped drive off a German U-boat prowling the anchorage, a small and rather poignant postscript to her own story.

Hood spent much of the later 1930s enforcing the Non-Intervention Patrol off Spain during that country's civil war, her decks marked with the broad neutrality bands British warships carried in the Mediterranean at the time. In April 1937 she stood between two Nationalist cruisers, Almirante Cervera and Galerna, and three British merchantmen attempting to run supplies into Republican-held Bilbao; faced with a battlecruiser's worth of persuasion, the Nationalists withdrew and the convoy got through.

With war looming, her obsolete 5.5-inch secondary guns were progressively stripped out from 1938 and replaced with modern 4-inch anti-aircraft weapons, a refit not finished until 1940, by which time she had rather more urgent business to attend to.

That business began on 3 July 1940, when Hood, as flagship of the newly formed Force H under Vice Admiral Sir James Somerville, led an ultimatum to the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria. When the French declined every option on offer, Force H opened fire, and Hood's own guns did much of the damage inflicted on the French battleships Bretagne and Dunkerque in the grim few minutes that followed, a bruising action against a former ally that nobody involved much enjoyed, but one Churchill judged essential to keep the French fleet out of German hands.

It is worth putting a number on Mers-el-Kebir, because it is usually described politely and it does not deserve politeness. Something like 1,297 French sailors were killed in those few minutes, most of them in the battleship Bretagne when her magazines went up. They were, three weeks earlier, allies. Somerville himself called it the biggest political blunder of modern times and thought the whole business filthy; he did it anyway, because the alternative was the possibility of the French fleet in German hands, and no British admiral in July 1940 was prepared to gamble on French good faith surviving a German occupation. The consequences ran on for years, and the French Navy shot back when it got the chance, as the article on HMS Resolution (09) describes. Hood's guns did a good deal of the damage. It is the only occasion on which she fired her main armament at an enemy ship, and the enemy was France.

The Battle of the Denmark Strait

HMS Hood, alongside the modern battleship HMS Prince of Wales, was sent to intercept the German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen as they attempted to break out into the Atlantic to attack Allied convoys in May 1941.

On the morning of 24 May 1941, under the command of Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland, HMS Hood closed rapidly with the German ships in the Denmark Strait, opting for an immediate, aggressive engagement.

Opening fire at around 0552 at a range of some 26,500 yards, roughly thirteen nautical miles, Holland's ships initially trained their guns on the leading German vessel in the belief that she was Bismarck; only in the final moments before firing did he realise the leading ship was in fact the cruiser Prinz Eugen, and order the shift onto the true target. Prince of Wales made the correction in time. Hood, tragically, did not.

Holland has been second-guessed for eighty years, and the criticism is easier to make from a chair. He knew, as everybody in the fleet knew, that Hood's weakness was her decks rather than her belt, and that at long range shells arrive steeply and come down through the deck rather than in through the side. The way to reduce that risk is to close the range fast, so that the enemy is shooting flat, and that is exactly what he did: he went at the German ships head-on at speed rather than turning to fight a long-range gunnery duel. The price of the head-on approach is that only your forward turrets will bear, so he began the action with four guns firing out of eight while Bismarck had all of hers. It was a calculated trade of firepower for time, and it was probably the right call with the ship he had. The misidentification made it worse. In the low Arctic light, with Prinz Eugen leading, Holland opened on the wrong ship and had to correct at the worst possible moment. Prince of Wales shifted in time. Hood was still shifting target when the salvo that killed her arrived.

The battle that followed lasted barely fifteen minutes, and it went catastrophically wrong for the British force. A 15-inch shell from Bismarck struck HMS Hood, igniting an enormous plume of flame and triggering a devastating magazine explosion that broke the great ship in two. She sank within minutes.

Signalman Ted Briggs was on the compass platform when the shell struck. 'A blinding flash swept around the outside of the compass platform,' he recalled decades later. 'I found myself being lifted off my feet and dumped head-first on the deck.' By the time he surfaced in water thick with oil, there was nothing left to see but flames burning on the sea where her bow had been.

Of her crew of 1,418, only three men survived, including signalman Ted Briggs, who would go on to become one of the war's most poignant living witnesses to a single, sudden catastrophe.

The other two are worth naming, because three men out of 1,418 is a statistic and Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn and William Dundas were not. Tilburn was an able seaman on the boat deck, blown into the sea and nearly pulled under by the wireless aerial as she went; Dundas was a midshipman of eighteen on the compass platform beside Briggs, who got out by kicking through a window. All three came up in oil, found small floats, and hung on. Nobody came for four hours. The destroyer HMS Electra had expected to be picking up hundreds and arrived to find three men and a great deal of floating wreckage, and took them into Reykjavik. What happened to them afterwards is oddly unequal. Tilburn went back to sea, served in Queen Elizabeth in the Far East and was still in uniform for the Korean War in the carrier Warrior, then worked for the Inland Revenue in Stockton-on-Tees with an evening job at a petrol station to make ends meet, and died in 1995 aged seventy-four. Dundas was killed in a car crash in 1964, aged forty-three. Briggs stayed in the Navy until February 1973, became the first president of the HMS Hood Association when it was formed in 1975, spent the rest of his life speaking for the other 1,415, and died in 2008, the last man alive who had stood on her deck.

It remains, to this day, one of the greatest losses of life ever suffered by a single Royal Navy ship, and the destruction of Britain's most celebrated warship sent genuine shockwaves through the entire nation.

A Board of Inquiry under Vice Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake concluded that Hood had been destroyed by a hit from one of Bismarck's 15-inch shells striking at or near her after magazines, though naval historians and the 2001 wreck survey have argued over the precise chain of events ever since, a debate that says a good deal about how much can go wrong in so very short a battle. Prince of Wales, herself barely out of the builder's yard and still carrying civilian technicians to nurse her troublesome new turrets, fought on alone after Hood's loss, took several hits in return, and broke off the action behind a smokescreen rather than share her flagship's fate.

There were in fact two inquiries, and the second one exists because the first was not thought good enough. Blake's board reported quickly in June 1941 and was promptly criticised, notably by the Vice Chief of Naval Staff, Sir Tom Phillips, for the plain reason that nobody had kept a verbatim record of what the witnesses actually said. Goodall, the constructor who had warned about her decks in 1938, objected on technical grounds: the explosion had been seen near the mainmast, some sixty-five feet forward of the after magazines, which did not fit the finding. So a second board sat under Rear Admiral H.T.C. Walker at Dorland House in Regent Street through the last days of August and the first week of September, took proper evidence, and reported on 12 September 1941. It concluded that a hit from Bismarck was the likely cause and that the probability was that the 4-inch magazines went first, and it dismissed the earlier fire on the boat deck as having nothing to do with the final explosion. The argument has continued ever since, through the 1993 technical literature and the 2001 survey of the wreck, and it will probably never be closed. What is not in dispute is that a shell got in somewhere it should not have been able to get in, and that everybody who mattered had known for three years that it could.

Vengeance

HMS Hood's loss triggered an immediate and determined Royal Navy response: a substantial task force, including the battleships HMS Rodney and HMS King George V, the aircraft carriers HMS Victorious and HMS Ark Royal, and a screen of supporting cruisers and destroyers, was assembled specifically to hunt down and destroy the Bismarck.

The German battleship was finally crippled on 26 May when a torpedo strike jammed her rudder, preventing any escape back to occupied France, and on 27 May, British battleships subjected her to overwhelming bombardment, sinking her with the loss of more than 2,000 of her crew, a grim but complete act of retribution for the loss of HMS Hood just three days earlier.

A Lasting Legacy

HMS Hood's wreck lies in the Denmark Strait, designated a protected war grave, and her loss remains one of the defining tragedies of the Royal Navy's Second World War, a stark reminder of just how quickly even the most celebrated and formidable warship could be destroyed by a single well-placed strike. She went unfound for sixty years, until the shipwreck hunter David Mearns led a Channel 4-backed expedition in August 2001 that located her, broken into two main debris fields some 2,800 metres down in the Irminger Basin between Iceland and Greenland; she was formally designated a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act the following year.

In August 2015, an expedition backed by the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, working once again under licence from the Ministry of Defence, recovered one of Hood's two ship's bells from the seabed. Restored over the following year, it was blessed and unveiled in a ceremony marking the battle's 75th anniversary on 24 May 2016, and it now hangs on permanent display at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, a small piece of the ship herself brought home for good.

Her name and her memory continue to be honoured through the HMS Hood Association, founded in 1975 by veterans who had served aboard her before that final voyage together with survivors and bereaved families, and numbering some 400 members today, and her story remains one of the most widely remembered single naval engagements of the entire war, a symbol both of British naval pride and of the terrible, sudden cost that pride could carry in battle.