HMS Hood (pennant number 51) was
the last battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy. Commissioned in 1920, she was
named after the 18th-century Admiral Samuel Hood. One of four Admiral-class
battlecruisers ordered in mid-1916, Hood had design limitations, though
her design was revised after the Battle of Jutland and improved while she was
under construction. For this reason she was the only ship of her class to be
completed. As one of the largest and most powerful warships in the world, her
prestige was reflected in her nickname ‘The Mighty Hood’.
Hood was involved in several showing the
flag exercises between her commissioning in 1920 and the outbreak of war in
1939, including training exercises in the Mediterranean Sea and a
circumnavigation of the globe with the Special Service Squadron in 1923 and
1924. She was attached to the Mediterranean Fleet following the outbreak of the
Second Italo-Abyssinian War. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Hood
was officially assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet until she had to return to
Britain in 1939 for an overhaul. By this time, advances in naval gunnery had
reduced Hood's
usefulness. She was scheduled to undergo a major rebuild in 1941 to correct
these issues, but the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 forced the
ship into service without the upgrades.
When war with Germany was declared, Hood
was operating in the area around Iceland, and she spent the next several months
hunting between Iceland and the Norwegian Sea for German commerce raiders and blockade
runners. After a brief overhaul of her propulsion system, she sailed as the flagship
of Force H, and participated in the destruction of the French Fleet at
Mers-el-Kebir. Relieved as flagship of Force H, Hood was dispatched to Scapa
Flow, and operated in the area as a convoy escort and later as a defence
against a potential German invasion fleet.
In May 1941, she and the battleship Prince of
Wales were ordered to intercept the German battleship Bismarck
and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, which were en route to the Atlantic
where they were to attack convoys. On 24 May 1941, early in the Battle of the
Denmark Strait, Hood was struck by several German shells, exploded and
sank. Due to her perceived invincibility, the loss affected British morale.
The Royal Navy conducted two inquiries into the
reasons for the ship's quick demise. The first, held soon after the ship's
loss, concluded that Hood's aft magazine
had exploded after one of Bismarck's
shells penetrated the ship's armour. A second inquiry was held after complaints
that the first board had failed to consider alternative explanations, such as
an explosion of the ship's torpedoes. It was more thorough than the first board
and concurred with the first board's conclusion.
Despite the official explanation, some historians
continued to believe that the torpedoes caused the ship's loss, while others
proposed an accidental explosion inside one of the ship's gun turrets that
reached down into the magazine. Other historians have concentrated on the cause
of the magazine explosion. The discovery of the ship's wreck in 2001 confirmed
the conclusion of both boards, although the exact reason the magazines
detonated is likely to remain unknown since that area of the ship was destroyed
in the explosion.
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