| HMS Hood, a 42,100-ton battlecruiser built at Clydebank, Scotland, was completed in March 1920. For more than two decades, she was the World‘s largest warship and, with her 15“ guns, a long, low hull and finely balanced silhouette, was to many the embodiment of “big-gun“ era seapower. During her travels in European waters and far away, Hood actively represented Great Britain throughout her career. With the Home Fleet after mid-1939, Hood operated in the North Atlantic and North Sea through the first part of World War II and received minor damage in a German air attack on September 26, 1939, an event that demonstrated the relative ineffectiveness of contemporary anti-aircraft gunfire. In June and July 1940, the battlecruiser was in the Mediterranean area. She was flagship during the July 3 Mers-el-Kebir battle, the most dramatic and destructive of several incidents in which the British Navy seized, interned, destroyed or attempted to destroy the warships of their recent ally, France. These acts were undertaken on Government orders to allay fears that the French Navy might fall into German hands. Hood spent the remainder of her service operating from Scapa Flow, covering the North Sea and Atlantic from the threat of German surface raiders. She was now elderly, overloaded, and burdened with an inadequate armoring arrangement. However, her great operational value had acted through the 1930s to prevent the Royal Navy from taking her out of service for a badly-needed modernization, and now it was too late. In May 1941, in company with the new battleship Prince of Wales, she was sent out to search for the German battleship Bismarck, which had left Norway for the Atlantic. On the morning of May 24, the two British ships found the enemy to the west of Iceland. In the resulting Battle of the Denmark Strait, one or more of Bismarck‘s fifteen-inch shells got into Hood‘s after magazines. They erupted in a massive explosion. The great ship sank in moments with all but three of her crew of 1,418, an event that shocked the Royal Navy, the British nation and the entire World. Hood‘s remains were located and photographed by a British deep sea expedition in July 2001. | |
| Image Filename | wwii1217.jpg |
| Image Size | 132.86 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 700 x 430 |
| Photographer | Unknown |
| Photographer Title | |
| Caption Author | Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | June 16, 1931 |
| Location | Portsmouth Royal Navy Yard |
| City | Portsmouth |
| State or Province | Hampshire |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Archive | United States Naval Historical Center |
| Record Number | |
| Status | Caption ©2007, ©2024 MFA Productions LLC Image in the Public Domain |
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