I once read a book detailing the exploits of the royal navy published in the interwar period, it was an earnest but entertaining read aimed at young adults. One ship that featured extensively in that book was HMS Hood. They call it dramatic irony, that sense you get when you, as a reader or member of an audience have knowledge of something the participants of a drama are unaware of. That’s what you get when you read something like this account of the Hood’s prewar travels around the world but I also gained something else from that read. That was a perspective on just how much of a calamity the loss of the Hood was and the impact it must’ve had on the public consciousness.
Battleships are not just weapons of war, they’re a locus for national prestige and since for much of the Hood’s career, she was the largest and most powerfully destructive engine of war ever constructed by man, the prestige and pride gathered around her was prodigious. Alas the cause of the Hood’s undoing was with her from the very moment her hull was laid down in 1916. She was constructed as a battlecruiser, ie a lightly armoured battleship built for speed. When Admiral Fisher first envisioned the concept of the dreadnought, he conceived it as two closely related types, one being fully armoured ships, the other being a more lightly armoured version. The lighter ships would use their speed to evade fire, rather than sit and take the punishment that smaller and faster ships, like destroyers, could deliver to slower vessels.
Since it’s impossible to armour vessels to be immune from attack, the concept of the battlecruiser seemed to be a pretty good idea and you know, it might’ve been if they’d been used in their intended context. Battlecruisers were built to harass and destroy enemy shipping, then speed away before enemy vessels could deliver a reprisal. They could outpace submarines, destroyers and deliver a salvo over the horizon before anyone even knew they’d been targeted. What they were not built to do was take on more heavily armoured and armed vessels in direct confrontation. Of course the Royal Navy knew this but fear not, they had a cunning strategy to overcome this shortcoming. When faced with an enemy whose guns outdistanced your own a battlecruiser would turn beam on and head towards the opponent at full speed, thereby using her speed to evade fire and close the distance so she could deploy her own armament. Yeah only, there’s a slight problem with this strategy…
...it’s complete bollocks. You see what happens when a ship turns beam on to an opponent is that she presents a much bigger target to the enemy. When ships are broadside to the opponent, that opponent has the width of the deck to aim at, beam on that opponent has the entire length of the ship to aim at, but it gets worse. The enemy ship now has the option of bracketing the range of their shots. Broadside to broadside, it took a ship around three salvos before she would be on range to the enemy, even when the range was accurate, they could still miss, something called straddling in gunnery parlance. With a ship beam on heading towards you, all you have to do is fire short and that ship will sail into your shot, you are practically guaranteed to hit it.
And that’s what happened, with ship after ship at the battle of Jutland. The battle of Jutland is a huge landmark in, not just naval history, but the history of the world because it’s when Germany lost WWI. With all the attention that land war attracts it might come a surprise to some that the war was lost in 1916 at sea but it’s my belief that the battle of Jutland is the decisive engagement of the war. Even so it was no walk in the park for the Royal Navy, in fact it was a veritable disaster, one that resonated through the public consciousness, probably even more than the sinking of the Hood. The battle highlighted a number of problems with, not just the thoroughly useless strategy mentioned above but problems with the very fabric of the Royal Navy’s ships of the line.
It seems the placement and construction of the ship’s magazine made the Royal Navy’s battleships and cruisers especially vulnerable to fire at range, where shells would penetrate the deck rather than side of the ship. The battle took place in May, Hood’s hull was laid down in September -- oops, can you see the problem here? Indeed, Hood was built to a design that predated the battle of Jutland. Hood was intended as the first of a new class of battleship but once the shortcomings of her design were realised, that plan was abandoned and she was completed as the sole example of the Hood class.
When the subject of the Battle of the Denmark Strait and the sinking of the Hood comes up in some TV documentary, it’s usually aired as some mystery, oh why did the Hood sink? There’s no mystery, the Hood was inadequately armoured and took a stray hit at extreme distance from the enemy. That hit turned out to be catastrophic because of the Hoods inherent design flaws but the battle wasn’t by any means a foregone conclusion. Mistakes were made on both sides, The Prince of Wales was misidentified as the King George V by the Germans and Admiral Holland ordered his battle formation to open fire upon the Prinz Eugen believing her to be the Bismarck. The pairing up of the Prince of Wales, a ship just out of the builder’s yard with the inadequately armoured Hood is a blunder that doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves either.
In the end it wasn’t flawed design or strategy that sunk the Hood, it was luck, she turned at the wrong moment just as Bismarck was testing her range.
