0659 hours CET. 24 May,
2016. Seventy-five years ago to this moment a fifteen inch (38cm) shell from the German fast
battleship KM Bismarck entered above
the aft main magazine of the British battlecruiser HMS Hood. At some 47,000 tons and also armed with a main armament
of eight fifteen inch guns ‘The Mighty Hood’ was the symbol of British naval
might during the interbellum. Moments later Hood
was a broken, sinking, flaming wreck.
HMS Hood was joined in the action
by the brand new and effectively incomplete battleship HMS Prince of Wales under the command of Captain J.C. Leach. Having
been hit seven times by Bismarck. HMS Prince
of Wales was also damaged in the action and Captain Leach had to take
evasive manoeuvres to avoid the rearing wreck of the Hood as she broke up and sank. The damaged Prince of Wales subsequently made smoke to mask her range and
correctly broke off the action affording the Germans a major naval victory.
Recently film was unearthed taken from the German heavy-cruiser KM Prinz Eugen which shows the moment HMS Hood blew up. The flash suggests an explosion with
the force of a low yield atomic weapon which broke the Hood apart. Within a
minute 1418 men were lost, including the fleet commander Vice-Admiral Lancelot
Holland, as the Hood sank into the
icy wastes of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Three of Hood’s sailors survived; Able Seamen Ted
Briggs, Bill Dundas and Bob Tillmann.
In July 2001 the
wreck of HMS Hood was discovered
lying in some 1500 fathoms or 3000 metres. She rests in three sections with the
bow on its port side some distance ahead of an upside down amidships section,
whilst what remains of the stern rests a further distance away astern.
Astonishingly, some 300 feet (or 100 metres) of the hull appears to have simply
disintegrated, testament to the force of what actually may have been two blasts,
with the explosion of the aft main magazine followed shortly thereafter by the
forward main magazine as she sank.
HMS Hood was soon avenged. Crucially,
during the action HMS Prince of Wales
scored at least three hits on Bismarck
one in the forward oil bunker which flooded the German ship with 2000 tons of
sea water and forced her to abandon her commerce-raiding mission. Three days
later at 0800 hours on 27 May the Hood’s
assailant capsized and sank taking with her 1995 of her 2200 strong crew. In an
exercise in sea power the Bismarck was
hunted down by the Royal Navy, crippled by British carrier-based aircraft, and
in what rapidly became a massacre Bismarck
was effectively destroyed by the battleships HMS King George V and HMS
Rodney under the command of Commander-in-Chief Home Fleet, Admiral J.C.
Tovey. She was then sunk by three
torpedoes from the heavy-cruiser HMS
Dorsetshire (although German accounts claim Bismarck was scuttled). The shattered wreck of the Bismarck now lies at a depth of 4790
metres, 470 nautical miles west of Brest.
Lessons? Some questions must be asked about Admiral
Holland’s tactics. The intercept course plotted by Holland enabled the two
German ships to engage both the Hood
and Prince of Wales with their full
armament, whilst the British ships could only engage with their forward main armament
during the early stages of the action. In a ghostly memory of events
seventy-five years ago the rudders on Hood’s
wreck are locked forever hard to port demonstrating clearly that as she blew up
Admiral Holland was attempting to ‘open the arc’ of the Hood’s main aft turrets so they too could fire on Bismarck.
There also seems to
have been mistakes made on board Hood
in ship identification as the flagship first engaged the Prinz Eugen leaving Bismarck
to open fire unmolested. A review of the Prinz
Eugen film on YouTube also shows British shells falling far from their
target with little or no grouping of the shells as they splash harmlessly into
the sea.
HMS Hood was a part-modernised
British battlecruiser-cum-fast battleship of 1919 vintage that was in reality no
match for the Bismarck. Her
destruction was sorry testament to what happens when technology is over-reached
by strategy. The Bismarck was an
ultra-modern 1941 battleship which combined speed, armour and firepower.
However, the Bismarck’s own fate was
sealed because technology alone cannot atone for bad strategy.
As the forward
section of HMS Hood slipped beneath
the waves her two forward turrets barked out one last defiant salvo. It may
well have been that all the guns were loaded and the firing circuits closed as
the ship sank. Quite possibly it was a last salute from a brave but doomed
sailor or Royal Marine on board a dying ship.
Seventy years ago
this week and within three days some 3400 Europeans were killed at sea. At this
time of European foment it is perhaps appropriate to remember the sacrifice of
all those who gave their lives - British and German alike.
Requiescat in Pace.
Rest in peace. Rühe in Frieden.
