HMS Hood (51)

Career
Ordered:	7 April 1916
Laid down:	1 September 1916
Launched:	22 August 1918
Commissioned:	15 May 1920
Fate:	Sunk by German battleship Bismarck on 24 May 1941
Struck:
General Characteristics
Displacement:	48,100 t
Dimensions:	860 ft 7 in by 104 ft 2 in by 33 ft 1 in (262.3 by 31.7 by 10.1 m)
Propulsion:	steam oil fired turbines, 4 shafts, 144,000 (107 MW) shp = 31 knots (57 km/h)
Range:
Complement:	c. 1,200 peacetime, c. 1,400 wartime
Armament:	8 x 15 inch (381 mm), 12 x 5.5 inch (140 mm), 8 x 4 inch (102 mm), 24 x 2 pounder (907 g), 20 x 0.5 in (12.7 mm) calibre guns
Aircraft:	1 fitted from 1931-32
Motto:	Ventis Secundis - Latin: "With the Winds Favourable"

HMS Hood was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy. She was one of four Admiral-class ships ordered in mid-1916 under the Emergency War Programme, but her sister-ships were never completed, and Hood was to be Britain's last battlecruiser.

Construction of Hood began at the John Brown & Company shipyards in Clydebank, Scotland, on 1 September 1916. Following the loss of three British battlecruisers at the Battle of Jutland, 5,000 tons of extra armour and bracing was added to Hood's design. Construction on her sister ships Anson, Howe, and Rodney was stopped in March 1917, but work continued on Hood. She was launched on August 22, 1918 by the widow of Admiral Sir Horace Hood, a Jutland casualty and distant relative of the famous Lord Hood for whom the ship was named. After fitting out and trials, she was commissioned on May 15, 1920 under Captain Wilfred Tomkinson and became flagship of the Atlantic Fleet's Battle Cruiser Squadron. She had cost £6 million.

In the inter-war years she was the largest warship in the world at a time when the British public felt a close affinity with the Royal Navy. Her name and general characteristics were familiar to most of the public, and she was popularly known as the Mighty Hood. Because of her fame, she spent a great deal of time on cruises and "flying the flag" visits to other countries. In particular she took part in a world-wide cruise between November 1923 and September 1924 in company with HMS Repulse and several smaller ships. This was known as the Cruise of the Special Service Squadron and it was estimated that 750,000 people visited Hood during that cruise.

She was given a major refit in 1930 and was due to be modernised in 1941 to bring her up to a standard similar to other modernised WWI-era capital ships. The outbreak of war made it impossible to remove her from frontline service, and so she never received the scheduled update.

Hood was transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in late 1936. In June 1939 she joined the Home Fleet's Battle Cruiser Squadron at Scapa Flow; when war broke out later that year, she was employed principally in patrolling the vicinity of Iceland and the Faroes to protect convoys and intercept German raiders attempting to break out into the Atlantic. As the flagship of Force H, she took part in the Destruction of the French Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940. In August she rejoined the Battle Cruiser Squadron and resumed patrolling against German raiders.

During the Battle of Denmark Strait on 24 May 1941, she was hit by a shell fired by the Bismarck which caused the catastrophic explosion of her aft magazines. Of the 1,418 aboard, only three survived. The dramatic loss of such a well-known symbol of British naval power had a great effect on many people; some later remembered the news as the most shocking of World War II.

The wreck of Hood was discovered in 3,000 metres of water in July 2001. In 2002 the UK government designated the site a war grave.

See HMS Hood for other ships of the same name.