Qualla: HMS Hood

HMS Hood: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit State Government Photographer, CC0. Three sailors lived to tell what happened. Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn, and Bill Dundas were the only men picked up from the freezing North Atlantic on the morning of 24 May 1941, after a single salvo from the German battleship Bismarck struck the battlecruiser HMS Hood and detonated her aft magazine. The ship that had symbolised British naval power for twenty years broke in two and sank in three minutes. Fourteen hundred and fifteen of her shipmates went down with her.

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Image: State Government Photographer | CC0

HMS Hood: The Mighty Hood

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ernest Hopkins, Public domain. Hood was launched on the Clyde in August 1918, the last and largest of an aborted class of four Admiral-class battlecruisers. Only she was finished — the others were cancelled when the First World War ended and the steel was needed elsewhere. Commissioned in May 1920 at 860 feet ...

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Image: Ernest Hopkins | Public domain

HMS Hood: An Old Ship in a New War

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. By 1939, Hood was tired. The improvements that should have brought her up to the standard of modernised contemporaries — new turbines, new deck armour, modern fire control — had been scheduled for 1941 and then postponed by the outbreak of war. The fundamental design flaw that th...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

HMS Hood: The Denmark Strait

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen sailed for the Atlantic in May 1941 to attack convoys. British cruisers spotted them on 23 May in the strait between Greenland and Iceland; Hood and the newly commissioned battleship Prince of Wales raced to interce...

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Image: Public domain

HMS Hood: The Three Survivors

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Navy Employee, Public domain. The destroyer HMS Electra reached the spot about two hours later. She found debris and three living men. Ted Briggs, an 18-year-old signalman, had been on the compass platform; he survived the suction of the sinking ship by some combination of luck and physics that he himself cou...

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Image: US Navy Employee | Public domain

HMS Hood: Honouring the Dead

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BiscuitsBeforeBias, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first board of inquiry concluded within a fortnight that a German shell had penetrated to the aft magazine. A second board confirmed it in September 1941. Historians have argued ever since about the precise path the shell took — whether it pierced the deck or the belt, whethe...

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Image: BiscuitsBeforeBias | CC BY-SA 4.0