The sinking of HMS Hood

On the morning of 24 May 1941, in the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland, four great warships clashed. The German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen were trying to break out into the Atlantic to destroy Allied convoys. Their way was barred by the British battlecruiser Hood and the new battleship Prince of Wales. The battle lasted less than twenty minutes. At about 6 a.m. a shell from Bismarck’s fifth salvo struck Hood, and moments later the ship’s after magazines exploded. The pride of the Royal Navy, for twenty years the largest warship in the world, went down in three minutes. Of the 1,418 men aboard, three survived. For the Germans it was the greatest victory of their surface fleet in the whole war. It proved short-lived, however: three days later Bismarck herself lay on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Rheinübung: the plan and the sortie

In the spring of 1941 the German naval command under Grand Admiral Erich Raeder believed that Britain could be starved into submission by cutting her supply lines from America. The burden of this war, the Battle of the Atlantic, was borne by the U-boats, but Raeder wanted large surface ships to go out onto the convoy routes alongside them. He was encouraged by a recent success: between January and March 1941 the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, flying the flag of Admiral Günther Lütjens, had sunk or captured 22 ships in Operation Berlin before putting into Brest in the second half of March.

The next raid, named Rheinübung (“Rhine Exercise”), was to be even stronger. Originally it was intended that all four modern German battleships should put to sea. In the end only two ships were left. Scharnhorst was waiting at Brest for her boilers to be overhauled, Gneisenau had been hit there in April by a British aerial torpedo and by bombs, and Bismarck’s sister ship, Tirpitz, still had an untrained crew. Bismarck, which had been commissioned in August 1940 and, after an enforced stay in Hamburg in the winter of 1941, was catching up on her training in the Baltic, was therefore joined only by the new heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Lütjens, who as Fleet Commander took command of the force, asked Raeder to postpone the operation until the other battleships were ready. Raeder refused; he wanted a great success for the surface ships before Hitler’s whole attention shifted to the planned war against the Soviet Union. He instructed Lütjens that merchant shipping was to be his main target, and that he should engage enemy ships of equal strength only when it was necessary and did not involve excessive risk.

On 5 May Adolf Hitler visited Bismarck at Gotenhafen, as the Germans called occupied Gdynia. According to accounts from the admiral’s circle, Lütjens spoke to him of the danger posed by British torpedo aircraft, but Hitler did not halt the operation. It began on 18 May: Prinz Eugen left Gotenhafen that evening, and Bismarck weighed anchor at about 2 a.m. on 19 May. Aboard the battleship, besides her captain, Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann, was Lütjens with the fleet staff. Secrecy could not be kept. On 20 May the force was sighted in the Kattegat by the Swedish aircraft cruiser Gotland, and the news reached the British naval attaché in Stockholm through unofficial channels. On 21 May the ships anchored in a fjord near Bergen, where a British reconnaissance aircraft photographed them. Prinz Eugen refuelled there; Bismarck, which was several hundred tons short, did not. That same evening the Germans put to sea and headed north.

The chase in the Denmark Strait

The commander of the British Home Fleet, Admiral John Tovey, had to watch several possible passages into the Atlantic. In the Denmark Strait the heavy cruisers Suffolk and Norfolk of Rear Admiral Frederic Wake-Walker were on patrol. During the night of 21–22 May the force of Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland – Hood, Prince of Wales and six destroyers – left Scapa Flow for Iceland. Tovey sailed on the evening of 22 May with the battleship King George V, the aircraft carrier Victorious and cruisers, once it was found that the fjord near Bergen was empty.

Hood, launched in 1918 and commissioned in 1920, was a symbol of British sea power. She carried eight 15-inch (381 mm) guns and could make more than 30 knots, and between the wars, as “the Mighty Hood”, she showed the flag in ports all over the world. In July 1940 she was the flagship of Force H at Mers-el-Kébir. She had, however, the congenital flaw of battlecruisers: her speed had been bought at the expense of armour. Her decks gave poor protection against shells plunging steeply from long range, and the reconstruction planned for 1939, which was to have strengthened them, never took place because of the war. Prince of Wales, on the other hand, was too new. She had been commissioned at the end of March 1941, her crew had not worked up, and shipyard workers were still aboard, putting right the defects of the new quadruple main-armament turrets.

At 7.22 p.m. on 23 May Suffolk detected the Germans in the strait, near the edge of the ice off the coast of Greenland. The cruiser took cover in the mist and kept within range of her radar. An hour later Norfolk came out of the mist and found herself a few kilometres from Bismarck, which fired several salvoes at her; the cruiser withdrew without serious damage. The shock of the firing, however, put Bismarck’s forward radar out of action, and Lütjens moved Prinz Eugen to the head of the line. This detail would matter the next morning. Holland, having received the cruisers’ reports, set off to intercept. He wanted to attack by night, head on, closing the range quickly so that the German shells would strike Hood at a flatter angle, on her side armour rather than her weak decks. After midnight Suffolk lost contact with the Germans for several hours. When she regained it at about 2.47 a.m., the British had to close at a less favourable angle.

The battle

At 5.35 a.m. (according to British records, with which most German accounts agree) lookouts on Prince of Wales sighted the German ships at a distance of about 17 nautical miles. Holland decided to attack at once, without waiting for Tovey to come up. The British ships steered towards the enemy so sharply that they could fire only their forward turrets – ten of their eighteen heavy guns. Prince of Wales had to keep close to the flagship Hood and follow her manoeuvres, which made it easier for the Germans to aim at both ships.

At 5.52 a.m. Hood opened fire at a range of about 24–25 km. She first fired at the leading Prinz Eugen, which she took for Bismarck; Holland quickly corrected the order, but according to some researchers Hood went on firing at the cruiser for some time. Prince of Wales aimed correctly at Bismarck from the start. The German ships opened fire at about 5.55 a.m. According to survivors from Bismarck, Lütjens hesitated to give the order, and the first gunnery officer asked several times for permission to fire, until Lindemann is said to have snapped: “I will not let my ship be shot out from under my arse. Open fire!” These words are known only at second hand, and historians differ on whether the captain really acted on his own initiative.

The Germans quickly found the range. An 8-inch (203 mm) shell, most probably from Prinz Eugen, struck Hood on the boat deck near the mainmast and started a fire in the ready-use stock of anti-aircraft ammunition. The fire was spectacular but did not cause the catastrophe. Just before 6 a.m. Holland ordered a turn to port to bring the after turrets into action. During this turn the ship was hit by Bismarck’s fifth salvo, fired at a range of about 16–17 km. Witnesses on Prince of Wales saw a huge column of flame near the mainmast, “like a gigantic blowlamp”, followed by an explosion that tore the after part of the ship apart. The stern broke away and sank; the bow rose vertically and went down a few moments later. A British board of inquiry later established that a 380 mm shell had pierced the armour and reached the after magazines; most probably the charges for the 4-inch (102 mm) guns exploded first, and set off the main-armament magazines. Other hypotheses – an explosion of the ship’s own torpedoes, or a shell striking below the armour belt – are still debated, but the wreck, examined in 2001, confirmed the explosion of the after magazines.

Hood sank in about three minutes. 1,415 men were killed, among them Vice-Admiral Holland and the ship’s captain, Captain Ralph Kerr. Three survived: Midshipman William Dundas, Able Seaman Robert Tilburn and Ordinary Signalman Ted Briggs. After two hours in the icy water they were picked up by the destroyer Electra and landed at Reykjavík that same day.

Prince of Wales alone

Prince of Wales, which had to turn sharply to avoid Hood’s wreckage, came under the fire of both German ships. She took seven hits: four shells from Bismarck and three from Prinz Eugen. One of them passed through the compass platform, killing or wounding almost everyone standing there except her captain, Captain John Leach. Another struck below the waterline but did not explode. At the same time the new turrets kept jamming and fewer and fewer guns could fire. At about 6.02–6.03 a.m. Leach laid a smokescreen and broke off the action, judging that further exchanges of fire would only endanger the ship without harming the enemy. Thirteen men were killed on Prince of Wales.

The British battleship had, however, managed to hit Bismarck three times, and two of these hits proved to be fateful. One shell passed right through the bow just above the waterline. It cut off access to some 1,000 tons of fuel in the forward tanks, and several hundred tons of water poured into the hull through the hole; the ship took on a list and settled by the bow. The second struck below the water amidships, flooding a generator room and partly flooding one of the boiler rooms. Bismarck’s speed fell, and behind her trailed a broad, iridescent slick of oil that gave away her course.

Lütjens’s decision

On Bismarck there was euphoria. Lindemann wanted to finish off the damaged Prince of Wales, reckoning that the chase would take two or three hours. Lütjens refused, and without explanation. He was keeping to Raeder’s orders, which told him to avoid action with heavy ships, and two of his predecessors as Fleet Commander – among them Vice-Admiral Wilhelm Marschall, who in June 1940 had sunk Glorious contrary to the letter of his orders – had lost their posts for acting on their own initiative. Nor did Lütjens know how many more British ships were heading his way; German intelligence had, after all, recently assured him that Hood was off the coast of West Africa.

In the morning Lütjens realised that with a damaged ship, dwindling fuel and British cruisers that could not be shaken off, he could not wage war on convoys. He rejected Lindemann’s proposal to return to Norway and decided to make for Saint-Nazaire in France, where there was a dry dock capable of taking the battleship. He counted on shaking off the pursuit more easily on the open ocean and on drawing the British onto a line of U-boats on the way. Prinz Eugen was to detach and carry on the raid alone. The force was shadowed by Norfolk, Suffolk and Prince of Wales, whose damage was being repaired under way.

In Berlin the news was received with mixed feelings. Raeder was pleased with the success but did not know what state Bismarck was in, and he left the decision to the admiral at sea. Hitler, according to accounts from his entourage, asked why Lütjens had not finished off the second ship as well. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda broadcast a special announcement that evening to the strains of martial songs; the German public, which in those same days was hearing of the Luftwaffe’s successes against the Royal Navy off Crete, greeted it with enthusiasm.

Shock in Britain

In Britain the news caused shock. The Admiralty announced that same day that Hood had received “an unlucky hit in a magazine and blew up”. Few ships were so dear to the British; few losses had claimed so many men at once. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, regarded the destruction of Bismarck as a matter of the utmost importance. The Admiralty drew ships into the hunt from all sides: from convoy escorts, from Gibraltar – Vice-Admiral James Somerville’s Force H with the aircraft carrier Ark Royal – and from the western Atlantic, where the battleship Rodney was escorting a troopship. In the end several dozen warships took part in the hunt, among them the Polish destroyer ORP Piorun.

The first board of inquiry, chaired by Vice-Admiral Geoffrey Blake, concluded as early as 2 June that the cause of the loss was a shell from Bismarck that had reached the magazines. Criticism of its cursory nature led to a second board, which in September 1941 came to the same conclusion. Both cleared Holland of blame. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, on the other hand, wanted to court-martial Wake-Walker and Leach for not renewing the action against Bismarck. Tovey came to their defence and threatened to resign; the matter was dropped.

Place in the war

The clash in the Denmark Strait was a tactical victory for the Germans and one of the most shocking moments of the war at sea. The sinking of Hood repeated the lesson of the Battle of Jutland in 1916, when three British battlecruisers had also blown up after hits on their magazines. The Royal Navy afterwards improved the protection of the magazines on its older ships.

Operationally, however, the battle sealed the Germans’ defeat. Prince of Wales’s hits deprived Bismarck of fuel and forced her to abandon the raid, and the deaths of more than 1,400 sailors made the British throw everything they had into the pursuit. That same evening, 24 May, torpedo aircraft from Victorious scored one hit, though without doing much damage. During the night of 24–25 May Lütjens managed to shake off the British cruisers, but he then gave away his position with long radio messages. On 26 May Bismarck was found by a Catalina flying boat, and aircraft from Ark Royal jammed her rudder with a torpedo. On 27 May, after a fight with the battleships King George V and Rodney, the ship went down, fighting in accordance with the order Raeder had issued after the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee, which forbade the surrender of a ship still able to fight; some two thousand men were killed, among them Lütjens and Lindemann. Prinz Eugen, without having sunk a single ship, reached Brest on 1 June.

Rheinübung brought to an end the era of raids by large German warships in the Atlantic. After May 1941 Hitler no longer allowed battleships to be risked on the ocean. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen broke through the English Channel back to Germany in February 1942, and Tirpitz spent the war in Norwegian fjords. Only the U-boats were left in the Atlantic. The wrecks of Bismarck and Hood were found at depths of several thousand metres in 1989 and 2001.