HMS Hood

The Pride of the Royal Navy and the Battle That Shocked an Empire

By: Gordon J. MacKenzie

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

HMS Hood was the pride of the Royal Navy, the most famous British warship of her age, and a floating symbol of empire, sea power and national confidence.

On 24 May 1941, that symbol vanished.

Sent to intercept the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait, Hood entered battle alongside HMS Prince of Wales. Within minutes, a catastrophic explosion tore through the ship. Of the 1,418 men aboard, only three survived. Britain lost more than a warship. It lost an icon.

HMS Hood tells the story of the ship before the disaster: the battlecruiser idea, the legacy of Jutland, the compromises in her design, her fame between the wars, the men who served aboard her, and the desperate wartime pressure that sent her into battle against Bismarck.

It also follows the shock of her destruction, the hunt for Bismarck, the theories about what caused Hood’s fatal explosion, and the long afterlife of the wreck as a war grave and place of memory.

Clear, direct and unsentimental, this is the story of a ship built to embody British sea power, and the battle that exposed the deadly gap between legend and reality.

Part of the Shipwrecks That Shaped History series.