24th May
On the morning of 24 May 1941, in the grey, cold waters of the Denmark Strait, two of the most famous warships in the world closed on one another at high speed. On one side were the British battlecruiser HMS Hood and the new battleship HMS Prince of Wales. On the other were the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. The encounter lasted only a few minutes, but it ended with one of the most shocking disasters in Royal Navy history: the sudden destruction of Hood, the pride of the fleet, with the loss of all but three of her crew.
Hood had been launched during the First World War and for more than twenty years she had been the most admired ship in the Royal Navy. She was long, elegant, powerful, and famous across the Empire. To the public she symbolised British sea power. Yet beneath that reputation there was an uncomfortable truth. Hood had been designed as a battlecruiser, which meant she combined heavy guns and high speed, but she did not have the same level of deck armour as a true battleship. Her design came from an earlier age of naval warfare, when the main danger was expected to come from shells striking the sides of a ship at relatively flat angles. By 1941, however, long-range gunnery had changed the problem. Shells fired from great distances could descend steeply and strike the thinner horizontal armour over magazines and machinery spaces.
Bismarck, by contrast, was new, heavily armoured, and built for the war that was already raging. She carried eight 15-inch guns, arranged in four twin turrets, and she was a formidable opponent. Her mission, Operation Rheinübung, was to break into the Atlantic and attack Allied merchant shipping. If Bismarck and Prinz Eugen reached the convoy routes, they could cause serious damage, not only by sinking ships but by forcing the Royal Navy to divert major forces to hunt them down. Britain could not allow that to happen.
When the Germans were sighted moving through the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland, the British moved quickly to intercept them. Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland, flying his flag in Hood, took Prince of Wales with him and steamed to cut off Bismarck’s route into the Atlantic. Holland knew he had to close the range as fast as possible. Hood’s greatest weakness was her deck protection, and that weakness mattered most at longer ranges, where enemy shells would fall at a steep angle. If Hood could get nearer, the shells would be more likely to strike her stronger side armour rather than plunge down through her decks. It was a sound idea, but it carried risks. While closing the range, Hood and Prince of Wales could only use their forward guns. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, running on a roughly converging course, could bring more of their weapons into action.
There was also confusion at the start of the battle. Prinz Eugen was leading the German line, with Bismarck behind her. Because Prinz Eugen and Bismarck had similar silhouettes from certain angles, the British initially targeted the wrong ship. Hood opened fire on Prinz Eugen, believing her to be Bismarck, while Prince of Wales soon shifted fire to the correct target. This mattered because the British needed to hit Bismarck as quickly as possible, but the early moments of the action were not as clean or decisive as they needed to be.
At about 5:52 a.m., Hood opened fire. Prince of Wales followed soon after. The German ships at first held their fire while Admiral Günther Lütjens, in overall command, hesitated. Captain Ernst Lindemann of Bismarck is said to have pressed for permission to return fire, unwilling to let his ship be hit without replying. Once Bismarck did open fire, her gunnery was frighteningly accurate. The German fire-control teams quickly found the range. Prinz Eugen also fired at Hood, and one of her shells is believed to have started a fire among ready-use ammunition or anti-aircraft ammunition on Hood’s boat deck. Flames and smoke rose from the British ship, but the damage did not yet appear fatal.
Holland continued to close the range. He ordered a turn to port, which would allow Hood and Prince of Wales to bring their after turrets into action. This was the critical moment. As Hood began the turn, she exposed more of herself to the German line. Almost immediately, Bismarck fired another salvo. One or more of her 15-inch shells struck Hood. The exact path of the fatal shell has been debated ever since, but the most widely accepted explanation is that a shell penetrated Hood’s thin deck or upper armour and reached one of her after magazines, where the ammunition for her big guns was stored.
What happened next was catastrophic. A great jet of flame shot up from Hood. Then came a massive explosion. The ship broke apart with terrifying speed, the stern disappearing first, the bow rising as the rest of the vessel was torn open. Men aboard nearby ships saw Hood vanish in a column of smoke and flame. It was so sudden that many could hardly believe what they were seeing. A ship of more than 40,000 tons, the famous “Mighty Hood,” had been destroyed in moments.
The cause of the explosion was almost certainly the detonation of one or more magazines. Warships carried enormous quantities of cordite propellant and shells, and if fire reached those stores, the result could be instant destruction. Hood’s after magazines, serving her rear 15-inch turrets, were the likely source. Once the magazine exploded, no damage-control effort could save her. The blast broke the ship’s back and killed nearly everyone aboard.
Out of a crew of 1,418 men, only three survived: Ted Briggs, Bob Tilburn, and Bill Dundas. They were thrown into the freezing water and later rescued by the destroyer HMS Electra. The scale of the loss stunned Britain. Hood was not merely another warship; she was a national symbol. Her destruction was a military blow, a psychological shock, and a personal tragedy for hundreds of families.
Prince of Wales, meanwhile, was left to fight on alone. She was a brand-new ship and still had civilian workers aboard, with some of her guns suffering mechanical problems. Even so, she managed to hit Bismarck, and those hits proved important. One shell damaged Bismarck’s bow and caused fuel contamination and leakage, reducing her ability to continue her Atlantic mission. After receiving damage herself and facing both German ships, Prince of Wales broke off the action under smoke. The Germans had won the battle tactically, but Bismarck had not escaped unharmed.
The sinking of Hood set off one of the great naval pursuits of the Second World War. The order from Britain was simple in spirit: Bismarck had to be found and destroyed. Forces were gathered from across the Atlantic. Aircraft, cruisers, battleships, and destroyers joined the hunt. Two days later, on 26 May, torpedo bombers from HMS Ark Royal crippled Bismarck’s steering gear, leaving her unable to manoeuvre properly. On 27 May, British battleships and cruisers closed in and battered her into a wreck. Bismarck sank that morning, ending the chase that Hood’s destruction had begun.
The question of exactly how Bismarck sank Hood has never completely lost its power to fascinate. For years, theories have argued over whether the fatal shell came through the deck, through the side, beneath the armour belt, or whether fire from Prinz Eugen somehow contributed to the final explosion. The wreck of Hood, found in 2001, confirmed that the ship suffered an enormous magazine explosion, but it could not settle every detail of the shell’s precise route. What is clear is that Bismarck’s accurate fire struck Hood at the worst possible moment, just as she was turning and before she had closed the range enough to reduce the danger from plunging shells.
There was no single simple cause. Hood was destroyed by a combination of design vulnerability, tactical circumstance, German gunnery, and terrible luck. She was an older ship facing a modern battleship. She had to close the range quickly because of her weaker deck armour, yet that approach limited her own fire and placed her under accurate enemy salvos. The Germans found the range with deadly speed. Then one shell did what naval designers and sailors feared most: it reached the ammunition spaces.
In the end, Hood’s sinking was not a long duel in which she was gradually worn down. It was a sudden killing blow. Bismarck did not slowly batter Hood into submission; she hit her in a vital place and triggered an internal explosion from which no ship could recover. That is what made the loss so shocking. One moment Hood was racing into battle, firing her great guns in the Arctic light. A few minutes later she was gone, leaving only wreckage, smoke, oil, and three survivors in the sea.
The Battle of the Denmark Strait remains one of the most dramatic naval actions of the Second World War because it compressed so much into such a short space of time: pride, modern firepower, old design compromises, command decisions, human courage, and disaster. Bismarck sank Hood because one of her heavy shells found the battlecruiser’s fatal weakness. The explosion that followed ended the life of a famous ship and turned a German breakout into a British vendetta. From that moment, the hunt for Bismarck was no longer only about protecting convoys. It had become a matter of honour, grief, and revenge.
