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HMS Hood,
a 42,100-ton battlecruiser was built at Clydebank, Scotland, and completed in
March 1920. For more than two decades, she was the World's largest warship and,
with her long, low hull and finely balanced silhouette, was to many the
embodiment of "big-gun" era seapower. During her travels in European
waters and far away, Hood actively represented Great Britain throughout
her career. Her first cruise, in 1920, was to Scandanavia. The next year she
went down to Gibraltar and Spain and in 1922 visited Brazil and the West Indies.
After a brief call on Denmark and Norway in 1923, Hood was flagship on a
eleven-month cruise around the World, accompanied by the smaller battlecruiser Repulse
and a number of light cruisers. In 1925, she called on Lisbon to help
commemorate Portugal's contributions to navigation and exploration.
For
ten years after 1925, Hood was assigned to the Royal Navy's Home and
Atlantic Fleets, operating primarily around Europe, with a visit to the West
Indies in 1932. She served with the Mediterranean Fleet in 1936-39, protecting
British interests during the Spanish Civil War. Back with the Home Fleet after
mid-1939, Hood operated in the North Atlantic and North Sea through the
first part of World War II and received minor damage in a German air attack on
26 September 1939, an event that demonstrated the relative ineffectiveness of
contemporary anti-aircraft gunfire. In June and July 1940, the battlecruiser was
in the Mediterranean area. She was flagship during the 3 July Mers-el-Kebir
battle, the most dramatic and destructive of several incidents in which the
British Navy seized, interned, destroyed or attempted to destroy the warships of
their recent ally, France. These acts were undertaken on Government orders to
allay fears that the French Navy might fall into German hands.
Hood
spent the remainder of her service operating from Scapa Flow, covering the North
Sea and Atlantic from the threat of German surface raiders. She was now elderly,
overloaded, and burdened with an inadequate armoring arrangement. However, her
great operational value had acted through the 1930s to prevent the Royal Navy
from taking her out of service for a badly-needed modernization, and now it was
too late. In May 1941, in company with the new battleship Prince of Wales,
she was sent out to search for the German battleship Bismarck, which had
left Norway for the Atlantic. On the morning of 24 May, the two British capital
ships found the enemy to the west of Iceland. In the resulting Battle of the
Denmark Strait, one or more of Bismarck's fifteen-inch shells got into Hood's
after magazines. They erupted in a massive explosion. The great ship sank in
moments with all but three of her large crew, an event that shocked the Royal
Navy, the British nation and the entire World. HMS Hood's remains were
located and photographed by a British deep sea expedition in July 2001.
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