The Loss of HMS Hood - But why did it blow up??

[Music] [Music] before we start i would just like to say that this video would not have been possible without the kind help and assistance of mr bill jurans who conducted an awful lot of the research that forms the basis of much of this video he's also contributed significantly to a number of books including the recent book battleship bismarck where along with mr doolin and nagaski the voyage of the famous battleship and the battles that it fought are presented in detail including some of what you're about to hear i would highly recommend picking up a copy for yourself so what exactly killed hms hood the surface answer may seem obvious but surely it was a german shell but how did that happen much has been said about exactly where and how that shell caused the loss of the ship but some of the more widely spread ideas if you more closely examine them do not make all that much sense and some of them don't make any at all to establish what actually happened or more accurately what is the most likely or plausible sequence of events to happen we have to establish a few things who might be responsible what were hood's defensive capabilities against the threats that those entities posed and what was hood doing at the time of the fatal explosion in terms of responsibility we can consider three parties the german battleship bismarck the german heavy cruiser prince eugen and hood herself we'll look at those in reverse order when we come to it now in terms of defensive capability whilst a battle cruiser and a relatively old one at that at least on paper hood was surprisingly well defended whilst initially envisioned as a ship somewhat light on armor in exchange for speed as was the case with a number of british battlecruiser designs due to changes in her construction that were taken due to the battle of jutland she emerged as a vessel whose main belt protection was approximately equal to that of the queen elizabeth class battleships the armor itself was somewhat thinner at 12 inches thick but it was angled such that at the expected battle ranges of the upper teens to lower 20s of thousands of yards the equivalent thickness of armor that was facing an incoming shell was roughly similar with hood's armor becoming more and more effective as range increased and the angle of drop of the incoming shell became steeper this kind of angled main belt would be repeated in the nelson yamato south dakota and iowa class battleships to name a few albeit with variations in precise armor thickness and precise armor angle depending on the ship in question where hood was vulnerable was her deck armor this consisted of several layers of different thicknesses on multiple decks each covering slightly different areas the complexity of these combinations meant that working out exactly how much armor protected the ship from impact from above in any given location is something of a nightmare to begin with complicated by the fact that since hood's belt armor like many ships of her period had thinner plates higher up as well as the main belt further down shells might bypass this thinner armor and also bypass a number of the deck armor layers which adds even more complexity to the equation and that's before you realize that multiple thinner layers of armor are in fact less effective than the same thicknesses in a single massive layer various schemes to address this weakness everything from relatively minimal but useful additions through to full-scale refits and modernizations would be considered over the interwar years but by 1941 none of these had come to pass so in demand was hood to act as the royal navy's flagship she would also become known as something of a wet ship as displacement increases combined with the extra armor worked into the design while she was under construction tended to make her sit lower in the water especially at the quarter deck although this varied depending on what exactly had been added to or removed from the ship in any given year and of course what stake the ship was in at the time how much fuel and supplies had been used up the sea state and a number of other factors at the time of her destruction hood had already received a hit which started a fire amidships which we'll examine in more detail when we look at the potential causes of her loss but in terms of position the ship had along with prince of wales been trying to run in close to the german ships there are a wide variety of reasons for this including the fact that hood's older fire control system would be much more effective at close range whilst much has been made of hood's weaker deck armor and whilst it is true that holland would have known about this it's also true that the admiralty fighting instructions called for all major capital ship engagements to seek to close the range as much as possible as quickly as possible noting that whilst closing a ship would be presenting a smaller target profile and a more difficult target in general as the enemy would have to adjust for significant changes in both range and speed especially when a number of small course corrections were made these instructions applied even to rn battleships that had considerably more deck protection it also needs to be taken into account that holland knew bismarck's mission and that the german ships would rather avoid engaging british heavy units so driving in hard limited the germans options since they had cruisers in one direction ice packs in another and now capital ships in a third by closing the range down even if bismarck and prince oregon made a break for it at top speed it would take some time for them to either draw out of range or cut across the british line of advance in either case affording more than enough time for the british guns to deal crippling or even fatal damage to enable the range to continue to close the two british ships had to make periodic course corrections these being signaled by the flying of the flag signal 2 blue which called for a 20 degree turn to port one of these turns had already been completed leaving any incoming shell fire to contend with an angle of about 37 degrees off of the perpendicular along with the angle of hood's armor at the time of the detonation hood was signaling to make another turn which would have left an angle of 17 degrees off perpendicular decreasing the overall resistance offered by the armor but opening up x and y turrets and thus doubling the ship's effective firepower obviously where along this turn she was makes a rather significant difference but we can piece together the most likely scenario based on a number of factors examination of the wreck showed that hood's rudder was locked in a turn to port which means that she was somewhere through that 20 degree turn but had not completed it given that there was a short delay between the initial signs of something going wrong and the explosion where rudder changes could have been made this rules out the tail end of the turn but it also allows for the start of the fatal incident to occur shortly before the turn began additionally when a vessel the size of hood puts its rudder over it takes some time for the altered water flow to overcome the inertia of the ship and alter its course in any appreciable manner as a result hood could have been continuing its apparent course for around about 10 seconds or so with the rudder actually locked apart without changing its angle relative to the target this of course extends the window in which the physical evidence of hud's status at the time of her demise matches up with the reports of what she was doing at the time prince of wales action report states that a turn of two blue at zero five fifty-five opened a arcs at prince of wales ninth salvo hood had a further two blue flying when at o600 just after bismarck's fifth salvo a huge explosion occurred between hood's after funnel and main mast and she sank in three or four minutes the way to signal that a flag order was to be executed was to haul down the flag and here we see that it was still flying which suggests that the turn had not yet begun at the time of the explosion meanwhile two of the survivors aboard hood indicated that a turn to port had just begun and that possibly the command to give the execute signal had been given right before the explosion lastly prince of wales had to take evasive action to avoid hud's wreck if it was still on their previous course this is unlikely to have occurred but would be a concern if prince of wales had begun to turn in accordance with the signal putting all of these together whilst at first the accounts may seem contradictory there is a way to make all of these accounts align and actually gives us an incredibly narrow window of time for the explosion to occur if the order to execute had been given aboard hood it is likely that the rudders would have been put over to port at the same time there would however be a short delay between the order being given and the signalman physically hauling the flags down meanwhile over on prince of wales with keeping formation paramount and having been warned by the hoisting of the signal it's likely the helm of the latter ship would be put over to port when hood started to swing as opposed to strictly waiting for the signal to go down obviously ships do have inertia so prince of wales would have continued her turn in the seconds after hood's destruction thus requiring a change in course this does however mean that the cause of the detonation occurred either immediately before or right at the very start of hood's actual turn which means that for the purposes of this discussion we may assume that at least for the circumstances of destruction caused by a shell impact the angle of impact relative to perpendicular is about 37 degrees once you account for the angle of hud's armor and then adjust for both angles in a 3d environment this in turn gives an effective impact angle for a shell of just under 44 degrees so now we know where the ship was and what shape it was in let us briefly consider the manner of the destruction there are multiple eyewitness accounts and as with all such incidents the specifics do differ but the common theme that comes through from the majority who saw the entire sequence of events is that a near silent very high intensity flame appeared to lance up from somewhere around the main mast for a few moments before being replaced or subsumed in a somewhat duller but much more expansive explosion from the vicinity of x turret this latter almost certainly being the detonation of the aft 15-inch magazines this appears by all accounts to have occurred shortly after the arrival of a salvo from bismarck which most observers who spotted the falling shells believe resulted in a hit somewhere between the aft funnel and the main mast albeit that a small minority think that two hits occurred these events occurred after the fire on the boat deck from an earlier hit was observed to have died down somewhat thus any scenario explaining the ship's destruction must account for this observed sequence of destruction with all that out the way let's now consider the potential culprits starting with hms hood herself and yes you did hear that right and there is some evidence behind this not everyone who saw hood blow up mentioned an incoming enemy salvo at the time or shortly before and a number mentioned the explosion appeared to coincide with the firing of one of the aft turrets three petty officers aboard prince of wales reported the following george henry gough saw a salvo from bismarck land on the starboard side of the hood very close the next thing he says that i remember seeing was flames from x turret a b and y were firing at the time and i noticed that x was not firing then the next thing i noticed was that b turret was firing but belching out flames after that why turret fired on its own and hood went up edgar holt stated a fire broke out breast x turret on hood's port side about two minutes later i saw a flame about 10 feet long shoot out of b turret muzzle and about half to one minute later why turret on hood fired her first salvo about a second later hood blew up lawrence sutton recalls hood was firing with her foremost turrets why turret had been trained four and a half during this time why turret then trained toward the enemy and before firing there was a flash after the main mast of the hood which appeared to be a fire on the boat deck why turret then fired and at the same time a huge flash came up all around y turret the flash rose to well above the main mast of the ship and all i heard was a tremendous roar and i could not see anything until the smoke had cleared away that was all i saw of the hood quite what was going on with b turret in the first accounts is unclear perhaps a jam perhaps a late firing gun but it doesn't appear to be related to the main explosion which was most definitely aft but all these and a few other accounts talk about something strange occurring with white turret theoretically there are a few ways this could occur for example if there was a malfunction with one of the guns that resulted in a flash or explosion that blew out the gun breach possibly a stuck shell a premature detonation a fault in loading that damage to charge followed by spark that happened to be in the wrong place etc etc this explosion or high energy burn could then have resulted in a flash traveling down through the ammunition handling system and into the magazine however it would have required someone to have done a jutland-style disabling of the ship's anti-flash measures which is technically possible but after jutlin those measures were made both stronger and much more complex so disabling them would not have been something that could have been done easily or quickly with the increased strength in particular even a jutland style over storage of charges in the turret and or shell room should not have been able to breach the system an extremely remote chance may be that an explosion occurred just as the hoist with the next set of charges and shell arrived which then might be able to ignite those charges and propel the hoist back down somewhat like a projectile exploding back into the magazine but this would be a sequence of multiple events that would also have had to have coincided down to the second and even then still overridden a number of safety features there's also the fact that whilst a great many turrets of varying sizes were hit and burnt out in both world war one and world war ii it was a very rare that this resulted in a magazine detonation and the loss of the ship fire and explosions tend to seek out lower pressure areas and thus tend to vent upwards and outwards whereas a flame heading into a magazine is going to be increasing the pressure ahead of it since in a closed-up magazine all of the exit paths are going to be the ones that the flame or flash is following to try and get in in turn this increased pressure will slow the advance of a flame perhaps not by much and perhaps not for long but when an explosion is involved nothing lasts for very long anyway and the lower pressure volume in the area of the initial explosion will tend to cause a rebound effect from enclosed areas sucking the air and any advancing flash back towards it of course a sufficiently large explosion can overcome this but there is no indication that hood was following jutland style ammunition handling procedures and stacking the turret with additional charges a number of other capital ships suffered quite catastrophic gun failures richelieu several times in world war ii and iowa in the 1990s but these did not result in the magazine detonating it also would not explain the first flare-up around the main mast the ship should have just blown up around the aft magazines unless the initial failure in the turret caused enough displaced air to cause the boat deck fire to flare up but a flare-up that intense from those circumstances again is exceptionally unlikely further even the battle cruisers at jutland were observed to have a noticeable delay between the arrival of a fatal shell and the subsequent detonation of their magazines given that hud's turrets were in far better shape in this regard than those ships it seems very unlikely that one could connect a specific gun firing with the ship exploding a mere second later there simply wouldn't be enough time for the flash to propagate the magazine to begin to burn pressure to build up and then the final destructive fireball to emerge so whilst it cannot be definitively discarded it would seem this is not the most plausible of scenarios next the boat deck fire this had been going on for a while at the time and was described by survivors as a fire in the ready-use ammunition lockers for the secondary guns in the vicinity could it have spread to the arf magazines it appears highly unlikely the fire was in the open and would thus tend to vent into the air and the boat deck had multiple layers of deck armor between it and the magazines vertically as well as quite some distance to go horizontally an explosion of even the entire stock of ready use 4-inch ammunition would not have been sufficient to breach the armored decks even directly below the site of the explosion let alone much further back in the ship the ammunition hoist to the 4-inch guns would have been locked up as the guns were not in action nor they expected to be at any point in the immediate future burning liquids spreading from this fire might seem to offer a potential avenue but there were extremely strict controls about the stowage and jettisoning in action of petrol and other similar supplies and in any case any flowing burning petrochemicals would have had to overcome the same ammunition safety systems as an explosion would have which would have taken a considerable amount of time even assuming that no one associated with such highly protected ammunition hoist systems noticed or did anything about you know a falling column of petrol and assuming that even if slow-moving burning petrol got somewhere delicate it would have consumed much of the oxygen available inside such confined spaces that it needed to get through and thus most likely would have put itself out on the way so based on the evidence this line of thinking can probably be effectively ruled out and what about prince oygan much has been made of the potential for the heavy cruiser's smaller eight inch shells to have perhaps have been the culprit via plunging fire for this we need to take a brief look at the range at which the engagement was being fought which will play into pretty much all subsequent scenarios range figures given for the final moments of the hood vary quite considerably depending on the source from around just under 15 000 yards to just over 21 000 yards but most figures and indeed those based most closely on observations from the ships involved in the battle tend to gravitate towards the middle of these figures from just under 17 000 to just over 19 000 yards given that these tend to talk more about the range at the time of the explosion which would be fractionally shorter than at the time of impact will take a range of approximately 19 000 yards as a decent estimate and due to being at the upper end of the likely possible ranges favors arguments for plunging fire unfortunately for the theory it doesn't favor them all that much the angle of fall from prince eugen shots at this range is only about 19 degrees at most which means that no deck penetration is taking place the round would just skip off and once adjusted for the angle of hood's belt relative to the incoming fire the penetration of the eight inch round at this range even if the german cruiser is using armor-piercing shells wouldn't go through even the thinnest uppermost part of hood's side protection as its starting thickness before adjustment of five inches is already greater than the approximate four inches of penetration that the eight inch round can achieve say nothing of the seven inch or twelve inch thicknesses lower down in short prince eugene could certainly hurt hood at this range by demolishing unprotected elements of the ship but there is no way for the shell to get anywhere that could pose an existential threat to the british battlecruiser that leaves us with bismarck's 15-inch guns and here a number of theories have been advanced direct penetration of hud's main magazines by a shell through the main belt penetration above the main belt via the 7-inch belt and some of the deck a diving shell like the one that hit prince of wales only this time also exploding a hit to hood's torpedo launchers and various other permutations well let's go over these firstly the torpedoes hood possessed a pair of twin above water torpedo tubes positioned just aft of the rear funnel one twin launcher per side each launcher had four torpedoes available up for two salvos with each torpedo carrying around 500 pounds of tnt as its warhead the theory goes that a shell striking this area could set off the torpedoes and in turn the two thousand pound tnt explosion would rip the ship apart and set off the magazines there are however some major problems with this theory a tnt explosion is sharp sudden and not accompanied by prolonged flames as were observed immediately before the hood exploded additionally prince eugene reported torpedoes in the water a few minutes after hud's destruction hood was the only british ship present equipped with torpedoes as prince of wales didn't carry any which immediately halves the likely available explosives further to this torpedo warheads are actually remarkably stable the simple shock of a shell hitting or passing through is not going to set them off although a shell detonating amidst them might in a number of other instances of torpedo-equipped ships being hit the torpedo warheads did not explode even when the compressed air canisters in their bodies were breached the much larger weapons aboard hms nelson for example made a complete mess of the torpedo room running about as they were said like scalded cats but failed to detonate when they were subjected to the shock of a nearby torpedo hit during operations in the mediterranean very occasionally a direct hit by a detonating explosive would set off a torpedo however the detonation of as much or more tnt did not result in the instant destruction of the ship in question nor the detonation of the magazines even though the ship undergoing the experience was considerably smaller than hood the magazine's much nearer and the intervening protection significantly less even when a torpedo detonation did doom a ship it took a fairly long time for the ship to sink estimates by experts at the time reckoned that even if all four torpedoes went off the likely result would be to blow out the five inch and seven inch plate locally but not the 12 inch plate below with the overall result being maybe a 20 foot hole blown in the ship's side along with most of everything above it but afforded a relatively easy path to the open air there's no conceivable way for the explosion to either travel or propel an object down through several decks along with going through several layers of protection and then eventually take out the magazines this protection also included an armored box that was built around the torpedo room which although mainly designed to keep projectiles away from the torpedoes would also have funneled any internal explosion somewhat largely outwards and somewhat upwards in the exact opposite direction to the magazines although such a blast may have done some structural damage to the upper part of the whole girder if it did occur given that the worst case scenario only involves 2 000 pounds of tnt the odds of half that explosive having a much greater effect are vanishingly remote and as mentioned earlier the pattern of damage and fire is inconsistent with the reported last moments of the battle cruiser so we come to the more prosaic shells hitting the magazine directly much is sometimes made of this diagram showing plunging fire either bypassing most or all of hud's primary protection penetrating the deck at favorable angle and then punching into the magazines however this leaves out one rather important factor the shown angles of fall depict are depicted as between 20 and 30 degrees at the range that we're using for the distance between the two sides the angle of fall of bismarck shells is only about 14 degrees even the lowest angle for this diagram 20 degrees doesn't occur unless hood was another five and a half thousand yards away well beyond even the longest estimates for the range between the two ships and a 30 degree hit would pretty much fat come at the moment the two sides spotted each other a time when the german ship was still minutes away from firing so these particular scenarios are not relevant to our considerations instead we come to the seemingly most obvious one a simple punching through the main belt by a 15-inch shell we can estimate the penetration capabilities of a german 15-inch shell at the ranges and angles involved via a number of methods including surviving german armor penetration calculations and data of course there is always a degree of uncertainty a specific shell may over or underperform somewhat as might the armor the absolute angle of impact might vary with the ship's and the behavior of the shell's armor-piercing cap might also vary even the burn rate of the charge might give slightly differing velocities so such information is at the threshold of penetration always an approximation of the average case with an appreciation that actual results might vary somewhat one way or the other however in this case it is incredibly unlikely as the values for the angle of the shell the thickness of the armor and the velocity of the impact are well outside the area where you would expect to see penetration without some especially spectacular confluence of events such a hit would have rung the nearby compartments like a bell but that would be about all in these conditions you'd expect penetration occurring at something around nine to nine and a half inch thickness of plate which is well short of the 12 inches of hud's primary belt although as you trend down from 12 inches to 9 inches the chances of a better than average result for the shell do increase that however will immediately raise some flags as 9 inches is of course greater than seven inches with the thickness of armor above the 12 inch belt perhaps this is the culprit whilst the shell certainly could have passed through the seven inch belt its speed would have been much reduced and it would then have faced a three inch deck at a very shallow angle accounting for the remaining velocity from penetrating the seven inch belt and even somewhat generously only allowing for the vertical element of this angle of impact and not the horizontal an allowance which increases the effectiveness of the german shell you still get no penetration the shell would have skipped off the three inch deck plate to burst somewhere amidships high in the ship and well away from any damage to the magazine with the deck resisting any splinters a penetration of the 5 inch belt still higher results in a shell punching through the armor deck in that area but the shell then either detonates when the fuse reaches its time limit before it hits the next deck down or it skips off in like manner and again detonates high in the ship some might ask about the slope of the lower deck armor but as you can see when the line is scaled to 15 inches thick to represent the actual width of an incoming shell for the shell to penetrate just enough above the 12 inch belt without catching on it means that the angle of descent is shallow enough that it must strike the horizontal deck albeit only just so things are looking pretty good for hms hood at the moment with the most likely scenario being a vanishingly unlikely chance that she killed herself but we still have a couple of scenarios left and of course there is the fact that she did actually explode the next option is a diving shell i.e a shell that hit the water short of the ship travelled through the sea and then punched into the ship below the armor protection through the torpedo defense system and then into or near the magazine before detonating such an attack had been planned and special modifications worked into the shells by the french and japanese navies not the german conversely one shell did dive and penetrate hms prince of wales well below its armour scheme and that was on a ship that was equipped with a deeper armor belt specifically in case of such assault whilst hood wasn't designed with this sort of attack in mind its tendency to ride somewhat low in the water by this point did grant a somewhat similar degree of additional protection although exactly how much is difficult to judge but firstly it needs to be pointed out that the shell that hit prince of wales hit so deep as to indicate a point of impact with the water considerably away from the ship its fuse had activated on impact with the water but not being designed for the forces associated with violent high-speed underwater travel the fuse had then failed leaving the shell to continue on its journey had the fuse worked it would have detonated well before it reached the side of the ship when it comes to hood assuming that the fuse actually works with the standard delay common to german armor-piercing shell fuses there is a marginal chance that a shell landing in a very narrow window about 20 feet away from the ship might assuming the fuse survives the impact and the tumble sneak in just between the elements of the torpedo defense system that might otherwise slow it down through the underwater plating and into the area of the magazines before detonating whilst tempting this assumes the fuse would still function that the shell remains on course and it arrives at the ship facing the right direction the shell and prince of wales was found back to front there's also the fact that an underwater hit directly to the magazine would bring with it a huge amount of water pressurized not only by the depth but by the speed of the ship and since magazine's charges do not detonate instantly as it takes a short time for the fire to spread and pressure to build the incoming water would likely quench or at the very least significantly mitigate any subsequent fire let's see the hit on uss boise at the battle of cape esperance for example so possible but a bit of a long shot from a physics perspective it would have also resulted in a splash of impact with the water that was far enough away from the ship to be distinct and this was not observed there is of course also the fact that where the observers saw a hit was much further forward on the ship and of course the column of flame around the main mast both of which mitigate against a direct hit to the ship's magazines there is however one hypothesis which fits all of these facts and takes notable advantage of a hydro dynamic feature that just so happens to correspond to the area where we're looking for a hit to occur it all starts hundreds of feet away at the ship's bow as any ship moves through the water it creates a bow wave outside of fancy designs like a bulbous bow or other unique shaping generally the larger and faster the ship the bigger the bow wave created by the ship cutting through the ocean this builds to a crest in the forward quarter of the ship before gradually falling away like all waves eventually reaching a trough and then coming back up again and so on until its energy is spent this wave profile will vary depending on the speed for a given ship the faster the ship goes the greater the bow wave and thus the deeper the trough we know that hood was traveling at just over 28 knots around the maximum speed of prince of wales following on behind and in these circumstances the bow waves trough or lowest point just so happens to be a bit forward of the aft turrets a bit like this now i can hear you say well this is a model you could adjust that to show whatever you liked well the admiralty thought about this possibility as well and they drew up this diagram which shows pretty much the same thing and you might be thinking well hang on a minute this admiralty diagram looks a little less severe than your model and yes that would be an accurate statement however i would ask you to cast your eyes upon this picture this is one of the last if not the last surviving high quality pictures of hms hood taken a couple of days before her final engagement as she races up towards the denmark strait taken from a seaplane she's traveling at pretty much full speed and you can see that the bow wave and accompanying trough is actually quite severe much closer to the model than to the admiralty theoretical diagram and is actually exposing a fair bit of the red paint that is below the ship's water line right in the area that we're considering as this photo represents hood pretty much in the condition that she would have been in a few days later at the battle of denmark straight it's a fairly definitive image now whilst this change in depth is not quite enough to expose the 12-inch belt entirely the loss of depth does mean that a shell could arrive at a similar point just underneath the belt without having to travel through nearly as much water which in turn renders the fuse much more likely to still be intact as most of the forces that would put it out are exerted during the journey through the water which is minimized in this case the point of impact with the water would also be much closer and less distinct from the ship itself and the shell would retain considerably more energy for onward passage into the ship and what would happen if a shell arrived in roughly the area described under these circumstances given the subsequent events the most likely scenario is this a 15-inch shell hits the water just short of the ship in the trough of the ship's wave profile probably a little more than 10 feet from the side of the ship plunging a short distance down it heads into the hull just under the armor belt sailing merrily above the bulk of the crash tubes that form part of the torpedo defense system and in through the hull plating the fuse has been initiated at this point less than a third of a second remains once inside the ship due to the location of the impact the shell finds itself in the aft machinery spaces but thanks to the angle of the ship relative to the angle of the impact it's traveling towards the aft bulkhead instead of simply into some lump of otherwise very valuable machinery the shell then hits the aft bulkhead that separates the machinery spaces from the 4-inch magazine either on its way through or more likely shortly thereafter the shell detonates the 4-inch magazine catches fire and a rapidly expanding cloud of burning gas begins to spread the four inch charges have a higher surface area to volume ratio than larger weapons charges and they are encased whilst the latter means that they're actually harder to set off in the first place once they do start to burn the confinement means that an explosion is far more likely than a rapid burn which in turn increases the chance of setting off other nearby charges the expanding gases now seek the path of least resistance through the hole that the shell has just punched in the bulkhead the pressure inside the magazine grows as more four-inch ammunition cooks off the hot gas and flame begins to fill the machinery space but it already has a path up and out through the ventilation ducts that run up through the ship emerging around the area of the main mast in the second or two that it's taken for all of this to occur outside observers have seen nothing now however a bright and high column of flame races up from the ventilation ducts as the burning magazine expends some of its energy like a short-lived blow torch through the easiest route out into the atmosphere but the energy in the magazine is too much air can only flow so fast and the hole out of the magazine into the machinery space and the ventilation ducts can only relieve so much pressure the pressure inside the magazine climbs rapidly pushing in all directions down and to the sides the incompressible ocean is not that far away above a series of layers of deck armor contain the growing pressure momentarily in the few tenths of a second after the pressure reaches a point where the four-inch magazine begins to rupture the only remaining easily accessible space not already at high pressure backed up by incompressible liquids is the bulkhead separating the four inch and 15 inch magazines the intervening five and a half inch magazine having been removed for conversion into more four inch magazine space the pressure and combustion of the four inch magazine bursts into the 15 inch magazine igniting charge after charge as several hundred tons of propellant ignite almost in an instant whilst the new pressure spike is much greater and begins to rip the ship apart in all directions there is one route that's slightly easier than most the pressure wave races up the ammunition hoists pulverizing the anti-flash measures along the way as the explosion is now powerful enough to tear the entire battle cruiser 12 inch plate and all into two a few flash doors are no real obstacle now a hellstorm of fire shells fragments and superheated high-pressure air blasts up into the aft turrets spilling out of the gun ports blowing open hatches and sending a colossal fireball racing skywards along with both of the af turrets with the majority of the pressure now relieved the ship's hull perforated like a swiss cheese and barely holding together is now subject to the immense forces of a 45 000 ton plus vessel undergoing the opening stages of a high speed turn the weakened hull twists as in rushing water drags at it in the forward part of the ship where some people are still alive they feel the ship heal to starboard slightly as the forward part leans out from the port side turn without some of the stabilizing effects of the aft third of the ship and most likely from the fact that tons of water are rapidly flooding what's left of the engineering spaces especially on the starboard side where the hit occurred it's possible that what's left of the hull between the two sections likely acts as a torsion spring as the ship slows the forward part of the ship then twists back to port but the superheated stressed torn and now torqued hull cannot hold much anymore and is in any case rapidly filling with water the forward part of the ship heals over to port as what's left of the aft sinks quickly rammed full of water by forward inertia alternatively and perhaps more likely is that the fl as the flooding progressed through the ship this induced a free surface effect as a change in the ship's angle of heal back towards the more normal vertical would have induced a wave of water to rush from starboard to port compounding the flooding which then combined with the understandable lack of stability experienced by only half a ship induced a rather larger and more permanent healed port now with water pouring in from the rearmost surviving part of the ship the forward section begins to sink rapidly by the stern perhaps assisted on the way by whatever scraps were left attached to the stern before it tore free the forward turrets fire a last defiant salvo and less than three minutes after the shell arrived the pride of the royal navy has vanished beneath the waves so there you have it ladies and gentlemen what according to all the evidence i can see appears to be the most likely explanation for why hms hood exploded at the time and place that she did yes indeed it is an incredibly lucky hit but as it turns out the evidence to follow is all there let me know what you think in the comments below and i'll see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry dock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 628,828

Rating: 4.9401612 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, HMS Hood, Battle of the Denmark Strait, Bismarck, Loss of Hood, HMS Prince of Wales, magazine explosion, Bill Jurens, World War 2, battlecruiser

Id: CLPeC7LRqIY

Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/WolvoNeil]

Drachinifel is a superb youtuber if you are into naval history, though he covers pretty much exclusively WW2, WW1 and early Cold Wars, his does do bits on 19th century as well.

[u/LateInTheAfternoon]

What on earth does RGN stand for?

[u/[deleted]]

Part of a series on HMS Hood by the excellent Drachinifel. I thoroughly recommend his channel.

[u/MrGinger128]

I loved extra history's video on the hunt for the Bismarck.

I was actually gutted when that host left. For the life of me I can't get into the new one so I've given up.

I still watch old episodes all the time.

The south see trading company is one of my all time favourite videos. The Swedish empire ones too.

Highly recommended if you're looking for easily digestible stories told in a really engaging way. They really made a ridiculously complex topic like the south sea trading company easy to understand.

[u/cyclonus429]

Love this guys channel. Watched this whole video and was amazed how in depth he went into it. Great stuff.

[u/pier4r]

Why I find it interesting.

I am not so knowledgable in naval warfare but I thought that the Hood was the case "critical hit, boom" and that the Bismarck was, at least on paper, plenty able to punch holes through a battlecruiser built for ww1 (that was refitted several times as well).

Well it seems that, at least trusting the specifications, the Hood should have survived pretty long against the Bismarck. There was, though, a little part of Hood's hull that was literally the Achilles' heel of the ship and the events seems to support the idea that Bismark went full Paris that day.

[u/mars0341]

The golden BB. It's better to be lucky than good any day.

[u/cliff99]

Knew the video was Drachinifel without even clicking.

[u/DevilsTurkeyBaster]

I had an uncle who died on Hood serving as a Senior Ship-wright. Ship-wrights kept the ships from falling apart. His letters revealed how much Hood has changed after the final refit. She had been a beautiful ship riding high in the water but once the heavy armour was added she rode only a few feet above the waves and was swamped even in light seas. When she got up to full speed the stern was submerged.

Based on that, here is what I think happened. Bismark was faster and Hood far behind so Hood would have to run the boilers extra-hot in order to close the gap. There were air intakes near the bow, the mid-castle, and the stern. The stern intakes would have been submerged. The only way to get sufficient air to the boilers would have been to open the bulkhead doors. In order to turn for a broadside the engines would have to be cut back else the now top-heavy ship would list. Extra-hot boilers then had an extreme pressure build-up that the captain was not aware of and the boilers blew. The open bulkheads then let the flash reach the magazine.

The officers and crew of Bismark were under-trained with most going to sea for the first time. They had almost no gunnery skills. I simply don't buy that Bismark could have scored a hit on Hood at that range given the poor quality of Bismark's crew at the time.