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85 years ago today, in the freezing grey water between Iceland and Greenland, the most famous warship in the world died in under three minutes. HMS Hood. 48,000 tons. The pride of the Royal Navy for twenty years. The ship British schoolchildren drew in their notebooks. "The Mighty Hood." She was hunting the Bismarck. At 05:52 on 24 May 1941, Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland gave the order to open fire at 26,500 yards. He was closing the range hard on purpose, because Hood's weak deck armor could not survive shells falling from above at long range. He needed flat trajectories, and he needed them fast. He was three minutes too slow. Bismarck's fifth salvo straddled Hood as she turned to bring her rear guns to bear. A single 15-inch shell punched through her thin armored deck and detonated her aft magazines. Witnesses on Prince of Wales described a column of flame that rose higher than the mainmast, eerily silent at first, the sound arriving a moment later. Hood broke in two. Her stern rose vertically out of the sea, guns still pointed at the sky, and slid under. Her bow followed. Of 1,418 men aboard, three survived. Signalman Ted Briggs, Able Seaman Bob Tilburn, Midshipman Bill Dundas. They floated on a raft of debris in near-freezing water, watching their ship's oil burn around them, until the destroyer Electra found them two hours later. Briggs was 18 years old. He lived until 2008, the last man who had stood on the Mighty Hood. The Bismarck won the battle. But Prince of Wales, only just commissioned with shipyard workers still aboard fixing her main guns, had landed three hits before retreating. One ruptured a forward fuel tank. Bismarck began trailing oil across the Atlantic like a wounded animal. Churchill's order to the fleet was simple. Sink the Bismarck. Every available British warship turned to the chase. Three days later, at the edge of the Bay of Biscay, a Swordfish biplane from HMS Ark Royal, flying through a gale at near sea level, dropped a torpedo that jammed Bismarck's rudder hard to port. She could only steam in a slow circle, straight back into the Royal Navy. King George V and Rodney closed at dawn on 27 May. They fired on her for ninety minutes. Bismarck absorbed over 400 shells and at least a dozen torpedoes before she rolled over and went down with roughly 2,200 of her crew. The Royal Navy answered for Hood in 72 hours.
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Submarine diving from the outside using a couple of GoPro cameras
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Everyone repeats that the U-boats nearly starved Britain out of the war. Spend an afternoon with the import figures and that story falls apart, though what replaces it is stranger and a lot more interesting. Before the war Britain was landing well over 50 million tons of cargo a year. In 1942, the worst twelve months of the entire campaign, it landed under 23 million. That is a collapse of more than half. Nobody starved. Average calorie intake barely moved, and the poorest fifth of the country was eating better in 1943 than it had in 1938, because rationing handed out food by coupon instead of by price. Britain plowed up millions of acres of pasture, roughly doubled what it grew at home, and quietly stopped importing the things that take up the most hull space for the least nutrition. Animal feed, for one. You do not ship grain across an ocean to feed a pig when you can ship the calories straight to a person. So the food side was solvable, and the Admiralty knew it. The frightening columns on the ledger were oil, steel, rubber, bauxite and timber, and the fuel figures did get genuinely ugly. British stocks hit their lowest point of the war in the first months of 1943. Now the part almost nobody mentions. The weapon itself was wrong for the job. A Type VII was not a submarine in the way we picture one. It was a surface torpedo boat that could duck underwater for a while. Submerged it made about seven knots and could hold that for roughly an hour before the batteries were finished. A fast convoy did nine. Which means a hidden U-boat could not chase anything. It had to run on the surface, at night, in the open, to get ahead of a convoy and set up a shot, and it carried only fourteen torpedoes to show for the whole patrol. Every countermeasure that eventually broke the U-boat arm, radar, the Leigh Light, aircraft, direction finding, was aimed at that surfaced boat in the dark. Then there was arithmetic. Patrick Blackett's operational research people worked out that losses to a convoy depended mostly on how many escorts were screening it, not on how many merchant ships were inside it. Double the ships in a convoy and the perimeter the escorts have to guard barely grows. Bigger convoys meant proportionally fewer sinkings. The shortage that mattered was never merchant hulls. It was escorts and long range aircraft, and the mid-Atlantic air gap was finally closed by a few dozen Liberators. The real window was 1940, and Dönitz could not exploit it. Germany started the war with 57 U-boats, of which about 26 could reach the Atlantic, and through the Happy Time he often had only eight to twelve boats on patrol at any one time. That handful did terrible damage against unescorted ships and green crews. By the time he finally had the 300 submarines he had been demanding since before the war, the other side had centimetric radar, escort carriers, hunter killer groups and Ultra reading his signals. In the first twenty days of March 1943 it still looked close enough that the Naval Staff later admitted the Germans had never come nearer to cutting the link between the New World and the Old. Convoys HX229 and SC122 lost 22 ships for one U-boat. Ten weeks later, in May, Dönitz lost more than 40 boats in a single month and pulled his fleet out of the North Atlantic. The whole campaign cost the U-boat arm around 30,000 dead out of roughly 40,000 who served in it. Almost three in four men. No other branch of any service in that war was hollowed out like that. Churchill wrote afterward that the U-boat peril was the only thing that really frightened him. It is worth being precise about what he was frightened of. Not bread queues. He was frightened of a slow bleed that would keep American divisions, tanks and aviation fuel from piling up in England, because without that stockpile there is no invasion in 1944, and the war grinds on for years longer in the east. The U-boats were never going to starve Britain. They came closer to stealing D-Day.
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On June 8, 1982, Argentine pilots dove so low over Bluff Cove that several of their bombs physically couldn’t detonate. The fuses needed distance to arm. They hadn’t given them enough. It didn’t matter. The ones that did go off were enough. Sir Galahad caught fire with over 150 Welsh Guards still in her hold. Men jumped into burning water. Others carried wounded comrades across decks that were cooking beneath their boots. The ship burned for three days straight. You can still find the footage. Sir Tristram was hit too. Between the two ships, 56 men were killed and more than 150 wounded in a single afternoon. It remains the British military’s deadliest day of combat since the Second World War. The attack lasted eight minutes. What makes it cut deeper: the British had air cover arranged for that morning. It was stood down due to a miscommunication between commanders. The ships sat stationary and unprotected in broad daylight while Welsh Guards waited below deck for orders that were too slow in coming. The Falklands were retaken 14 days later. Argentina surrendered on June 14. The men who died at Bluff Cove never saw it. 56 names. Remember them.
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During John F. Kennedy's inaugural parade on January 20, 1961, a flatbed truck hauled a full-scale replica down Pennsylvania Avenue featuring a patrol torpedo boat dressed to look like the famous PT-109 that JFK commanded during World War II. PT-109's WWII crew rode aboard the float during the procession. As the float passed the presidential reviewing stand, a smiling President Kennedy turned to look back and wave at his former shipmates.
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Ships of the surrendered Italian Fleet ~1943. What ships can you spot?
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Japanese subs being sunk in Operation Road's End off Japan in 1946
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Divers place USS Arizona crew member Lauren Bruner's urn onto famed battleship
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Bismarck vs Hood in color footage on this day 85 years ago
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