"Battleship" HMS Hood

[JohnT]

Surprised to read Antony Beevor  - Crete calling HMS Hood a Battleship.  At least James Holland  - The War in the West -  knows she was a Battle Cruiser.  

 

I suppose she had to go up against a fully operational Battleship in Bismarck though I always thought the battle between them and Prinz Eugene and POW was never likely to end well for the RN.  As I understand it POW was still in work up and had dockyard civilian workers still on board so hardly a well oiled machine.  In fact she seems to have done remarkably well all considered.  

 

Hood was always an accident waiting to happen if used toe to toe with a modern armoured battleship.  You would think they had learned from Jutland when Battle cruisers showed they didn't carry enough armour to slug it out with the big guns.

 

I thought the tactics for Battle cruisers and indeed pocket battleships was to out gun cruisers and anything smaller and run like the blazes from anything bigger and better gunned & armoured.  Thats is any other battleship or battlecruiser.

 

I suppose the RN thought they had no option but to engage Bismarck with what they had out there in the Denmark Straight?

 

Still she was a battle cruiser and one day maybe even historians might get that right !

[Rob 1]

Quite agree, it is amazing they put an old battle cruiser of a general design concept that had proven dangerously vulnerable to catastrophic failure against a modern armoured battleship. They certainly knew to withdraw in other occasions when the risk was considered too great, such as withdrawing Prince of Wales shortly after (although she was sadly left vulnerable in another situation not long after).

[bentwaters81tfw]

Hood was about to sail to the US to have the armour upgraded. Sadly Bismarck got in the way. Don't hold your breath about 'historians' though.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

With the exception of the turndowns, Hood's armour was pretty much even with the Queen Elizabeth class battleships everywhere else.

 

There is a ridiculous amount of false "facts" fastidiously held about Hood and her armour, but compare it all on a case by casr basis and you'll find it to be utter tripe in all cases but the turndowns which were scheduled to be upgraded.

 

All this plunging fire rubbish needs to die a painful death too. At the range the fatal shot was fired the ballistics of the German gun puts the shell on a tragectory 14deg below horizontal. The shell penetrated the side of the hull and the 1" turndown, not the decks.

 

Furthermore, all of Bismarck's other hits on both RN ships were high - Hood's spotting top, Prince of Wales' bridge and funnel. Now refer back to the ballistica and cross refer to German accounts that the gunnery officer had left his station and was outside spotting fall of shot we see that Bismarck's ranging was diabolically bad. It was Hood's turn to port which corrected it for them and also opened up the only path through the armour a shell could take without being deflected away from a 4" magazine.

 

Should Hood have had better turndown armour? Yes - this was recognised and planned for. Was Hood inherently inferior to Bismarck? Absolutely not.

 

Sea battles come down to luck most of the time. The escort carrier USS Princeton fired a 5" potshot at the Japanese heavy cruiser Chokai - a formidable threat if ever their was one. Unlike Hood vs Bismarck, the Princeton really was up Poop Creek without a paddle before it began however that poxy little 5" shell just happened to land on Chokai's Longlance torpedo banks and practically blew the ship out of the water. Only an idiot would suggest that was anything other than a million to one shot, and when you actually look at Hood's armour compared to other ships and also compare actual facts - e.g. ballistics all the old plunging fire rubbish very quickly proves to be 99.99% luck in the same way.

 

Back in the day people needed a scapegoat. Hollande was dead. The Admiralty blamed the ship's age instead. People have mindlessly regurgitated the same old dung ever since.

[JohnT]

Interesting to read that Jamie. 

[Oliver]

Having relatively recently gotten into ship modelling and all the reading about them that goes with that I found that really interesting Jaime, thank you.

 

Would love to hear more insite about Hood and her proposed modifications etc?

[Valenstitch]

20 minutes ago, Oliver said:

Having relatively recently gotten into ship modelling and all the reading about them that goes with that I found that really interesting Jaime, thank you.

 

Would love to hear more insite about Hood and her proposed modifications etc?

I`ve seen some of this stuff online Oliver, I think it`s on the HMS Hood site? not 100% but I have seen it , Hood comes out of her rebuild looking like Renown after her rebuild, I always fancied having a go at the conversion!

 

Granto

[Seahawk]

In wartime you do not always have the luxury of fighting with the ideal weapon for the task in hand.  You use your judgment to make the best dispositions you can with the assets you have, which will be affected by all manner of factors from government parsimony in peacetime (recurring one, that)  through to simple accident (remember the aircraft carrier intended to accompany Prince of Wales and Repulse running aground in the West Indies?).  It was definitely suboptimal to tackle the Japanese in Malaya with Buffaloes, Vildebeestes and Sharks, as the young men sent out in them no doubt well knew,  but, when the chips are down, you a. withdraw, b. surrender or c. fight with what you have, however inadequate.   

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

5 hours ago, Valenstitch said:

I`ve seen some of this stuff online Oliver, I think it`s on the HMS Hood site? not 100% but I have seen it , Hood comes out of her rebuild looking like Renown after her rebuild, I always fancied having a go at the conversion!

 

Granto

 

Pretty much this. I forget where everything is but the Hood Association is a good place to start.

 

From what I understand the upgrades to Hood and Repulse were intended to be pretty much what Renown received - i.e. heavier turnout armour (the turndowns are angled armour sloping down from the deck armour inside the hull to the side armour belt. Hood had this, but from memory only 1" thick. I think Renown's was 2". The deck armour was as good or bad as anything else but armour above and around the 15" magazines was good. Although laid down in 1916 Hood was suspended after Jutland and redesigned with much better armour.

 

The whole plunging fire thing was a recognised concern, but more relevent at longer range ~ say around 25,000 yards. Hollande was closing the distance as fast as possible to minimise exposure. Exchange of fire started at around 16,000 yards I think it was. A Hood Association member has the ballistics tables for the German main guns and as above the approaching shell came in flat, not down from above.

 

Hood's planned reconstruction was largely concerned with superstructure layout. Hood's anti aircraft weaponry was inadequate as was that of Repulse, with too few weapons, poor directory and limited arcs of fire. From what I understand the reconstruction would have resulted in the foremast tripod, bridge and rear superstructure being raized and a KGV / Renown rebuild type layout installed instead. I dare say you could look at HMS Vanguard for an idea of what Hood would have looked like in summer 1942.

 

https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=10&site=webhp&tbm=isch&source=hp&ei=MqYMWcPuJszZwQLO3JPwBw&q=hms+vanguard&oq=hms+vanguard&gs_l=mobile-gws-img.3..0l5.2113.4539.0.4856.14.8.1.5.5.0.277.1076.0j6j1.7.0....0...1c.1j4.64.mobile-gws-img..1.13.1186.3..35i39k1.5yq-N7MSleA#imgrc=g0JM-qtvNuhTPM:

[Vlad]

I agree with Jamie, the battlecruiser label does not confer any mythical weakness and Hood could be (and has been) called a fast battleship. Her protection scheme is in many ways equivalent to ships of her generation (I only consider the Colorado class strictly superior) but the distribution of multiple armour thicknesses makes it very hard to predict at what ranges and angles which parts of the ship have valid immunity zones.

 

But wasn't Hood's deck slope 2"? Not that it would have actually made a difference in the scenario being discussed. The 1" section is the main deck over the engineering spaces. I don't know how penetration of such thin plate works at very shallow angle of fall of the shell, but isn't one of the possible paths to the 4" magazine via this thin deck and the engine room bulkhead?

 

In any case I'm not sure the slope was due to be upgraded. The additional armour would have extended the main deck outwards to meet the top of the belt and closed off a possible path to the slope, but the slope itself would have still been 2", no? Depending on target angle, the German 38cm could penetrate far more than 12" of belt armour at the ranges involved in the Hood scenario, and 2" of backing slope isn't going to stop something that got past that. The refit would have done nothing to change this path. Arguably, even PoW's belt might have been in trouble at the ranges Holland pushed to in that engagement.

 

The RN obsession with plunging fire and closing the range was based on trials with their own 15" guns that had fairly low muzzle velocity. I suppose they had no way of knowing but charging in was precisely the wrong thing to do against the high muzzle velocity German guns.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

It might have been 2" - I could be getting mixed up with Renown and Repulse. There's a sectional drawing doing the rounds which I'll try to find...

 

With the thinner plates and deck armour they are still effective armour (apart from with genuine plunging fire) because the impacts are generally foreseen to be shallow oblique angles, so the total kinetic energy of the round doesn't need to be absorbed by the armour (which I agree is in the realms of the unfeasible even against the RN's own gun fire) but rather the shell is supposed to be deflected rather than stopped.

[JohnT]

I hadn't realised what a fascinating topic this would turn out to be when I did the original post.  I confess knowing nowt till now about these matters other than what I'd read in the more general books on the Bismarck.

 

I was aware from general reading of the issues affecting the battlecruisers at Jutland.

 

Can any of you chaps comment on the apparent seeming vulnerability in practice of these ships as opposed to say Bismarck who when finally caught up with seemed to absorb huge amounts of punishment at close ranges eventually from both KG V and Rodneys with her 16inch guns?  It seems such a contrast to the "uneducated" eye. 

 

Again thanks for the insights

[Vlad]

The issue with the battlecruisers at Jutland was a combination of poor safety procedures and volatile cordite allowing hits on turrets and barbettes to propagate into magazine explosions. There is an argument that turret armour was insufficient but good turret armour still isn't an excuse for lax safety. Again, even with the smaller guns of that period and ranges that were impressively long for their day, they are still outside the realms of true plunging fire (just look at the low maximum elevations and high muzzle velocities on the German guns). As far as I'm aware, the battlecruisers did not suffer direct magazine penetrations and Tiger shrugged off a hit or two on her 9" belt. So the main part of the armour scheme, at least on the newer ships, was working as intended.

 

Bismarck is over-glorified. The German approach used a low main deck and thick deck slope to deflect short range shots from the ships vitals (incidentally barely any improvement in concept over WWI designs). This made her maddeningly difficult to sink by close range gunfire, but the overall scheme suffered from the same issues as other out-dated schemes: low volume under maximum protection and weight wasted spreading partial protection on both key and non-key systems outside of the main citadel. They ended up a ship that was hard to sink but quick to disable, unable to fight back or do much to prevent her inevitable end. That's not good design in my view. Pretty much all subsequent analysis of her scheme identifies a maze of possible "weak spots" at medium and long ranges, not unlike Hood, including the possibility that medium thickness plate might increase the probability of penetrating thicker plate behind it by unfavorably altering the path of the shell without actually slowing it down enough.

 

Back to plate thickness, surely there comes a point where the plate is too thin (insufficient tensile strength) to deflect the shell before it actually punches through, even at very shallow angles, and it would depend on shell nose design if it digs in or turns away. I'm just wondering whether 1" was below that threshold in this case i.e. was Hood's engine room vulnerable to deck penetration even at shorter range.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Vlad

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

To expand on that (which I completely agree with), the safety procedural issues at Jutland are often attributed to a bad habit the Royal Navy had picked up whereby hatches / doors for ammunition transfer from magazine to turret were being left open to give an improvement to the overall rate of fire. The actual procedure was to lock everything down unless actively transferring shell and powder charges to prevent flashes through the magazines. By having these access ways open during the action, they exposed themselves to magazine explosions when relevant steelwork was struck. A lick of flame through the magazine was fatal.

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

20 minutes ago, Vlad said:

Back to plate thickness, surely there comes a point where the plate is too thin (insufficient tensile strength) to deflect the shell before it actually punches through, even at very shallow angles, and it would depend on shell nose design if it digs in or turns away.

 

Yes, absolutely, and the thickness at which it ceases to be effective will vary depending on the oblique angle, the shell shape/type and the kinetic energy of the shell at impact.