"Exploding British Battle Cruisers " Topic

Having just read Robert K. Massie's wonderful book Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea, I wondered if the reason HMS Hood suffered a magazine explosion was not due to thin deck armor but rather poor ammunition handling practice.

The battle of Jutland demonstrated the danger of battle cruisers fighting their equals (other battle cruisers) or battleships. Or more precisely, the danger to British battle cruisers, three of which were ripped apart by magazine explosions. The German battle cruisers at Jutland were pounded into near wrecks but did not explode. This was due to lessons learned by the German navy from a very close call with the SMS Seydlitz that only escaped a magazine explosion at the battle of Dogger Bank by the quick action of a couple of officers. It was discovered upon inspection of the damage that a turret hit could cause flash fires of powder bags that would travel down hoists into magazines almost instantly. As a result all German capital ships were retrofitted with more safety doors and crews were given more stringent safety guidelines for handling ammunition. Unfortunately the British navy remained ignorant of the danger until it was too late. In fact it was routine to lock open or remove safety doors and keep more loose powder bags laying around in the turrets in order to achieve a higher rate of fire.

This got me wondering if the Hood, the last of the battle cruisers, suffered the same fate in the second world war for exactly the same reasons as her great war predecessors. In light of Jutland, did the British navy change the way ammunition was handled on capital ships? Could it be that lack of safety features doomed the Hood and not it's thin deck armor?

Short answer is that no one really knows how the Hood was lost. Try these two links for some insight

The wiki link lists six possible theories for the loss.
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warship.org/no21987.htm

Much of the problems related to ammo handling were resolved during the war and after. What little evidence we have on Hood's sinking doesn't point in that direction.

In light of Jutland, did the British navy change the way ammunition was handled on capital ships?

Yes, they did.

The real reason (though not the technical one that we might never know) that Hood blew up was bad luck.

Note that none of the IJN Kongos which were British-designed BCs blew up.
-Kle.

I guess I'd like to mention that none of the Iron Dukes blew up, either, and Hood was armored at least as well as they were. (I've heard people say she was armored as well as the Queen Elizabeths, but one quick internet reference link doesn't quite support that.)

My point being that just because Hood was called a battlecruiser doesn't mean she had much in common with the ships lost at Jutland, other than being faster than the battle line. If the term had been thought of at the time, she might have been considered the first "fast battleship", rather than the last battlecruiser.

Has no one ever dived on her to see just what can be examined? I was interested to see the details of the sunk "Prince Of Wales" and the expressed view (with evidence) that it sank (and so quickly) due to damage caused by its own shafts/props related to bomb damage by Germans while still at dock that had never been repaired.

Dan

There have been dives on Hood. The problem that the area where the explosion occurred was blown apart and there are only pieces of debris. Except for the extreme end of stern, her aft structure has ceased to exist, making it impossible to determine what actually happened, other than that the aft magazines blew up.

link