HMS Hood was a British battlecruiser, the keel of which was laid in 1916, launched in April 1918, and entered service with the Royal Navy in May 1920. The total length of the ship was 262 m, width 32 m, and her full displacement in 1941 – 48,400 tons. HMS Hood’s top speed was around 28-32 knots. The main armament at the outbreak of World War II was eight 381 mm guns in four twin turrets. The secondary armament consists of 14 102 mm guns, 24 40 mm cannons and 4 533 mm torpedo tubes.
HMS Hood was the only Admiral class ship to enter service with the Royal Navy. It was also the only line cruiser put into service after the end of World War I. What’s more – throughout the interwar period it was the largest ship in the world, which was specially negotiated by British diplomats during the Washington Conference in 1921-1922. Despite her great size, HMS Hood had at the time of launching similar artillery armament as other line ships in the Royal Navy. However, it had much weaker armour, which was to be compensated for by considerable speed – which actually happened in the 1920s.
At the outbreak of World War II, the German, Italian, and Japanese battleships were at least as fast as HMS Hood, but had much better armor. HMS Hood was built at the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank. From the moment she entered service, she was part of the British Atlantic Fleet, quickly becoming a kind of showcase of the Royal Navy, as the largest ship in the world. In the period from 1920 to 1939, he made numerous representative and occasional cruises – e.g. in the years 1924-1925 he made a cruise around the world. At the outbreak of World War II, he served in the North Atlantic, and in 1940 he was ferry to Gibraltar and took part in Operation Catapult, i.e. the destruction of the French navy at the base in Mers-el-Kebir. In May 1941, he was sent, with the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, against the German battleship Bismarck. During the clash with him in the Danish Strait, he was sunk on May 24, 1941.
