This high position allowed them to be worked during heavy weather, as they were less affected by waves and spray compared with the casemate mounts of earlier British capital ships.

Some 5,000 long tons (5,100 t) of armour were added to the design in late 1916, based on British experiences at the Battle of Jutland, at the cost of deeper draught and slightly decreased speed.

[24] Hood's protection accounted for 33% of her displacement, a high proportion by British standards, but less than was usual in contemporary German designs (for example, 36% for the battlecruiser SMS Hindenburg).

[34] However, the US continued with their established design direction, the slower, but well-protected, South Dakota-class battleship and the fast and lightly armoured Lexington-class battlecruiser, both of which were later cancelled in accordance with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.

[36] To add to the confusion, Royal Navy documents of the period often describe any battleship with a maximum speed over 24 knots (44 km/h; 28 mph) as a battlecruiser, regardless of the amount of protective armour.

[37] The scale of Hood's protection, though adequate for the Jutland era, was at best marginal against the new generation of 16-inch (406 mm) gunned capital ships that emerged soon after her completion in 1920, typified by the American Colorado-class and the Japanese Nagato-class battleships.

They returned home 10 months later in September 1924, having visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland, and other colonies and dependencies, and the United States.

[51] On 23 April 1937, the ship escorted three British merchantmen into Bilbao harbour despite the presence of the Nationalist cruiser Almirante Cervera that attempted to blockade the port.

The outbreak of the Second World War made removing her from service near impossible, and as a consequence, she never received the scheduled modernisation afforded to other capital ships such as Renown and several of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships.

[56] The ship's condensers were in such bad condition by this time that much of the output from the fresh-water evaporators was required to replenish the boiler feedwater and could not be used by the crew to wash and bathe or even to heat the mess decks during cold weather, as the steam pipes were too leaky.

When war broke out later that year, she was employed principally to patrol in the vicinity of Iceland and the Faroe Islands to protect convoys and intercept German merchant raiders and blockade runners attempting to break out into the Atlantic.

Hood, Renown and Repulse were deployed to the Bay of Biscay on 5 November to prevent the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer from using French ports after she had attacked Convoy HX 84, but the German ship continued into the South Atlantic.

Prinz Eugen was probably the first ship to score when a shell hit Hood's boat deck, between her funnels, and started a large fire among the ready-use ammunition for the anti-aircraft guns and rockets of the UP mounts.

[64] Just before 06:00, while Hood was turning 20° to port to unmask her rear turrets, she was hit again on the boat deck by one or more shells from Bismarck's fifth salvo, fired from a range of approximately 16,650 metres (18,210 yd) (or 10.3 mi.).

[66] A huge jet of flame burst out of Hood from the vicinity of the mainmast,[Note 1] followed by a devastating magazine explosion that destroyed the aft part of the ship.

[69] The official Admiralty communiqué on the loss, broadcast on the day of the sinking, reported that: "during the ... action, HMS Hood ... received an unlucky hit in a magazine and blew up.

It endorsed this opinion, stating that: (c) (The) probable cause of the loss of HMS Hood was direct penetration of the protection by one or more 15-inch shells at a range of 16,500 yards [15,100 m], resulting in the explosion of one or more of the aft magazines.

[71]The Vice Chief of Naval Staff, Acting Vice-Admiral Tom Phillips and others criticised the conduct of the inquiry, largely because no verbatim record of witnesses' testimony had been kept.

One casualty, George David Spinner,[75] is remembered on the Portsmouth Naval memorial,[76] the Hood Chapel at the Church of St John the Baptist, in Boldre, Hampshire, and also on the gravestone of his brother, who died while serving in the Royal Air Force in 1942, in the Hamilton Road Cemetery, Deal, Kent.

The principal theories include the following causes: At the second board, expert witnesses suggested that what was observed was the venting, through the engine-room ventilators, of a violent—but not instantaneous—explosion or deflagration in the 4-inch shell magazines.

Its main conclusion is that the loss was almost certainly precipitated by the explosion of a 4-inch magazine, but that there are several ways this could have been initiated, although he rules out the boat deck fire or the detonation of her torpedoes as probable causes.

[86] In their study of the battleship Bismarck's operational history released in 2019, including its engagement with Hood, Jurens, William Garzke, and Robert O. Dulin Jr. concluded that Hood's destruction was most likely caused by a 380-mm shell from Bismarck that penetrated the deck armour and exploded in the aft 4-inch magazine, igniting its cordite propellant, which in turn ignited the cordite in the adjacent aft 15-inch magazine.

[87] In 2001, British broadcaster Channel 4 commissioned shipwreck hunter David Mearns and his company, Blue Water Recoveries, to locate the wreck of Hood, and if possible, produce underwater footage of both the battlecruiser and her attacker, Bismarck.

The amidships section, the biggest part of the wreck to survive the explosions, lies inverted south of the eastern debris field in a large impact crater.

It was the opinion of Mearns and White who investigated the wreck that this was unlikely as the damage was far too limited in scale, nor could it account for the outwardly splayed plates also observed in that area.

[96] In 2012, the British government gave permission for Mearns to return to the site of Hood's final resting place to retrieve one of her two ship's bells which were lying in a small open debris field some way from the wreck herself.

With the backing of the HMS Hood Association, Mearns planned to return the bell to Portsmouth where it would form part of the first official and permanent memorial to the sacrifice of her last crew at the newly refitted National Museum of the Royal Navy.

The original attempt, sponsored by Paul Allen and using his yacht Octopus, was abandoned after ten days in September 2012 due to unfavourable weather conditions.

[103] A metal container holding administrative papers was discovered washed ashore on the Norwegian island of Senja in April 1942, almost a year after the Battle of the Denmark Strait.

[12] The Ascension Island guns saw action only once, on 9 December 1941, when they fired on the German submarine U-124,[105] as it approached Georgetown on the surface to shell the cable station or sink any ships at anchor.