How Did The Bismarck Manage To Sink HMS Hood So Quickly? | History Documentary | Reel Truth History

This recently discovered film from 1939 shows Britain's biggest warship of World War II, the mighty Hood. Just two years later, HMS Hood fought the German ship Bismarck in one of the greatest sea battles of the conflict. Hood was hit and sunk in just three minutes. 1,415 men were killed, the largest loss of life ever suffered by a British warship. 71 years on, two questions remain. How could the pride of the fleet have been destroyed so quickly and who was to blame? Two naval boards of inquiry fail to get to the bottom of the mystery, but now a major expedition on a state-of-the-art research boat is traveling to the North Atlantic. They'll use the latest technology to examine the wreck. This is the center of the whole section of the ship that's missing, that's been obliterated. In an attempt to unlock its secrets once and for all. This massive fireball would have just traveled like right here in a fraction of a second carrying everything in front of it. August 2012. Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, has agreed to lend his yacht and its team of specialists to help with the investigation into the sinking of HMS Hood. Named the Octopus, this huge boat is specially equipped for deep sea exploration. Joining the expedition is one of the world's top deep ocean explorers, David Mearns. Thank you, nice to see you. In 2001, Mearns discovered the wreck of the Hood nearly two miles down on the seabed in an expedition filmed and funded by Channel 4. Now he is returning to explore the wreck using more advanced technology to try and solve the mystery of why it sank so quickly. When we started to investigate the shipwreck it was far more complicated than we ever expected. Major sections of it are obliterated on the seafloor and it raised probably more questions than it answered and really this trip is to answer some of those questions. The new expedition's starting point is Iceland's capital, Reykjavik. Their destination is a point 300 miles west of Iceland in an area known as the Denmark Strait. These treacherous waters are only accessible for a few weeks every summer. Generally not beautiful Caribbean weather in the Denmark Strait, however this time of year, obviously near the middle of summer, this is as good as it gets. Weather I suggest will be the deciding factor between success and failure. One of the team members is Innes McCartney, a leading UK naval archaeologist. Ever since I was a child I've had a fascination with HMS Hood. I think like so many kids of my generation I sort of built the airfix model of the Hood and I certainly remember playing with it in the bathtub on more than one occasion the Hood got sunk. So later in life to be coming out here on an expedition to investigate the wreck is just fantastic. The wreck will tell us what's happened to it if we can understand the language you know we can interpret what is there we will work out what happened to the ship. The third member of the team is Rear Admiral Philip Wilcox representing the Royal Navy. He also has a personal reason to be here. His uncle was a 20 year old sailor who died when the Hood sank. Eric qualified as an able seaman and joined the Hood and was manning one of the four inch guns on the boat deck. I remember my father telling me the shock that my grandmother had when she received the telegram that Eric had been killed on board the Hood. It will take 16 hours for the octopus to reach the site of the wreck of HMS Hood. HMS Hood was launched in 1918. She was built on a massive scale. A long sleek hull made her not only faster but also more impressive. To carry her 20 heavy guns and travel at a top speed of 30 knots she needed four huge turbines. Over 860 feet long she was the Royal Navy's largest ship and a potent symbol of Britain's global might. Her formidable 15 inch guns beat out a clear warning to potential enemies. At the time she was built and certainly well on to the the late 1930s there was no warship in the world that was bigger or more powerful than Hood and she symbolized everything that was great about Great Britain. In the 1920s and 30s Hood reigned supreme in an era of gunboat diplomacy. She even went on a world tour visiting far-flung corners of the empire receiving over 700,000 visitors and showing the world that Britannia ruled the waves. A rare color film of the ship taken two years before she was sunk has recently come to light after lying hidden in a private collection for years. It shows Hood just before the outbreak of World War II. David, Innes and Philip have never seen the footage before. There she is. It's going to be 20-30 seconds of her passing by the entire screen. That is mightily impressive isn't it? I mean can you imagine the reaction around the world as she went on her global trip in the 1920s? Sheer unadulterated power, the navy's iconic symbol. It's graceful though isn't it? I mean it's quite a beautiful ship. I mean if that steamed down the Solent today everybody would just gape in awe at it you know because it's such a such a hugely impressive ship. I just wonder how many of those lads were still on board. I would think actually quite a few because you joined for a commission. Most of those I think would still have been on board two years later. 1920s she must, not only is she the largest ship in the Royal Navy, she's the largest ship in the world. Oh absolutely. There's nothing the Americans got, there's nothing the Japanese got, there's nothing Germans got. No one's got anything that compares to her her power and might and appearance. Yeah. But one nation aimed to overturn the balance of power. In the run-up to World War II, Germany had been hard at work building a ship to rival Hood. The battleship Bismarck was much more modern than Hood, with better guns and armour. When war broke out it was nearing completion and would soon be ready to put to sea for the first time. After a day and a half of sailing, the Octopus reaches its destination, some 300 miles off the coast of Iceland, the Denmark Strait. It's here, at a location that David has kept secret, that the wreck of HMS Hood lies nearly two miles below the surface of the ocean. This is where it happened. This is where, you know, the gun flashes in the morning and the Hood blew up, right here. And it's um, it's awe-inspiring and it's slightly emotional, I have to say. Tomorrow, the investigation begins to answer the 71-year-old mystery. The treacherous icy waters of the Denmark Strait, 300 miles west of Iceland. One of the greatest sea battles of the Second World War took place here, 71 years ago. The pride of the British Navy, the ageing battlecruiser HMS Hood, confronted Hitler's newly completed German battleship, Bismarck. On May the 19th, 1941, the Bismarck slipped out of the port of Gotthenhaven, Germany, on her maiden voyage. It was accompanied by the cruiser, Prince Eugen. The Bismarck hoped to avoid detection, as it headed into the Atlantic. But British intelligence received sighting reports, as the ship sailed through the narrow stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. Throughout the war, convoys had sailed the icy North Atlantic, bringing essential supplies to beleaguered Britain. The Admiralty now feared Bismarck had them in her sights. So, the loss of a single convoy was going to be potentially very, very devastating. And the Germans knew that, you know, ultimately, if they could blockade Britain, they had a good chance of starving us out of the war. The research ship Octopus has arrived in the Denmark Strait, the site where Hood finally confronted Bismarck. On board, David Mearns and the team are preparing to find out what really happened in the battle. So, we need that definitive latitude-longitude. You're prepared to release that now. Yeah, I've got that. So, our navigator, Peter, will put them in the survey system, in the chart system, so we know where we're going to start from. Okay, so we'll dive on that, and then we'll manoeuvre to that. The remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, will take two hours to descend 2,800 metres to the ocean floor. Back in 1941, the British were desperate to stop the Bismarck at any cost. After 24 hours of searching, an RAF spy plane located the battleship hiding in a Norwegian fjord. It was clear that Bismarck was heading for the North Atlantic and the convoys. At anchor off Scarpa Flow in the Orkneys, HMS Hood, accompanied by the battleship Prince of Wales, was ordered to steam at full speed to the Denmark Strait. Here, they could intercept the Bismarck if it took this route to attack the convoys. Hood's wartime complement was 1,418, slightly less in peacetime. That's the size of a small town in the United Kingdom. It's important to remember 70 of ship's company were under 18. The youngest was 16 and four months. It's very difficult for a 16-year-old to have anything but fear, particularly for action in the first time. On the evening of the 23rd of May 1941, Bismarck was spotted at the entrance of the Denmark Strait, before disappearing again into a thick bank of fog. On board Hood, Admiral Lancelot Holland knew Bismarck was close, but he didn't know where the ship would reappear. Imagine where we are right now to be the bridge of the Prince of Wales. The Hood is just there, about 750 meters away. Next morning, the fog cleared. All the eyewitnesses are now dead, but Esmond Knight, who was on board the Prince of Wales, was interviewed in 1972. Suddenly, this tiny little voice saying, enemy in sight. People looking up to see. There he was right up. Enemy in sight and pointing, pointing towards a blank horizon. They had spotted Bismarck, 14 miles away in the distance. Hood opened fire. Her massive shells took 50 seconds to cover the 14 miles to their target. 90 seconds later, Bismarck returned fire. On board, Prince Eugen captured the battle. I remember looking towards Bismarck and suddenly seeing this line of orange flashes right across her side, which meant to us that she was using her fore and aft armament at us. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Range closing, then presently hearing this. Shells from the German ships rained down on the British. Bismarck launched salvo after salvo at HMS Hood. The rounds from Bismarck and Prince Eugen are coming in across like this, coming in at this sort of angle. Huge splashes. Then Bismarck scored a direct hit. This footage shows what happened next. The mighty Hood simply exploded. The fatal round comes in. Huge shudder. Everyone on the bridge knocked to the floor. Ted Briggs was on the bridge. The admiral was up on the compass platform and he was sitting in the captain's chair. The captain was standing just, just behind. People started to get out towards the starboard door of the compass platform. As I got there, Commander Warren, navigating officer, stood to one side and a polite little gesture just like that. And that sticks out. An explosion of this size should have been impossible. Hood sank in less than three minutes, killing 1,415 men on board. Only Ted Briggs and two other men escaped. How had the mighty ship proved so vulnerable? Now, after two hours descending 2,800 meters to the ocean floor, the ROV is approaching the wreck site in search of answers. David Mearns has turned a boardroom on the Octopus into an operations center, where he will direct the dive onto the wreck. It will not be easy. The force of the explosion was so great that the wreckage of Hood is scattered across two miles of the sea floor. The sonar images show that most of the debris lies in two distinct areas. Just how far apart are these two fields? If you go center to center, it's probably closer to 600 meters. 600 meters, so then the Hood was doing 28 knots. Well, we know that the ship slowed down. A live video feed is being sent from the cramped ROV control room on the lower decks to the operations center, where David, Philip, and Innes are watching the dive. Wreckage straight in front of us. There's a shoe. That was a shoe, yeah. Another shoe. Go ahead. Yeah, David, can you come down to the ROV control room, please? Yeah. There is a problem with the ROV. A strong current is making it difficult to keep the vehicle in position, and there is a danger it might collide with the wreckage. The ROV operator pulls the underwater vehicle back from the wreck. What we didn't want to do was lose control of the vehicle and collide into the piece. So the only way was to jump over it, pull the cable up very fast, get four meters over the top of the piece, and come down on the other side to turn around and see it. But an indication of how strong the current is, is that when they came up, they jumped 45 meters on the other side of the piece. The team are forced to halt their investigations for now. In the meantime, they have another task to perform. On the last expedition, David Meehan's found the ship's bell, and he's long wanted to bring it back to the UK as a lasting memorial to those who died. The Ministry of Defense have granted the expedition special permission to try and retrieve it. Okay, that current is about four and a half meters. That's it. That's 100 percent. That's it. There it is. Yeah. Oh yeah, you can see the crown now. That's going to be hard. You can get under that one. It's got to get into that hole. The bell is buried in a section of Hood's wreckage, which is extremely difficult to access. The recovery hooks that we have now are not working. You can see they had a very good hook on it. They were lifting it up, but it didn't bite in. The bell, through its own weight, fell, did what we didn't want it to do, actually fell into the hole, and now we don't have the visual access we had before. I'd say the chances of us being successful are less than 50-50 and probably more like 30-70. Meehan's decides to abandon the recovery of the Hood's bell. The expedition is proving even harder than they had imagined. Now the weather on the surface has taken a turn for worse. The ROV is brought back up. They must now wait and hope the conditions improve before they can make any more dives. We've aborted basically because of the wind conditions are trending upwards and the heave is, it was 1.1 meters when we launched this morning, and it's now 1.7 meters and increasing, so even the launch is risky in conditions like this. There's still risk of damage and serious damage, and then it's game over if we damage it sufficiently. 71 years ago, HMS Hood, the largest ship in the Royal Navy, was sunk off the coast of Iceland by Hitler's new battleship Bismarck, killing 1,415 men. The sinking of the Hood was a terrible shock to the British. It was not just the huge loss of life. In London, the Navy's top brass at the Admiralty were also deeply concerned. If the Hood could be destroyed so quickly, was there a fundamental flaw in the design of all British warships? The Admiralty set up two boards of inquiry to investigate how the ship was lost. Eyewitnesses from nearby ships described what they had seen. Some of the men drew sketches to explain the sequence of events. There just seemed to be one great big flash and a lot of smoke, and out of the smoke there seemed to be two balls of fire, of which one was higher than the rest. There was a dense cloud of smoke, and I could see large pieces of wreckage in the air, and when the smoke cleared, she had sunk. Hood had been designed to survive incoming fire, but somehow a shell had set off a massive explosion. Some believed the shell hit the ship's store of torpedoes. Some thought one of the ammunition stores or magazines. The inquiry found it impossible to pinpoint the precise place or cause. Much of the evidence is contradictory and inconclusive, and we realize that many points in connection with the loss of the Hood can never be proved definitely. Without access to the wreck, the board of inquiry could only guess at what had caused the Hood to explode. Back on board the Octopus, the weather has improved, and the ROV is back in the water looking for clues. On the seabed, there are fragments of the wreck and personal effects. I've been at war twice, and I know the challenges that are faced by those people who go off to fight. Seeing the human debris that sits around the site, the boots, the gas masks, all of this brings into context that this was not just a ship. This was a ship full of sailors and marines. Bismarck's triumph of sinking HMS Hood was short-lived. Days and nights of relentless pursuit of the Bismarck by the greatest convergence of warships ever participating in a roundup at sea. Every available British ship was dispatched to go after Bismarck. The crippling blow on the unsinkable pride of the swastika navy. The German ship had been damaged in battle and was limping towards France. Three days later, on the 26th of May, the Bismarck was found 600 miles out in the Atlantic. 15 British swordfish biplanes attacked with torpedoes and severely damaged the German battleship's rudder. Unable to steer, Bismarck was now a sitting duck. Four British warships closed in and bombarded it with shells. Three days after sinking Hood, Bismarck was also destroyed. Over 2,000 men died, an even higher death toll than the Hood. Back on board the Octopus, David Mearns and naval archaeologist Innes McCartney are looking for clues to the cause of the catastrophic explosion that sunk Hood. They're searching for signs that would indicate an explosion in an ammunition or torpedo store. See this wreckage here, what I want to make sure is that that's not connected to the rudder. This is the stern steaming light. Yeah, this is like an inner wheel in here or something. Oh, the filaments. Yeah, the light bulb. Well, there's an intact bloody light. Well, how does that happen? Why is that not imploded? That's incredible. If there was shock in this area, all this would fall off. The shock has been forward. Examining the Hood is difficult because so much was destroyed. Any clue can be useful to help the team locate where they are on the ship. You can very, very clearly see the wooden decking in here. Yeah, but this is the base of a derrick. These things here? The derricks were small cranes located near the guns. They were used to load ammunition onto the ship. Locating them is confirmation that the ROV is near one of the magazines. Innes, you can see that shape there. You can see at the base of that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. This is one of those, isn't it? That's a very good drawing of what we've just seen. If that's the case, we could be very close to what we're looking for. Yeah. They have identified that this is the rear section of the Hood, but this doesn't really help solve the mystery of what caused the explosion. Then, suddenly, hidden among the confusion of debris, Innes spots a vital clue. There's one. That's another one there. Have you seen the number of cordite cases in here? There were so many blasted cases under where it's come back from the rudder. I know there's like lids and all that broken copper all around the back. Yeah. There's the magazine. Yeah. There's the exploded magazine. Yeah, okay. I've just seen a small circular item about a foot across with some hatching in the middle that from the other way up bearing might have a seal in it as well. Most likely the lid off what is called a Clarkson case. Clarkson cases are brass containers that held cordite. The highly explosive mixture needed to propel the Hood's heavy shells. They were stored in a number of armour-plated magazines above the ship's shell rooms. Every single Clarkson case they discover has been destroyed. Confirmation that it was one of the magazines that exploded. The devastating effect of a magazine explosion was captured on film six months later when another ship, HMS Barham, was torpedoed by a German submarine. This remarkable footage shows that an explosion of the ship's magazines would have caused total destruction of HMS Hood. An explosion of that size in a fraction of a second will have propagated itself a great way through the ship. It would have taken out bulkheads. It would have taken out anything in its way. And this massive fireball would have just travelled, like here, just travelled through an area like this in a fraction of a second, carrying everything in front of it. So we were trying to answer the question why so few people survived. When you see the evidence of a complete magazine detonation, like we've seen on the seabed, then it is showing us that the colossal nature of that explosion is what killed the people that were inside, you know. And it's no coincidence that the three survivors were actually on the external side of the hull of the Hood. David and Innes are now sure that the explosion that ripped through the Hood began with the detonation of one of the magazines. But which one? They know that the gun magazines were spread along the fourth level deck of the ship. Their failed attempt to recover Hood's bell may now provide a vital clue. They decide to go back to the area where they found the bell. It hung outside the captain's quarters, right above one of the 15-inch magazines. They hope that the captain's cabin can provide vital clues to the source of the explosion. Right where that vertical member terminates. Yeah, the flat plate is bent, isn't it? You can see this is all lino flooring, all peeled away, falling down. It's just incredible. We're in the captain's day room. That's deck. Yeah, that's the floor. This looks like a tear, doesn't it? Look at the way it's buckled. Look, it's been blown. The whole thing has been... It's pushing it out. Unreal. We're looking at a portion of the wreck in which the bell has been encapsulated. And when this piece fell to the seabed, the bell was inside it and came down with it. And that is why, you know, we've been able to identify it within this piece of wreckage. The wreckage itself is extremely badly damaged and it's very difficult to actually work out what it might be. But it's suggesting that the outside of it is actually a ceiling and the bell itself is actually resting against what was once a floor. And you can see on the inside the lino flooring all hanging down. So you think that's folded then? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's folded. The whole thing has been bent back, probably by explosive blast. What's going on there? The captain's day room, once an ornate room where the captain received guests, was turned inside out by the force of the explosion. It's not of the same type of material at all. The beams on it are different. The extent of the damage is confirmation that it was the 15-inch magazine directly below it that exploded and not the torpedoes stored in a different part of the ship. But the magazines were heavily armour-plated. They shouldn't have exploded. For the answer, David and Innes turned to Philip Wilcox's specialist knowledge of ship design. How could a shell penetrate the lower decks where the ammunition was stored? Philip believes that the Bismarck must have made an incredibly lucky hit. The shell comes through here. It goes in the vicinity of the main mast, which is what we know. It punches through lightweight shell plating through here. It then hits around the armoured deck there. The Bismarck's shell crashed through the hood's lightly armoured deck to the ammunition stores below. What we've also seen is that the fact that there's been... this admiral's cabin has been ripped apart. Bearing in mind where these magazines are, are we actually looking at this event coming up here? Because this whole deck has bent almost back on itself at this point. After years of controversy, now at last they have the full picture. A lucky shot tore through the hood's defences at their weakest point. The 15-inch magazines exploded, tearing the ship apart. No one stood a chance. David and the team have proved what two boards of inquiry never could. We're looking at a piece of the wreck that is incredibly close to the source of the major explosion that destroyed the ship. This is the centre of the whole section of the ship that's missing, that's been obliterated. So, you know, it nails that down absolutely at 100%. But one question still remains. Could the disaster have been avoided? The octopus is in the perilous waters off Iceland, where the investigation team have finally solved the mystery of why the mighty hood sank so quickly and catastrophically 71 years ago. They've got one more question to answer. Could the disaster have been avoided? For years, there has been a dispute as to whether Admiral Lancelot Holland on board Hood made a tactical error that left his ship more vulnerable to Bismarck's shellfire. David and Innes hope the wreck might hold the key. But just as they set out to dive again, the weather intervenes. Captain Glenn Dolby on the bridge of the octopus is concerned about an approaching storm. Already, high winds are making the sea very choppy and almost impossible to control the ROV below. There is no choice but to abort the dive. It's pretty awful. If we put the ROV in there, we'd likely be able to launch it without too much risk. But if we have to recover it, I think we'd end up seriously damaging the ROV, perhaps worse. The next day, the captain reluctantly decides to abandon the expedition. The octopus must return to Reykjavik to shelter from the storm. If you're going to have weather, you might as well have it really, really rough. We've aborted the mission for now and we're heading for Iceland for shelter. The forecast isn't good and certainly we're experiencing a dramatic increase in sea conditions now. The only option we have now is to run for shelter. You can never do anything when the weather kicks up. I mean, it is just a feature of working at sea. But Innes and David have one last hope. By looking at the underwater footage shot during the expedition, they might get lucky. They're looking for footage of the rudder to see if it will reveal if Holland made the critical turn. We're looking at that bit right there. All Navy commanders were taught to sail at full speed head-on towards the enemy. At the very last moment, they would turn the warship sideways so both front and rear guns could be unleashed on the enemy. At the speed the hood was going, it would take just 30 seconds to make the change of course. For years, people have argued whether the hood made this maneuver or not. If the hood made the turn, Admiral Holland gave the boat its best chance. If it didn't, this would have hugely limited the ship's chances of survival and means Holland got his tactics wrong. Eyewitnesses differ. No one knows whether the hood turned. David and Innes now review the ROV footage they hope will finally provide an answer. There's no damage here. This is the underside where it would have hit the seabed. If it had landed on the seabed, this whole section here would be damaged and it isn't. It's pristine. All the way. This rudder is intact. The lack of any damage shows that the rudder wasn't moved when the ship hit the seafloor. And it's proof that Admiral Holland had indeed begun the turn just before the hood was hit by the Bismarck. What we're seeing there is a moment in time, you know, a very, very iconic image of Hood's last turn. And we've been able to confirm that is the case. So I'm absolutely convinced the rudder wasn't dislodged. It didn't impact on the seabed. Holland had not just ordered that turn, but Hood actually executed it and was probably halfway through it when she was finally hit. So that's an absolute firm conclusion that has come from this expedition. Holland and his captain Ralph Kerr were taking split-second decisions in the heat of battle. After years of speculation, the evidence shows they did the right thing. But even so, it wasn't enough. You look at Holland and Kerr and these commanders who virtually study and spend their whole naval careers getting ready for this one moment, and their decision could be off by 30 seconds, not criticizing Holland, just the unluck of it, could be off by 30 seconds. And it results in the loss of the ship and all his men and his life. The sinking of Hood and Bismarck had huge consequences for both sides in the Second World War. The British government had worried there might be something fundamentally wrong in the design of their warships. In reality, the flaw was in warships in general. In the new age of air power, large ships couldn't hide. No giant battlecruisers like HMS Hood would ever be built again. New warships would be smaller and more maneuverable. The Octopus returns to the shelter of Reykjavik harbor. For the team, their deep sea investigation is over. They have solved a major mystery. By showing these images, we bring history to life. And we can shed new light on all sorts of aspects of the battle and the ship and the archaeology of the ship and the construction of the ship and what happened. And historically, that's a very important thing that we've been able to do. There is one final duty to perform. Lord, almighty God, who rule over all our lives, accept these wreaths today as our remembrance... The expedition team hold a memorial ceremony and lay wreaths to honor the 1,418 men who served on board HMS Hood on her last voyage. We pay tribute to their supreme sacrifice and courage on that day and will forever remember them. We came out here to do a lot of technical things, but most importantly, what came out to honor the memory of the men. For David, Innes and Philip, it's a sad but proud moment as they leave the Octopus. 71 years after one of World War II's darkest tragedies, they have finally laid Hood's ghost to rest.