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Today we take a look at how HMS Hood and the Admiral class battlecruisers came to be, from the earliest concept to the final execution!
00:00:00 – Intro
00:01:53 – What came before
00:05:48 – Issues with existing British capital ships
00:09:14 – Shallow draft battleship concept
00:13:46 – Revisions due to size
00:17:57 – Does the Grand Fleet need a new battleship?
00:23:26 – Pivot to battlecruiser
00:24:41 – Small tube boilers and 18″ guns
00:27:50 – The initial Admiral class
00:28:05 – Jutland
00:28:56 – Fast battleship?
00:29:29 – More guns?
00:30:22 – Jellicoe adds even more armour
00:31:19 – Is this my final form?
00:33:40 – Finally in the water!
Sources:
Ensign 6 – HMS Hood
https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Battleships-World-War-Battlecruisers/dp/0870218174
https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Battleships-1919-1945-R-Burt/dp/1399097652
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battlecruisers-Shipshape-John-Roberts/dp/1840675306
https://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Battlecruisers-1905-John-Roberts/dp/1473882354
Naval History books, use code ‘DRACH’ for 25% off – https://www.usni.org/press/books?f%5B0%5D=subject%3A1966
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Pinned post for Q&A 🙂
Incredibly interesting.
Utterly fascinating, thank you!
We are ALL Hood fanboys admit it.
Can we have a episode that reviews the naval battle where the French won and that kept the Brits from reinforcing Yorktown where Cornwallis had to surrender?
Awww… man, I play "WoW: Legends" on PS4, not PC.
Do we get a code for some freebies, too, Drach?
Pretty please?
😊
Torpedo crews on a capital ship must have virtually a non-job.
The hood was a out dated ship that got destroyed period💯
If you want to see a great video of hoods last battle which was created by world of warships it is a music video made by Saboton called Bismarck
After over 100 years it is nice to see that the MOD has not change one bit. They always make the right decision but only after exhausting every other possibility.
Look at the Type 45s !
34:30 – 34:45, you can imagine that being just an annoying observation at the time of her launch/commissioning, and yet that could well be a major contributing factor to her demise 😬
Great work as usual
My Dad was always obsessed with the Hood. His favourite movie as a kid was the Sink the Bismarck!, so I love all of this. Also interesting note, Admiral Horace Hood, a descendent of the Admiral Hood that the ship was named after, died at Jutland.
As a dedictaed fan of Hood (my uncle was a stocker on her and went down with her in 1941). I was amazed by the amount of detail you were able to give on these proposed battleships and the Admirals.
I am amazed at what the designers were able to do without CAD or a speadsheet. Calculating the weight and speed etc.
It seems that the British navy has a bit more debt to Jelliicoe, as a result of his intervention in the Admirals design. I think he was technical officer earlier in his career.
Excellent, thank you. What this video shows is how Dreadnought design and development was still in its infancy in 1914, and there was no concensus about the way forward.
Absolutely! He’s usually deep diving into Excelsior class Star ships.
The previous Hood videos are up there with my all time favorite Drac content. Keeping all that in mind makes the design & construction of Hood fascinating. 👍
My Grandad worked as an electrician for John Browns and his work on new radar on the Hood finished the night before she left for sea. Any later and he would have been kept onboard and always thought he would have died when she went down.
Flawed she may have been, but HMS Hood was a handsome ship.
She was one of a kind 😊
What if they had sent Warspite perhaps the luckiest & unluckiest Battleship of all time?
shoulda had an oak laminate deck. replaced as needed,w/ damaged timbers thrown overboard : ),to be recovered after action, for reuse or burning
needa HMS Hood 2; what"it"did after build,refittings&before the dreaded"hardon"for Bismark
armored glass,keep lines of sight,stop powerwashing of deck&flooding of turret, Redfield
Nice of Drach to take a break from couscous recipes.
With all the fits and starts during her construction Hood probably should never have even been launched. She ended up as a hodgepodge of old and new concepts of warship design. She was seriously overrated, and probably could not have stood up in a duel with Nagato, Maryland, or even the 14-inch gunned US California or Mississippi class battleships. She might have used her speed to run away, but she was not able to trade heavy gunfire with any of these vessels. Since she was completed, more should have been done to keep her up to date during the mid to late 1930s. It was widely known that the Germans and Italians were building 30-knot, modern ships armed with 15-inch guns, and if the British weren’t aware that these ships displaced about 6000 tons more than the treaty limits it was a staggering failure of British intelligence not to be aware of this. Hood was unable to seriously threaten either Prinz Eugen or Bismarck, primarily because her fire control table was badly out of date. POW, on the other hand, was quickly able to range in on Bismarck and hit her because of her modern fire control system. The failure to lay up Hood for just a short while to upgrade her fire control system is nothing short of criminal, and speaks volumes about British Imperial mentality of the interwar period. Showing the Flag is no excuse for failing to modernize such a fast and powerful ship, and letting her engines run down to crap didn’t help her any during the battle against Bismarck. By 1941 Hood was only fit for convoy escort duty, as just the appearance of her was probably enough to scare off ships threatening her convoy. A proper reconstruction of Hood probably would have involved the removal of “Y” turret and the raising of her quarterdeck to keep her drier in any moderate to rough sea state. I’m sure that realistically she could not be expected to fight the newer German and Italian battleships. She might have even had a tough time in a duel with Scharnhorst or Gneisenau, and the pair of them operating together would have shot her topsides to pieces, killing key personnel and putting her fire control equipment out of action. Wallowing and burning from numerous topside hits, she would have been unable to defend herself, and she would have died the slow, fiery, bloody death of the Bismarck. I know there are countless Hood lovers out there, and people are still trying to make excuses for her poor performance in battle and quick demise, but she was completely washed up as a front line fighting ship by the mid-1930s, a paper tiger, a useless hunk of tin. She might have been turned into some nice razor blades by then, but used in the line of battle she was nothing more than a death trap for all but three of her crew.