HalcyonDaze
Contributor
HMS Hood was an impressive warship for her day, but unfortunately she had a few things going against her. The original plan was to build a slightly faster and better-protected successor to the Queen Elizabeth-class, but as the design was being revised it was pointed out that the British already had a crushing superiority in battleships. However, the British had overestimated the specifications and progress of the German Mackensen-class battlecruisers and decided a heavily-armed 30-knot battlecruiser was needed to counter them. Thus Hood and three sister ships were ordered in April 1916; however Hood's keel was laid on May 31, 1916 - the same day three British battlecruisers explosively redistributed themselves across the North Sea at Jutland and HMS Lion almost suffered the same fate. Hood's construction was stopped and the ship was redesigned to include about additional armor; her three sisters were cancelled and multiple design changes meant she wasn't completed until 1920.
On paper her 12-inch inclined waterline belt was on par with the 13-inch vertical belt on the Queen Elizabeth- and Revenge-class battleships, but above that there was a thinner 7-inch middle belt and 5-inch upper belt. Hood was the last British capital ship designed before they began following the American and Japanese practice of an "all or nothing" armor scheme; in postwar tests against SMS Baden the British realized all 7-inch armor plate would do against a 15-inch AP shell was trigger the fuze and ensure the shell exploded inside the ship. The added armor and other changes had also put Hood about 5,000 tons over her original design weight; she sat four feet deeper than designed and was a wet ship under a lot of structural stress.
Ironically, Hood's status as the Royal Navy's largest and seemingly most capable combatant worked against her; as flagship of the Battle Cruiser Squadron she had one major refit in 1931 and aside from that was ridden hard and put away wet during her career. Three of the less-valuable Queen Elizabeth-class battleships and the smaller battlecruiser Renown were fully modernized ahead of her in the late 1930s; Hood was scheduled to get similar updates in 1941 (total replacement of the turbines, boilers, secondary battery, and superstructure plus added deck armor) but that was put off until more of the King George V battleships could be brought into service. By the start of WWII her steam plant was so decrepit it shaved 4-5 knots off her top speed, and in May 1940 she stripped a turbine trying to run at 28 knots. Bismarck was not the almighty terror postwar legend made it out to be - the Germans were getting back into the capital ship design game after a 15-year hiatus and missed a few post-WWI developments - but even against Hood in her prime it was just as fast, just as well armed, and better armored. Hood's destruction was still down to a lucky hit and some unfortunate handicaps; if Vice-Admiral Holland's original plan had worked he might have gotten the drop on the Germans at sunset the previous day and made it a more advantageous fight. As King George V proved a few days later, Prince of Wales in fully operational condition would have been a nasty opponent for the Bismarck; even in her untested and malfunction-plagued state (half of her guns and Y turret jammed at various points during the fight) she landed a couple of serious blows that forced a return to base.
As for Barham and the two Yamatos, they got clobbered pretty badly - Barham was not significantly modernized after WWI unlike her sisters Queen Elizabeth, Valiant, and Warspite and she took three torpedo hits in almost the same spot (U-331 actually fired at a range of just over 400 yards and damn near got run over by the next battleship in line). Like Hood, it's suspected a fire started in the 4-inch magazines and spread to the main magazines as the ship rolled over. Yamato and Musashi took a simply ridiculous amount of punishment, with Yamato essentially getting the equivalent of the entire Japanese air assault at Pearl Harbor aimed expressly at her. Generally speaking if you capsize a burning ship carrying hundreds of tons of explosives bad things happen once they start falling out of racks and bouncing off things. I don't believe Mutsu's loss was ever fully investigated; she blew up at anchor and the IJN was seemingly more interested in keeping it secret than determining why she exploded. It's hard to specifically give the British and Japanese ships short shrift; aside from Pearl Harbor US battleships never really came under that kind of fire and several other nations' battleships also suffered catastrophic magazine explosions from hits - Roma, Bretagne, Marat, and Gneisenau being examples from Italy, France, the Soviet Union, and Germany during WWII.
