HMS Hood: Pride of the Royal Navy [Hardcover]

Andrew Norman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001

The sinking of the HMS Hood on May 24, 1941 dealt a major blow to the British Royal Navy. Like Titanic years before, Hood had seemed invincible and much of the hopes of the Royal Navy rested with her as the nation entered the war with Germany. But in just seven minutes after an encounter with Bismarck and her consort Prinz Eugen, HMS Hood sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, taking the lives of 1,418 men with her. Author Andrew Norman explores the events leading up to the disaster and the legacy it left in its wake.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrew Norman began researching the HMS Hood after attending an annual memorial service for victims of the sinking. His previous books include a study of the lost English village of Tyneham and a recently completed biography of T. E. Lawrence. He lives in Dorset, England.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Stackpole Books; 1st edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081170789X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811707893
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,003,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars HMS Hood: Pride of the Royal Navy, November 3, 2001

By 

Lawrence Duckles (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: HMS Hood: Pride of the Royal Navy (Hardcover)

Norman's book begins with a fundamental mistake on its very first page, a description of the Hood's adversary, the Bismarck, as a "pocket battleship" (an error also found in Ian Kershaw's otherwise estimable biography of Hitler). This was a term applied only to the first three warships Germany built after the First World War, the Deutschland (later Lützow) the Admiral Scheer and the Admiral Graf Spee, which by treaty were limited to 10,000 tons. The Bismarck was a full battleship (over 50,000 tons fully loaded) and, at the time of her launching in 1939, the largest in the world.
The problem with any biography of the Hood (Edwin Hoyt's poorly written "The Life and Death of the HMS Hood" is a similar example) is that for the first 19 of her 20 years of existence she led a relatively uneventful career, so the first part of Norman's book tends toward the anecdotal (the ship's pets, some of her more colorful characters, etc.), while the latter part simply rehashes material better stated elsewhere. Norman's theories concerning Admiral Holland's tactics and the Hood's final explosion tend toward the far-fetched and don't really add anything to the scholarship of this subject. He would have done better to consult Robert Winklareth's "The Bismarck Chase," which, while it contains errors of its own, at least explores in detail issues of naval gunnery with some degree of knowledge. Kennedy's "Pursuit" and Müllenheim-Rechberg's "Battleship Bismarck" still remain the preferred and most accurate sources.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Hoodwinked, January 8, 2004

By 

Richard Worth (MO, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HMS Hood: Pride of the Royal Navy (Hardcover)

The author's potential contribution to the study of HMS Hood lay in recording the memories of her crewmen. Surprisingly though, the "recollections" section takes up a mere 40 pages--published separately as a booklet, this might have been worth a modest price. Here I will discuss the remaining 100+ pages with their focus on technical/historical material: warship design, naval combat, and battle history, none of which Norman understands. From a vast list of errors, I have selected a few representative examples.
NORMAN on warship design: Regarding deck protection, "Hood's armor was not plate, but of the cemented type...." This is pure gibberish. Hood did have British C armor ("C" for "cemented") in thicknesses up to 15-inch, but not on her decks, which instead had lesser steel with no individual plate more than about 2-inch. No mere detail, this bears directly on the cause of Hood's loss, and the author cannot even correctly parrot the fundamentals.
NORMAN on battle history: "Most, if not all [of Bismarck's shells], failed to explode or did so only partially." In reality, German shells indeed underachieved, but it was Prinz Eugen's ammunition that gave a demonstrably poor performance, not Bismarck's. Norman says that, if Bismarck hit Hood with a shell, "chances were that it had not exploded"--opening the door for his theory that Eugen fired the fatal shell. Norman's theory depends on ignorance of the basic facts.
NORMAN on naval combat: When sunk, Hood was "well within" her immune zone, "defined as a range no closer than 12,000 yards, and the outer limit beyond 25,000 to 30,000 yards." The concept of an immune zone--the area where both the belt armor and the deck armor are likely to resist the armor-piercing shells--did not apply in this instance for the simple reason that Hood had no immune zone. Quite the contrary, through much of Norman's specified zone, neither Hood's belt nor her deck would suffice to keep out Bismarck's shells. She was doubly vulnerable! But Norman again is steering us toward his Eugen theory, puzzling though it is--if Hood was immune to Bismarck's 800kg armor-piercing shells, what could Eugen achieve with shells that were 122kg and not armor-piercing? Norman claims Eugen's shells could by-pass Hood's armor, plummeting straight down Hood's funnel, though he offers no explanation how the shells could achieve the great heights necessary for this trajectory. In fact, Eugen's shells were descending from an angle only about 20 degrees above the horizontal; so unless the Germans managed a bank shot off a low-flying billiards table, this theorized hit was physically impossible.
Given the availability of many fine books on Hood and Denmark Strait, this one earns little regard. The final word on Norman's research appears on page 82 with a photo captioned "Hood at speed"--a dramatic photo which, unfortunately, depicts the battleship Royal Oak, a ship four years older than Hood and from an entirely different class.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A mess, August 1, 2004

By 

John S. Cunningham (Las Vegas, nv United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: HMS Hood: Pride of the Royal Navy (Hardcover)

Spotty history, technical speculation, second rate naratives.

Don't waste your time with this mess of a book. I knew I was in trouble when the author had already refered to the Bismarck as a "pocket" battleship in the prologue.

It covers little to nothing on the design of the Hood. It spends an entire chapter covering some obscure world cruise but has zero account of the Hoods pre-Bismarck battles (as part of Force H), zips straight through the Denmark straight fight, then dives into poorly thought out conjecture and speculation as to why the ship was lost.

His grand conclusion is that an 8" plunging shell (HE by the way, not AP) from the Prinz Eugen somehow passed straight down one of the stacks, penetrated the steel bar supports and armor, and exploded in the boiler room. Here superheated steam (itself a massive fire supressant) and pre-heated oil were released and flashed into a major fire that broke the ship in two and sank it. All this theory is based on the fact that something similar happend to a cargo ship bombed by a brit naval aircraft at some other point in the war. You gotta be kidding me.

I picked this title up for $5 at a remainder sale, and it was overpriced at even that price. Spend your money on something educational like a comic book. This title has no place in the library of any serious naval historian.