It is hardly surprising that these leaders of a movement designed to restore Italy’s greatness regarded a ship like the Hood as a symbol of her present inferiority. The presence of foreign warships in the sea that had once belonged to Rome was naturally resented by the Fascist party. Some years were to pass before they would make the bold claim

that the Mediterranean was Mare Nostrum. By then the shipbuilding yards of Genoa and the aircraft factories of Milan would have produced the power to reinforce this claim.

After leaving Gibraltar that year the Hood went on to Mlaga, Valencia, and Toulon. A report on the cruise says: “Many guests were entertained on board the ships at the various ports, and the ships’ companies were well received on the shore by the local inhabitants." Like most official reports it tells us little about the real life of the ship during those months. It is curious to think, looking at logbooks and diaries kept during this period, that this was the heyday of the Roaring Twenties. Little of it is reflected in naval records, and the social historian who had nothing else to rely on would carry away a curious and unbalanced picture of the times. Much more than the Army—which, after all, must live ashore even if it still lives in its own withdrawn community— the Navy had a specialized existence, remote from the preoccupations of the land.

This was the era described by the young Evelyn Waugh, by Noel Coward, Michael Arlen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway—the wasteland of frustrated hopes, emasculated heroes, sun-tanned nymphomaniacs, and bottle-scarred veterans. Little of it seems to have made its imprint on the self-contained community of a great warship, under the shadow of whose presence, far out at sea, the uneasy peace of those lotus-eating years was maintained.

Like a cocktail made with too much Italian vermouth, Michael Arlen’s Green Hat preserves something of the flavor of the era, and portrays a naval officer of the period: “His eyes slightly bloodshot, not so much from hours of scanning distant horizons, as from too many pink gins in the wardroom—there being so little else to do in battleships.”

There was, of course, plenty to do, but the round of entertaining from one port to another caused many officers to sigh at the prospect of yet another “good-will” cruise. '“Entertaining and being entertained is all very well,” wrote Admiral Cunningham in his autobiography.*

*Cunningham, A Sailors Odyssey.

 

“but a few days of high-pressure official engagements and entertainments from 9:30 a.m. one morning until 3 or 4 a.m. the next makes the average naval man long to get away to sea. Courtesy visits to foreign ports and ‘Showing the Flag’ cruises do a great deal of good; but they are among the most strenuous exercises I know, and ruinous to the digestion.”

From Gibraltar to Malaga is 62 miles. As they swept up the coast on a day of bright sunlight, with their escorting destroyers on their flanks, the two British battle cruisers made a fine sight. The V-headed arrows of their wakes interleaved and crisscrossed astern of them. Inshore, where the open rowing boats of the coastal fishermen lingered with lines down over the shallow banks, the thunder of the long swell came in to break on the rocks as if, far out to sea, a gale were blowing.

On trials the Hood had achieved a speed of 31.9 knots at deep-load draft, and 32.07 at local draft. She was always a fast ship—that was what she had been designed to be—but she was also remarkable for another factor, her high economical speed. This was something that endeared her to engineer officers, especially during the stringencies of those postwar days, when every official return was scrutinized to see whether there had been any waste. At only two-fifths power the Hood could steam at 25 knots —those other three fifths were all needed to drive her 44,000 tons just 6 or 7 knots faster. The power: fuel ratio, in large ships especially, often gives a surprising graph: the extra fuel, power, and space to accommodate them are all required to provide those last few knots. At 25 knots, though, the Hood was happy, and so was the engineer captain. So too were the officers and crew, for she had surprisingly little vibration at her economical cruising speed.

It was the sacrifices in her armor to give her those additional knots that distressed a writer to the Naval Review:*

 

*"Value of Speed in Capital Ships,” Naval Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1920).

 

In the case of the Hood the whole of the increased displacement has been allocated to one factor—speed. A change of policy is thus established, and it is one whose nature the writer holds to be unjustified by either tactical or strategical considerations.

If the Hood’s design had been agreed upon at the time when this writer voiced his criticism (1920), then he would have been right in condemning what he calls a “change of policy.” His error was to have forgotten that the Hood was laid down in 1916, before the lessons of Jutland had been fully appreciated, and that she did not represent a change of policy but the continuation of an earlier one.

Later, in this same analysis of the value of speed in capital ships, the writer makes the point that

We are told by her designer that experience and trial have shown that the Hood can receive the blows of several torpedoes and still remain in the line without serious loss of speed.

If one examines her lines, her protective bulges, and her underwater armor plating, this would seem to have been true.

As she dropped anchor under the tawny lion-skin walls of Gibralfaro castle, in Mlaga, power was what she represented to the Spaniards watching, and to the Spanish admiral whose barge went out to meet her. But power, as the writer in the Naval Review had remarked, must be looked at in two ways.

Power to withstand punishment is alike necessary to the pugilist and the capital ship. Speed must never he permitted to develop at the expense of protection.

In that first Mediterranean cruise, the foreign naval officers and the distinguished visitors, as well as the general public, found much to marvel at in this graceful giant. For the gunnery specialist there were the eight 15-inch guns in their huge turrets, guns whose shells weighed a ton apiece and whose muzzle velocity was 1,670 miles per hour. For the engineer the gleaming engine rooms demanded inspection; the brass voice pipes gleaming, the ladder rungs shining silver, and the polished dials and indicators that returned your reflection on every hand. Boiler rooms murmured that the whitewashed lagging on pipes was not for greasy hands, and auxiliary machinery thrummed. Beyond were housed her four turbine engines—four turbines developing a total of 144,000 h.p., each unit driving its 20-ton propeller.

For those with a taste for astronomical figures there were her six vast searchlights, each of 120,000,000 candle power, designed for the kind of night action that would never be seen again. By the time World War II started, British scientists and technicians would have evolved radio direction finding, or radar; the night and the fog would be pierced without a ray of light.

The cap tallies bearing the words “H.M.S.