Pakenham is a brave man. Also Pakenham believes in you. We must have officers who believe in their Admirals instead of back-biting them. But what can you expect when Sir Gerard Noel writes to the First Sea Lord protesting against my being at the Admiralty and saying, “God help the Navy’? We have laid down 187 new ships since 15th November (four of them battle- cruisers of 33 knots and 15-inch guns) and all of them will be fighting within a year. God is helping the Navy.

Extravagant, eccentric, at times almost irrational, emotional— but with a genuine sincerity and patriotism unequaled—Lord Fisher comes to life in his letters.

One of the battle cruisers to which he referred was the Hood. She was not fighting within a year, but before that year was

20 out Lord Fisher had resigned. Disagreeing with Winston Churchill, then First Lord, over the Dardanelles campaign, he had said, “I was always against it.” He had also said, “This is wartime, and we can’t have any damned folly about susceptibilities. Don’t you worry about any odium—I will take that and love it.” He retired to become Chairman of the Inventions Board, but the four battle cruisers he had written of with such gusto and affection—“33 knots and 15-inch guns”—were taking shape in the hammering shipyards. More than twenty years later, one of them, the Hood, would be at sea under war conditions and still engaged against the same German enemy.

The Hood was born in the thundering, clanging yards of John Brown Company, on the banks of the Clyde, the “strong” river of Lanarkshire, the largest firth on the western coast—the building ground of great ships. But before a section of her keel was laid, before a rivet was driven, or the dimensions of angle bars or channels, frames, girders, or strakes specified, the design of the vessel had to be passed and approved. The naval architects who designed the Hood were guided by the overriding factor that she was to be a battle cruiser, not a battleship.

The distinction is important, and her history is meaningless without some knowledge of her ancestry. The battleship itself was a logical development of the old “line-of-battle” ships, ships capable of standing and fighting the heaviest adversary in the line. At the close of the nineteenth century, with Germany arming and with the building of the High Seas Fleet, the necessity for Britian to be able to meet a heavy threat in home waters became obvious to Admiral Fisher. The final outcome of a great deal of experiment was the Dreadnought. The first all-big-gun ship, she mounted movable turrets, three on the center line and one on each side, each turret holding twin 12-inch guns.

The race between England and Germany was now joined— the race to produce the heaviest armored, heaviest gunned battle fleet. But heavy armor, massive turrets, and the weight of the new guns inevitably meant that a loss in speed had to be accepted. Fast ships, of course, were still needed: as commerce raiders; to protect the fleet; and to act as supporters to the line-of-battle ships. These fast ships were the cruisers, some of them armored, and known as second-class cruisers; some of them unarmored, light cruisers.

But between the battleship and the cruiser lay a world of difference, and it was in an attempt to bridge this gap that the battle cruiser was evolved. The driving idea behind her conception was that she should be fast enough to cope with enemy cruisers and destroy them with her greater firepower; but at the same time she must be heavily enough gunned and sufficiently armored to be able to stand in the line of battle and, if necessary, fight against the slower but more heavily armored battleships. The battle cruiser was a hybrid and, like many hybrids, she possessed a unique beauty. She had, though, her deficiencies, in staying power and resistance—deficiencies which are also sometimes marks of the hybrid. In a footnote to The World Crisis, 1911-14, Winston Churchill wrote:

Contrary to common opinion and, as many will think to the proved lessons of the war, I do not believe in the wisdom of the battle cruiser type. If it is worth while to spend far more than the price of your best battleship upon a fast heavily gunned vessel, it is better at the same time to give it the heaviest armor as well. You then have a ship which may indeed cost half as much again as a battleship, but which at any rate can do everything. To put the value of a first-class battleship into a vessel which cannot stand the pounding of a heavy action is a false policy. It is far better to spend the extra money and have what you really want. The battle cruiser, in other words, should be superseded by the fast battleship, i.e. fast strongest ship, in spite of her cost,

"She was the most beautiful ship I ever worked aboard. , .

I was in a bar on Clydeside in November 1940, an ordinary seaman in my first ship. An old man was telling me about the Hood.

“I’ve seen her but once since the war,” he said. “of course she's been refitted like, over the years.