In one sense it was not new, for as early as the eleventh century Scandinavian saga-makers had sung of a ship with "its sides sheathed in iron”—“Ljot the Pale is in the east in the Swedish isles; he has a ‘dragon,’ covered with iron above the sea.”

The Hood was heavily armored—but she had been designed before the lessons of Jutland had been fully appreciated. The effect of plunging fire on the upperdecks of capital ships meant that those decks needed to be as well protected as her flanks.

As the ordnance factories machined and proved her guns— eight 15-inch guns each weighing 100 tons and housed in 900-ton revolving turrets—her four propellers, weighing 20 tons apiece, were being cast. Meanwhile riveters, suspended like the Lilliputians over the frame of Gulliver, were busy at their noisy, skillful trade.

The very names of the rivets have a music of their own—snap- head, and countersunk, panhead, rough hammered point, snap point, and panhead with conical neck. Above, on the rapidly forming decks, some of the riveters would be heating their metal bolts, an apprentice keeping the fire at its right temperature. With a swift twist one of the men would lift the hot rivet, the tongs he used seeming like a steel extension of his arm, so easy was the movement. Beside him the bell mouth of a flexible tube gaped in the gray air. With a flick the hot rivet rattled down the echoing pipe, to leap out somewhere below, where another man seized it and, while the fire was still in the metal, thrust it into position in plate or frame.

On August 22, 1918, three months before the German High Seas Fleet steamed down the Firth of Forth to surrender under the guns of the Grand Fleet, the great hull took the water. Too late to play a part in the first of the World wars, old by the time the second one broke out, the ship that now moved slowly to the restraining hawsers of fussing tugs was to dominate the sea lanes and play an important role in the politics of the next twenty years. Launched when victory was in sight, she would represent the sunset glow of sea power—the last of the big ships whose presence on the horizon could determine policy. A lean silhouette reported off a coast line, she would be welcomed by the citizens of many countries and watched uneasily by those whose schemes were thwarted by her presence.

Ventis Secundis—With Favorable Winds—her ship’s crest would read. Her name came from a family of great sailors. Most distinguished of them had been Viscount Samuel Hood, the Admiral whose actions against the French in the West Indies at the close of the eighteenth century were among the most brilliant of that, or almost any, war. Her name was also a tribute to Rear- Admiral the Honorable Horace Lambert Hood, third son of the fourth Viscount, and lineal descendant of the great Admiral. He had died at Jutland. A friend of Earl Beatty and leader of the Third Battle Cruiser Squadron, Rear-Admiral Hood had gone down aboard his ship the Invincible under the eyes of his

Commander-in-Chief. His widow, Lady Hood, launched the great ship.

No man living can avoid his fate, and ships too—which also have their characters and personalities—are subject to the same immutable laws. What strange operation of chance or fortune determined this ship’s name? Here is an eyewitness account of the way in which Rear-Admiral Hood met his death in the Invincible.

 

“Hood pressed home his attack, and it was an inspiring sight to see this squadron of battle-cruisers dashing towards the enemy with every gun in action. On the Lion's bridge we felt like cheering them on, for it seemed that the decisive moment of the battle had come. Our feelings, however, suffered a sudden change, for just when success was in our grasp, the Invincible was hit by a salvo amidships. Several big explosions followed, great tongues of flame shot out from her riven side, the masts collapsed, the ship broke in two, and an enormous pall of black smoke rose to the sky. One moment she was the proud flagship full of life, intent on her prey; the next, she was just two sections of twisted metal, the bow and stem standing up out of the water like two large tombstones suddenly raised in honour of a thousand and twenty-six British dead; an astonishing sight, probably unique in naval warfare.”

 

 

It was not to be unique.

On that August launching day, with the gulls screaming over the disturbed water as the ship settled and the tugs took her, as the builders and the admirals and Admiral Hood’s widow watched, and as the young apprentice kept his eyes on This” plate on the starboard quarter, did no one feel a shiver down the spine? But then the launching of a great warship is always a moment of emotion. "A terrible beauty is born. . . *

 

*Chalmers, The Life and Letters of David, Earl Beatty. Compare this description with the end of the Hood, page 193.

 

“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” With these words Admiral David Beatty turned to his flag captain Ernie Chatfield on the bridge of the battle cruiser Lion during the first part of the Battle of Jutland. What prompted them was the sight of the battle cruiser Queen Mary disappearing in a column of gray smoke while masts and funnels fell in over her broken back. “Like a toy in a pond,” remarked one of the other eyewitnesses.

What were the lessons of Jutland? The question has often been asked, and the battle has been fought over on paper more than almost any other in British history. That fact in itself seems to prove that no one can consider Jutland a decisive victory. Little ink has been spilled over Trafalgar.