Horace Hood - First World War

First World War

At the outbreak of the First World War, Hood's experience with coastal operations recommended him to serve with a small flotilla of Humber class monitors on the Belgian coast, bombarding German positions and troop formations during the Siege of Antwerp and then the Battle of the Yser, assisting Belgian forces to hold the coastline during the Race for the Sea.

In March 1915 Hood was in command of the Dover forces in the Channel, tasked with preventing German ships and submarines passing through. He was transferred to command of Force E at Queenstown by orders of Churchill and Fisher, for his perceived failure to do this as submarines continued to pass the Channel to threaten shipping in the Irish Sea. Force E consisted of obsolete cruisers and boarding vessels whose task was to patrol the area south west of Ireland to give instructions to arriving merchant vessels and guard against attacks by armed merchantmen. In February their operating area had been moved 200 miles further west as they were considered in themselves to be tempting targets for submarines. After his transfer, intelligence reports based on intercepted messages from German submarines showed that they had indeed had extreme difficulty passing the Channel, and as a result their orders were changed to travel around Scotland instead. Before Churchill was replaced as First Lord he corrected his mistake by appointing Hood to command of the Third Battlecruiser Squadron operating out of Rosyth in Scotland. Hood's command was the three battlecruisers of the Invincible class: HMS Indomitable, HMS Inflexible and his flagship HMS Invincible.

In late May 1916 came the only opportunity for the British battlefleet to engage the German main force at the Battle of Jutland. Hood's squadron was attached to Jellicoe's main battlefleet and thus had not witnessed the destruction of two British battlecruisers at the guns of their German counterparts. Arriving as the action was well underway but ahead of the main fleet by advantage of their greater speed, Hood's force's first action was to rescue the light cruiser HMS Chester, which had been separated from the main fleet to provide a signal relay but was then ambushed by four German cruisers and was in danger of sinking. Hood's timely arrival scattered the German ships and caused fatal damage to SMS Wiesbaden, which sank later that night with 589 of her crew.

Hood's intervention had far greater effects than were realised at the time however. In diverting his squadron to the North-West to aid Chester, Hood had inadvertently confused the German battlecruiser commander Admiral Hipper into believing that the main British force was approaching from the North-West and prompting his withdrawal to the main German fleet, an act which has been claimed saved the British battlecruiser fleet from destruction. Hood meanwhile attached his squadron to the British battlecruiser squadron of Admiral Beatty and with them formed the vanguard of the British battlefleet, which was now heading directly for the approaching Germans.