Free The Lonely Sea by Alistair MacLean

own lifetime…But a legend grows old.
    And now, with the long night’s high-speed steaming over, the dawn in the sky and the Bismarck looming up over the horizon, the legend was about to end forever.
    Safely out of range, but with a grandstand view of the coming action, the men of the Norfolk and the Suffolk watched the Hood and the Prince of Wales, acting as one under the command of Vice-Admiral Holland, bear down on the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. But even at that distance it was obvious that the two British ships were too close together, that Captain Leach of the Prince of Wales was being compelled to do exactly as the Hood did instead of being allowed to fight his own ship independently and to the best advantage, and, more incredibly still, that the closing course, their line of approach to the enemy, was all that a line of approach should not be. They were steering for the enemy at an angle broad enough to present the Germans with a splendid target but, at the same time, just acute enough to prevent their rearturrets from being brought into action, with the result that the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were able to bring their full broadsides to bear against only half of the possible total of the British guns.
    Even worse was to follow. The Hood was the first to open fire, at 5.52 a.m., and, for reasons that will never be clearly known, she made the fatal error of concentrating her fire on the Prinz Eugen, and did so throughout the battle. The mistake in identification was bad enough, but no worse than the standard of her gunnery: the Prinz Eugen emerged from the action unscathed.
    The Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, consequently, were free to bring their entire armament to bear on the Hood, who, because of her approach angle, could only reply with her two fore turrets. True, the Prince of Wales had now opened up also, but the blunt and bitter truth is that it didn’t matter very much anyway: her first salvo was more than half a mile wide of the target, the second not much better, and the third also missed. So did the fourth. And the fifth.
    The Germans did not miss. The concentrated heaviness of their fire was matched only by its devastating accuracy. Both were on target—the Hood —almost at once, the Prinz Eugen ’s 8-inch shells starting a fire by the Hood ’s mainmast within the first minute. The Bismarck, too, was hitting now, the huge 15-inch projectiles, each one a screaming ton of armour-piercing steel and highexplosive, smashing into the reeling Hood and exploding deep in her heart. How often the Hood was hit, and where she was hit we will never know, nor does it matter.
    All that matters, all that we do know, is what was seen by the survivors of that battle at exactly six o’clock that morning, as the fifth salvo from the Bismarck straddled the Hood. A stabbing column of flame, white and orange and blindingly incandescent, lanced a thousand feet vertically upwards into the grey morning sky as the tremendous detonation of her exploding magazines almost literally blew the Hood out of existence. When the last echoes of the great explosion had rolled away to lose themselves beyond the horizon and the smoke drifted slowly over the sea, the shattered remnants of the Hood had vanished as completely as if the great ship herself had never existed.
    So, in the twenty-first year of her life, the Hood died. This, the first naval engagement of her long life, had lasted exactly eight minutes, and when she went down she took 1,500 officers and men with her. There were three survivors.
PART TWO
    The destruction of the Hood, the invincible, impregnable Hood, came as a tremendous shock both to the Navy and the country at large. It wasincredible, it was impossible that this had happened—and the impossible had to be explained away, both verbally and in print, with all speed.
    As details of the action were at that time lacking, no mention was made of the Hood’ s suicidal angle of approach to the