HMS Hood (Pride of the British Navy)

HMS Hood (pennant number 51) was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, and considered the pride of the Royal Navy in the interwar period and during the early period of World War Two. She was one of four Admiral class battlecruisers ordered in mid-1916 under the Emergency War Programme. Although the design was drastically revised after the Battle of Jutland, it was realised that there were serious limitations even to the revised design; for this reason, and because of evidence that the German battlecruisers that they were designed to counter were unlikely to be completed, work on her sister ships was suspended in 1917. As a result, Hood was Britain's last completed battlecruiser. She was named after the 18th century Admiral Samuel Hood. Hood had served in the Royal Navy for over two decades before her sinking, almost certainly at the hands of the German battleship Bismarck, on 24 May 1941.