By Bradley Perrett
London - An expedition has found the wreck of the British battlecruiser Hood and maybe the answer to a 60-year-old mystery - how the ship sank in combat with the German battleship Bismarck.
The only living survivor of the disaster headed on Tuesday to the site between Iceland and Greenland to lay a plaque on the wreck of the ship on which more than 1 400 of his shipmates died.
"This is a chance to say a final goodbye to the men who died there," Ted Briggs told Britain's Channel 4 television station, organiser of the expedition.
Three kilometres below the Atlantic, searchers on the weekend found that part of the ship had been blown to pieces, confirming that a magazine explosion had ripped her apart, the expedition said in a statement.
"Our immediate reaction has been one of surprise by the damage suffered by Hood," expedition leader David Mearns said after a remote-control submarine sent back the first pictures. "It is far worse than any of us had expected."
HMS Hood was the largest and most famous warship in the world from the day she was launched in 1918 to the day in 1941 when she and another British battleship attacked the Bismarck in a battle that soon led to the battlecruiser's destruction.
Only Briggs and two others survived.
The news shocked Britain and its Commonwealth allies, and decades later naval experts and enthusiasts still argue about how the great ship was so quickly destroyed.
Sweeping backwards and forwards with sophisticated sonar last week, the expedition found an object that looked liked a ship. The submarine was sent down and this week sent back pictures that confirmed that it was indeed the Hood.
"The 'Mighty Hood' is scattered over the sea floor in pieces," historian Eric Grove, another expedition member, said. "The section from the mainmast to the after... turret is blown to fragments."
"There can be no doubt that the after magazines exploded with considerable force."
That solves one of the mysteries about the Hood's loss. Some experts thought that a much smaller explosion of the ship's torpedoes, not the magazines, had broken the ship in two.
The wreck of the Bismarck, which the Royal Navy destroyed three days later, was found in 1989, but naval enthusiasts have always longed for someone to find what was left of the Hood.
The expedition has also found a partial answer to one further Hood mystery: how a shell got to the magazine.
According to popular myth, Hood was so weakly armoured that one of Bismarck's shells had plunged through her thin decks.
But the Hood actually had fairly strong armour and studies show that Bismarck's shells had no easy path through her decks.
Penetration of the thick side was also hard to explain. The Hood's course was thought to have made the Bismarck's shells hit her at a fine angle, so they would tend to bounce off.
But if the Hood had executed a planned turn, then the angle would have been much better for the Bismarck. The searchers found evidence that the ship had at least begun that final turn.
"From the rudder position we have found on the stern portion, we know that Hood was turning when she blew up," Grove said. "The more she turned to port (left), the more vulnerable her side armour became." - Reuters