On the morning of May 24, 1941, in the freezing Denmark Strait, the largest and most famous warship in the world was hit by a single critical shell, snapped in two, and vanished in three minutes. Of 1,418 men aboard HMS Hood, only three survived. This episode treats the mighty Hood as a character study: a massive, complex, and fundamentally flawed machine whose destruction was seeded a quarter century before it happened.

We trace how the Battle of Jutland panicked the Admiralty into welding 5,000 extra tons of armor onto a hull already under construction, pushing her four feet deeper into the water and earning her the nickname the largest submarine in the Navy. We follow her glamorous 1923 to 1924 world cruise, the Invergordon mutiny, the collision with HMS Renown, the cracking condensers that stole hot water and heating from the crew, and the cancelled 1941 modernization that might have saved her. Then the grim mission at Mers-el-Kebir, the bizarre rocket-launched aerial mine mounts added to her deck, and the plunging 15-inch shell from Bismarck that found her weakest point.

• Why Hood’s deck armor was designed for contact-fuse shells just as time-delay plunging shells made it obsolete
• How constant dampness and shut-down ventilation led to high tuberculosis rates among the crew
• Why the Navy never pulled its greatest symbol into dry dock for a proper rebuild
• How David Mearns’ 2001 sonar expedition found the wreck with the rudder still locked in a 20-degree port turn
• The afterlife of Hood’s guns on Ascension Island and the ship’s bell rung on the 75th anniversary of her loss