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  ...