Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

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Byron Angel
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Byron Angel »

"McMullen was not "furious" (his words) just because "communications were out"... He was clearly furious because of Leach decision to disengage.
"

In order to avoid any possible misunderstanding of language, are you presenting this as an opinion, or do you consider it to be a clear fact?

B
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody:
"are you presenting this as an opinion, or do you consider it to be a clear fact?"
Everyone can listen at McMullen interview (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80010751) and decide why he was "furious"... I would say it's the only logical conclusion.

However, if anyone still prefers to think that McMullen, in the heat of battle, was "furious" (his words) because communications were out (!), just when he realized his Captian was "breaking off the engagement" while "shooting was going very well" (his words)... he is free to believe so, I can't oblige anyone to face reality here.


Bye, Alberto
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"There's always a danger running in the enemy at close range" (Adm.W.F.Wake-Walker)
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by dunmunro »

Alberto Virtuani wrote: Fri May 10, 2019 7:00 am Hello everybody:
"are you presenting this as an opinion, or do you consider it to be a clear fact?"
Everyone can listen at McMullen interview (https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80010751) and decide why he was "furious"... I would say it's the only logical conclusion.

However, if anyone still prefers to think that McMullen, in the heat of battle, was "furious" (his words) because communications were out (!), just when he realized his Captian was "breaking off the engagement" while "shooting was going very well" (his words)... he is free to believe so, I can't oblige anyone to face reality here.


Bye, Alberto
The fact that McMullen might have been "furious" in the moment, doesn't change the fact that he then agreed that Leach did the right thing, by opening the range. Mcmullen had one concern and that was to keep his 14in guns on target, but Leach had to worry about the firestorm that was about to descend on PoW, and the ever declining volume of fire that PoW was capable of.
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by wadinga »

Fellow Contributors,

Reading the GAR there were considerable problems merely loading the cages on the 23rd. Turret B had problems which meant the shell arrestor was not refitted before Action Stations, they were busy fixing:
Hinge trays at forward shell room fouled the locking bolt on the revolving shell ring: both trays being bent.
and
This latter defect was taken in hand immediately in order to free the revolving shell ring and was completed a few minutes after action stations. It was not then considered advisable to proceed with replacing the arrestor.
Of B turret in the first action:
No mechanical defects.
Except operating without a shell arrestor and not having hydraulics available is not a mechanical defect. A cock-up, but not a defect. This does not contradict Barben's account.

We have established that everything was not "fine" with the guns, the Gunnery Officer at his binoculars was isolated from monitoring their performance and it is surely the case that McMullen would only start getting "furious" when his view of the target was taken away by PoW turning so far the forward DCT would not bear. When would this have been? Since PoW would have turned most of the approximately 160 degrees she had turned by this time, there is a strong likelihood the surging shell would have damaged Y turret shell ring already. This is as McMullen admits in the tape. The Captain acted rightly, as McMullen clearly says. Whether just enough turn to match Bismarck's course would have caused the shell surge or whether it needed more, no one will surely ever know.

Since boy seamen are unlikely to persuade a Captain that his actions are incorrect and should be reversed, however "furious" their Gunnery Officers are, his only purpose was to establish communications. When he went to the Compass Platform there was no Captain there because he was already down on the Admiral's Bridge.

McMullen's laconic delivery on the IWM tape says "as any gunnery officer would be" as a way of qualifying the use of the exaggerated "furious". He has already claimed he was "absolutely furious" about the Padre taking over the PA system, which must be at least double as furious as being merely "furious".

Incidentally on reel 3 he mentions how a simple hydraulic leak amongst the complicated interlocks on Y turret resulted in additional serious damage when the turret was being rotated as the vessel had just left Hvalfjord after the action and readying for possible deployment against a potentially returning Prinz was contemplated. Again the shell ring's fittings were smashed and disabled and that was just moving the turret, not even firing the guns! Reported in the GAR as:
On passage to Rosyth after the action, two further hinge trays in "Y" shell handling room were buckled by fouling the revolving shell ring.
His assessment "shooting was going very well" is of course subjective and retrospective. Even when quizzed by the arrogant A V Alexander he could not for certain say he had hit Bismarck, let alone 2.5 times (0.5 off for merely winging a boat). Later, much later, he would know he had. He was straddling with some salvoes although his own salvo plot shows not consistently. Most RN naval officers would never have a German battleship in their sights, no wonder he was mildly "miffed" when factors beyond his control quite rightly removed it from his vision. He would get two more chances as Leach pursued the fleeing Bismarck.

All the best

wadinga
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,
Wadinga wrote: "We have established that everything was not "fine" with the guns..."
We have established exactly the contrary (download/file.php?id=3463; however still someone prefers to trust the happy ending novel accounted by British for 78 years, than to trust figures that explicitly tell something different.

Tovey: "The PoW had started off well...". (although he was trying to find a justification for his Captain while writing his point 19....)
McMullen: "shooting was going very well" (retrospective, possibly, as an expert gunner looks behind and judges his ship performance.
Leach never mentioned in his report any actual gunnery problem, just his own "fears", that he had in his mind already before the battle...
The only one who says something different is... Wake-Walker... (when he needed to justify his own timid conduct...)

A gunnery expert (Adm.Santarini), after analysing the battle, judges the PoW one as an "excellent gunnery performance".

However, here in this forum, still there are members who need to believe to the "poor PoW that was firing badly"... Do they realize they are just repeating a wrong statement used to justify an officer whose conduct in front of the enemy was "debatable", to say the least?


Bye, Alberto
"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition" (Adm.A.B.Cunningham)

"There's always a danger running in the enemy at close range" (Adm.W.F.Wake-Walker)
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by dunmunro »

Alberto Virtuani wrote: Fri May 10, 2019 8:10 pm Hello everybody,
Wadinga wrote: "We have established that everything was not "fine" with the guns..."
We have established exactly the contrary (download/file.php?id=3463)
"We" haven't established anything since points all points except 8, 9, and 10 are disputed.
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Bill Jurens »

For what it's worth -- and I do have a bit of experience in this area -- I think Prince of Wales' gunnery was not very good at all. It's a very small sample -- on ship, one time, uncontrolled conditions -- but for whatever reasons PoW took, in my opinion, far to long to 'get on' to the target.

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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Byron Angel »

Another point worthy of note is that McMullen's salvo chart suggests that PoW had pretty much lost the plot after Salvo 14, with two successive double salvoes (15/16 and 17/18) falling notably short (1,000 yards?). It can be reasonably argued that 17/18 were likely compromised by the hard turn away to the south, but the earlier fall of 15/16 is more difficult to explain.

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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,
Bill Jurens wrote: "...I think Prince of Wales' gunnery was not very good at all.... but for whatever reasons PoW took, in my opinion, far to long to 'get on' to the target"
Despite personal opinions, undisputed facts demostrate that PoW took less time than Bismarck (3 minutes vs 3.5 or 4 minutes) to hit, therefore in such a difficult battle geometry (range closing by almost 900 meters per minute) her performance was excellent (considering the failure of her radar to provide the very useful initial range...). Hood never got on the target (she was really firing very badly, but the happy-ending novel could not point at Hood after her destruction...) and only Prinz Eugen hit her enemy less than a minute before PoW.

Coming to "getting on the target" (therefore straddling vs hitting), PoW straddled at the 6th semi-salvo. For Bismarck we don't know exactly: most British witnesses (I don't trust them very much, because all accounts are different and contradictory, as obviously they were not precisely counting enemy salvos) say she straddled at the 3rd salvo: however they speak of a 3rd salvo that straddled , hit and caused the boat deck fire (we know it was PG, not BS) and in any case this hit happened at 5:57:30 (too much time after open fire to be the 3rd salvo only...).
In addition, BS fired initially a Vollsalve, therefore her 3rd salvo is anyway 4th (or 6th semi-salvo, depending whether Bristish were counting 4 or 8 shots salvos, because BS was firing semi-salvos quite close one (A+B) to the other (C+D) even after the Vollsalve). I don't see any big "advantage" for BS gunnery vs PoW also in "getting on the target", disregarding hitting.

In addition, we have to keep in mind that we speak of a much larger distance from which PoW first hit and/or first starddled compared to a much shorter range at which BS adjusted her fire (4000 yards more, download/file.php?id=3463), confirming the "excellent performance" of PoW: of course, this is inconvenient for the ones who still in 2019 prefer to trust the "novel" because of the reasons lucidly explained by Adm.Santarini (download/file.php?id=2993).


The worsening of PoW performance after salvo 14 was due to the avoiding maneuvers around Hood and should not be considered as a gunnery problem in any case.


Bye, Alberto
"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition" (Adm.A.B.Cunningham)

"There's always a danger running in the enemy at close range" (Adm.W.F.Wake-Walker)
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by wadinga »

Fellow Contributors,

The only example where the generation of Happy Endings were contemplated, and then not for long:
(she was really firing very badly, but the happy-ending novel could not point at Hood after her destruction...)
was that the British authorities did want, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps for morale/propaganda reasons, to ascribe the damage Bismarck received to Hood. To somehow give her lost crew a validation for their sacrifice. However the evidence that nobody in Prince of Wales saw Hood's fire landing near McMullen's target gradually made it clear the new battleship had caused all the damage, and publication of German accounts also confirmed Hood fired at Prinz Eugen throughout, with photographs to prove it.

Therefore all accounts ascribe the hits to Prince of Wales and thus indirectly criticize Hood's gunnery, with the more-informed ones identifying the ancient and unmodernised fire control system as a major factor. Lord Chatfield pointed out in 1941 Hood had fought a ship 25 years younger than herself and since speed, guns and armour remained pretty much viable, the archaic Dumaresq/Dreyer table slated for replacement over 20 years previously and thus obsolete when installed, must be singled out.

Many sources have shown the extensive rebuild for Hood contemplated, and the reasons for treating other vessels first have been discussed at length, but I fail to see why Hood's fire control system could not have been radically updated to the standards for new builds in the late 1930s at minimal cost. When her secondary armament was replaced, the latest AFCT could have been installed at the same time, and inputting data from state of the art Type 284 radar into the venerable Dumaresq/Dreyer system was surely madness.

Once again, speculations have been misrepresented as facts:
undisputed facts demostrate that PoW took less time than Bismarck (3 minutes vs 3.5 or 4 minutes) to hit,
No one knows which of PoW's salvoes hit, there is no German account other than of Georg Herzog giving any idea when hits were received:
I was sleeping in compartment XI when, at 0500 hours, the alarm sounded. We were awakened [by a person] since the alarm device had malfunctioned. I saw a piercing flame (a flash) astern of port as I came topside; I later found out was from the sinking "Hood". While I was proceeding to my gun on the aircraft deck a shell hit a launch's bow and burst through it. I don't know where the shell detonated. Splinters flew about [and] one of them hit Bootsmannmaat Zeidler on the head.
Bismarck is supposed in the revisionist version to have switched targets and hit PoW in 50 seconds, including time of flight. This must be a world record for:
Coming to "getting on the target"
This was during the:
The worsening of PoW performance after salvo 14 was due to the avoiding maneuvers around Hood
although the same promoters say there were minimal manoeuvres around Hood, when they need to explain away their ridiculously short speculative timeframe and recorded angle of shell passage through the Compass Platform.
"We" haven't established anything since points all points except 8, 9, and 10 are disputed.
:ok:

All the best

wadinga
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Alberto Virtuani
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,
"thus indirectly criticize Hood's gunnery"
Q.E.D.: indirectly, never directly, while the incredibly poor Hood shooting should be the real discussion theme, not the "excellent" PoW performance, criticized here based on... nothing solid.

"No one knows which of PoW's salvoes hit"
...but we know very well which straddled. If hit can be disputed (in theory, as probability are for 3 straddles = 3 hits), straddles cannot. I'm afraid Bismarck was in no way superior in "getting on the target" than PoW (if anyone has a different "supported" view, not just feelings...he is welcome).

"there were minimal manoeuvres around Hood"
minimal maneuvres but large heelings generated by the rudder put hard to starboard + to port at max speed within 30 secs....

"We" haven't established anything since points all points except 8, 9, and 10 are disputed"
No, they are not "disputed" (because this would imply an alternative opinion comparable to this supported one download/file.php?id=3463), they are once again just "denied a priori".


Bye, Alberto
"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition" (Adm.A.B.Cunningham)

"There's always a danger running in the enemy at close range" (Adm.W.F.Wake-Walker)
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by northcape »

1) It is not known when, in a relative timeline, PoW has scored hits.
2) The same accounts for the time when Bismarck has started shooting.
3) As a consequence, these events can be pinned down with a relative accuracy of a few minutes at best.

These are some of the facts, the rest are personal opinions. I also suggest to Mr.Virtuani to learn about the meaning of the word "undisputed", and to reflect on his obsession on the word "fairy tale". Style, tone, and phrasing are becoming more and more obnoxious, while on the same time the same old wrong information is presented repetitively.

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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by HMSVF »

wadinga wrote: Sat May 11, 2019 9:20 am Fellow Contributors,

The only example where the generation of Happy Endings were contemplated, and then not for long:
(she was really firing very badly, but the happy-ending novel could not point at Hood after her destruction...)
was that the British authorities did want, perhaps sentimentally, perhaps for morale/propaganda reasons, to ascribe the damage Bismarck received to Hood. To somehow give her lost crew a validation for their sacrifice. However the evidence that nobody in Prince of Wales saw Hood's fire landing near McMullen's target gradually made it clear the new battleship had caused all the damage, and publication of German accounts also confirmed Hood fired at Prinz Eugen throughout, with photographs to prove it.

Therefore all accounts ascribe the hits to Prince of Wales and thus indirectly criticize Hood's gunnery, with the more-informed ones identifying the ancient and unmodernised fire control system as a major factor. Lord Chatfield pointed out in 1941 Hood had fought a ship 25 years younger than herself and since speed, guns and armour remained pretty much viable, the archaic Dumaresq/Dreyer table slated for replacement over 20 years previously and thus obsolete when installed, must be singled out.

Many sources have shown the extensive rebuild for Hood contemplated, and the reasons for treating other vessels first have been discussed at length, but I fail to see why Hood's fire control system could not have been radically updated to the standards for new builds in the late 1930s at minimal cost. When her secondary armament was replaced, the latest AFCT could have been installed at the same time, and inputting data from state of the art Type 284 radar into the venerable Dumaresq/Dreyer system was surely madness.

Once again, speculations have been misrepresented as facts:
undisputed facts demostrate that PoW took less time than Bismarck (3 minutes vs 3.5 or 4 minutes) to hit,
No one knows which of PoW's salvoes hit, there is no German account other than of Georg Herzog giving any idea when hits were received:
I was sleeping in compartment XI when, at 0500 hours, the alarm sounded. We were awakened [by a person] since the alarm device had malfunctioned. I saw a piercing flame (a flash) astern of port as I came topside; I later found out was from the sinking "Hood". While I was proceeding to my gun on the aircraft deck a shell hit a launch's bow and burst through it. I don't know where the shell detonated. Splinters flew about [and] one of them hit Bootsmannmaat Zeidler on the head.
Bismarck is supposed in the revisionist version to have switched targets and hit PoW in 50 seconds, including time of flight. This must be a world record for:
Coming to "getting on the target"
This was during the:
The worsening of PoW performance after salvo 14 was due to the avoiding maneuvers around Hood
although the same promoters say there were minimal manoeuvres around Hood, when they need to explain away their ridiculously short speculative timeframe and recorded angle of shell passage through the Compass Platform.
"We" haven't established anything since points all points except 8, 9, and 10 are disputed.
:ok:

All the best

wadinga
I've been reading these forums for the last 5 years (and those on the Hood website before they gave up and surrendered :lol: ) and to me its become increasing clear that actually "facts" are hard to come by and that "interpretation" of evidences (a lot of the time based on witness testimony which can be notoriously unreliable, documentation that in a lot of times was done after the event, or reliance on technology that was analogue and in no way compare to our digital age and charts inputed by humans who had other things in the back of their minds) are order of the day.

Bill Juren's ages ago asked the very good question "what do we actually know" in regard to arguments over the who's chart was correct. You could equally ask the same question in regard to the entire Denmark Strait engagement to be honest.
A lot of the arguments are revolve around the same source but have wildly disparate theories as to what they actually mean. There seems to be a willingness to dump some references as they don't fit the giant jigsaw puzzle and a idea that pure quantitive thesis can somehow prove or disprove a qualitative source,forgetting the that battles prior to to the electronic revolution were based on what were admittedly high complex analogue era machines - but controlled by humans. There was no AI in the background,no hard drives and not even a floppy disc or card!

To me these whole debates comedown to what a person instinctively believe is the case beforehand. If you think that there was a cover up, then the evidences can shaped or interpreted to show that there is a cover up. If you think that there was a fundamental problem with British equipment and construction you will see the sources differently. There seems to be absolutes, where you either think one or the other, there is no in-between, yet if we had a retro-scope you would in all probability see that in fact this was exactly where the true state of affairs would be found.

I've said this time and time again for all of the technology, the ballistics calculations and impressive ships you cannot ignore the human factor. Warfare is not clean, its effects on the human brain are well documented. On reading some posts there seems to be a idea that x,y,z should happen. well it probably does in training or exercises - thats why you do them so when the time comes a person is better able to carry out a role within a subconscious "hardwired" way. What I would say (from experience in dealing with life or death events) is that a person who has experienced them tends to be more "forgiving" than somebody who hasn't.


So yes training and exercise is there to prepare

And to a point it does.

However I can tell you that in real life it doesn't always work like that, a crisis situation is rarely textbook and things happen in ways that means the rulebook goes out the window. Things get missed, mistakes occur and human fragility comes to the fore. It may be inconvenient to some but it occurs and there are rafts of medical research that have been written about the effects of stress and traumatic events on men and there ability to function as per rulebook.

Interpretations we have plenty of. Indisputable facts are harder to tie down.


As our moderator once said (paraphrasing) "what do we actually know and agree on".

That would be a starting point.

(keep up the good work by the way Bill, this place is far more pleasant and evenhanded than in the past and we are damned lucky to have you!)



Best wishes HMSVF
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by Alberto Virtuani »

Hello everybody,
1) It is not known when, in a relative timeline, PoW has scored hits.
2) The same accounts for the time when Bismarck has started shooting.
3) As a consequence, these events can be pinned down with a relative accuracy of a few minutes at best.
Style, tone, and phrasing are becoming more and more obnoxious, while on the same time the same old wrong information is presented repetitively
Apart from the free provocation above,
1) ...but it is 100% sure (undisputed) that PoW's first straddle was after 3 minutes from open fire (5:53). Bismarck did not do so much better despite having a functioning radar. Therefore my statement (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=8552&p=83459#p83454) is proven. Sorry for Mr."northcape".
2) Bismarck started shooting at minute 5:55 as written in the PG KTB for both German ships. Theories pointing to another time (based on British confused accounts) have been proven wrong by Lutjens message (distance at open fire 208 hm...thus at least 2 minutes and half after PoW that opened from 25,000 yards, true range). If anyone wants to propose a different (proven) reconstruction, he will be welcome.
3) we already discussed the precision of the chronometers on board: no way to move the times, but I see "inderterminateness" is very comfortable when no other explanation can be given....

The only "obnoxious" thing here is the repetition of the old fairy-tale sold to the world by the British for so many years... we can agree to disagree on that of course but not on facts.

"this place is far more pleasant and evenhanded than in the past"
...surely for the ones who were deeply annoyed by Antonio Bonomi's precise reconstructions, new material and deep researches...


Bye, Alberto
"It takes three years to build a ship; it takes three centuries to build a tradition" (Adm.A.B.Cunningham)

"There's always a danger running in the enemy at close range" (Adm.W.F.Wake-Walker)
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Re: Message Traffic heard by RODNEY 24 May 1941

Post by alecsandros »

HMSVF wrote: Sat May 11, 2019 1:42 pm Therefore all accounts ascribe the hits to Prince of Wales and thus indirectly criticize Hood's gunnery, with the more-informed ones identifying the ancient and unmodernised fire control system as a major factor. Lord Chatfield pointed out in 1941 Hood had fought a ship 25 years younger than herself and since speed, guns and armour remained pretty much viable, the archaic Dumaresq/Dreyer table slated for replacement over 20 years previously and thus obsolete when installed, must be singled out.
Hello,
HMS Hood executed gunnery trials in 1938, 1939, in poor visibility and at medium to long range - about 15000y to 19000y IIRC, and fired her guns in anger - with excellent results - in 1940 at Mers-el-Kebir , from 17.500y to 18500y (range was increasing with time), against ships at anchor, and later against a fleeing battlecruiser (Strasbourg) and escort destroyers (http://www.hmshood.org.uk/reference/off ... 34-317.htm) (she fired about 36 semi-salvos at Mers-el-Kebyr, in about 15 minutes - but a critical aspect is that she had her aft turrets un-masked...).

In all accounts that I have read about those events, her gunnery team - and gunnery results - were reportedly good to very good.

And yes, I know she was scheduled for an upgrade in 1941, but it is a stretch to say she did poorly at DS because of "obsolescent" fire control, because the same "obsolescent" FC produced good results in other gunnery shoots (and IIRC, other RN battleships , equipped with the same FC , did good and very good against the enemy as well).
No one knows which of PoW's salvoes hit,[...]
Yes, we do know which salvos hit, because we know which salvos straddled. And yes, I know there is a possibility that some non-straddling salvos did produce hits, but based on Prince of Wales gunnery report, and salvo plot, that possibility is very remote .
Bismarck is supposed in the revisionist version to have switched targets and hit PoW in 50 seconds, including time of flight.
Yes, that is easily explained by battle geometry.
although the same promoters say there were minimal manoeuvres around Hood, when they need to explain away their ridiculously short speculative timeframe and recorded angle of shell passage through the Compass Platform.
Capt Leach's account explains this , as his decision of turn away was taken after the demise of the Hood, and therefore manouvred hard to exit the battle area. His manouvre to avoid Hood is superimposed on the same trajectory of the "exit".
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