Less than 10 minutes after the British opened fire, a shell from Bismarck struck Hood near her aft ammunition magazines. Soon afterwards, Hood exploded and sank within three minutes, with the loss of all but three of her crew. Prince of Wales continued to exchange fire with Bismarck but suffered serious malfunctions in her main armament.
The British battleship had only been completed in late March , and used new quadruple gun turrets that were unreliable. Prince of Wales soon broke off the engagement. The battle was a tactical victory for the Germans, but its impact was short-lived. The damage done to Bismarck' s forward fuel tanks forced the abandonment of the breakout and an attempt to escape to dry dock facilities in occupied France, producing an operational victory for the British.
In April , the German Kriegsmarine intended to send the recently completed fast battleship Bismarck into the Atlantic Ocean to raid the convoys carrying supplies from North America to Britain. The operation was intended to complement the U-boat attacks on British supply lines during the Battle of the Atlantic. The two fast battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had just completed a similar operation, code-named Berlin , between January and March that year. The number of major warships available to the Germans was limited; Bismarck ' s sister ship Tirpitz was not yet operational, Scharnhorst was in need of a boiler overhaul after Operation Berlin, and Gneisenau had been damaged by air attacks early April while in Brest, France.
The British Royal Navy learned of Bismarck ' s sortie after the Swedish cruiser Gotland spotted the vessels passing through the western Baltic Sea on 20 May; Gotland ' s report was passed to the British naval attache in Stockholm , who forwarded it to the Admiralty. British reconnaissance aircraft confirmed the Germans' presence in Norway. Another group, consisting of the battleship Prince of Wales , the battlecruiser Hood , and a screen of six destroyers , Electra , Achates , Antelope , Anthony , Echo and Icarus , under the command of Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland in Hood , cruised to the south of Iceland to intercept the Germans once they were detected.
Norfolk and Suffolk spotted Bismarck and Prinz Eugen on the evening of 23 May; Suffolk was fitted with radar that allowed them to shadow the Germans through the night whilst remaining outside of German gun range. Prince of Wales was a newly commissioned King George V -class battleship, similar to Bismarck in size and power. Prince of Wales had not yet been properly "shaken down", and her crew was inexperienced. She still had mechanical problems, especially with her main armament.
