WW2 75 – 24 May 1941 – Lost with the Mighty Hood: Able Seaman Percival Charles Herbert Acton (1917-1941)

Continued from OBERLEUTNANT HANS-LUDWIG WOLFF (1912-41) 

2 April 1941 - No longer an enemy   (German Air Force)

https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/12/ww2-75-2-april-1941-no-longer-enemy.html

 

 

Percival Acton’s name – as seen in the picture above – appears on Exmouth’s rather than on Budleigh Salterton War Memorial. And yet his mother was born in Budleigh in 1884, as fellow researcher and Exmouth resident Carol Fogg discovered. Alice May Pyne, brought up in the town, was the daughter of a local fisherman. She and her parents, John and Elizabeth Pyne, along with her sister Kate and brothers Joseph and John lived at 13 Cliff Road, as recorded in the 1891 census.

Alice May Pyne (1884-????)  moved away from Budleigh to settle in Brighton with her husband Charles Acton, and that is where Percival himself was born in 1917, growing up at 34, Ditchling Rise in the Sussex town.

 

HMS Hood, photographed on 17 March 1924. Image credit: Wikimedia

He followed his father into the meat trade and is listed as a wholesale butcher. When war broke out in 1939, like many of the Budleigh fishermen from his mother’s family, he joined the Royal Navy, rising after a few years’ experience to the rank of Able Seaman with the Service Number P/JX 172597. It is not known when he joined the crew of HMS Hood, but he would certainly have been proud to sail on this Admiral-class battlecruiser, regarded as invincible by the British public.

 

Hood (foreground) and Repulse (background) at anchor in Southern Australia during their world tour, 1924. Image credit: Wikipedia

Hood had been in service since just after WW1, having been commissioned on 15 May 1920, and had undergone a number of refits. However the ship’s material condition was apparently not of the best at the outbreak of war, such had been her near-constant active service as the Royal Navy’s most battle-worthy fast ship of its kind. On 25 September 1939 she was attacked by German aircraft in the North Sea and suffered damage which limited her speed, leading to a further refit in April and June 1940.

 

Bismarck in 1940. Image credit: Wikipedia

After patrols of the Bay of Biscay in November 1940 and March in the following year, Hood was sent to pursue the German battleship Bismarck, which had sailed for the Atlantic in May 1941. The British squadron of which she was part included two heavy cruisers, HMS Norfolk and HMS Suffolk and the battleship Prince of Wales. On 24 May, Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen were intercepted in the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland.   

 

Painting by the German war artist J.C. Schmitz-Westerholt, depicting Hood sinking stern first; Prince of Wales is in the foreground. Image credit: Wikimedia

Both German ships concentrated their fire on Hood, starting a large fire among the ammunition for the anti-aircraft guns and rockets on the boat deck, between her funnels.

One or more shells from Bismarck hit the boat deck for a second time, resulting in a massive explosion which broke the back of the ship. It sank in only three minutes with the loss of all but three members of its 1,418 crew.  

 

 

For the British public the sinking of HMS Hood must have been an immense shock, reported, as in the above edition of the Sunday Pictorial newspaper, as ‘sunk by a freak shot in battle with the Germans’. Image credit: www.dailyecho.co.uk 

 

 

Portsmouth Naval Memorial. Image credit: Wikipedia 

Percival is commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial. The H.M.S. Hood Association, set up in 1975, exists to gather information about his fellow-crew members with the aim of ‘perpetuating the memory of the Mighty Hood.’  

 

The next post is for PETTY OFFICER FREDERICK WILLIAM PANNELL (1907-41) who was killed on 26 May 1941 off the island of Crete while serving on HMS Gloucester. You can read about him at   

https://budleighpastandpresent.blogspot.com/2020/12/ww2-75-26-may-1941-sad-story-of.html