1/2 Crown - Elizabeth II H.M.S. Hood

H.M.S. Hood was sunk on 24 May 1941 by the German battleship Bismarck in the Denmark Strait — three salvos, a magazine detonation, and 1,415 men dead in under three minutes. Only three survived. At the time of her loss she was still considered the most powerful warship afloat by much of the British public, despite being critically under-armoured against plunging long-range fire, a vulnerability identified years earlier and never fully corrected.

Gibraltar issued a substantial run of silver commemoratives through the early 1990s tied to Royal Navy history, this piece among them.