Why is there a sunken fleet at Scapa Flow?

At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month 1918 the First World War ended. All fighting
on the Western Front stopped and the guns fell silent. Fighting on the Eastern Front had
mainly ceased earlier in the year. Germany had agreed to an armistice after fours years of
fighting, her armies exhausted, navy blockaded in their home ports and her population at near
starvation. With the war the drain on manpower had crippled the agricultural sector with fields
full of crops but nobody to harvest them. Imports were also wiped out due to the Royal Navy
(RN) blockade of German and her allies' ports. The British also put enormous pressure on
neutrals not to trade with Germany so her economy collapsed as a result.

For the German Highs Fleet their high water mark had come and gone. It had done battle
with the British in 1914 off the coast of Chile and the Falkland Islands coming out victors and
vanquished. In 1915 the Germans again met the British at Dogger Bank and beat them
decisively. The Royal Navy, on the other hand, was pursuing a strategy seeking to engage
and cripple the High Seas Fleet in a single engagement,. Finally in 1916 the Germans
ventured forth from their home ports hoping to lure the British fleet onto a picket of U-Boats.
But the Royal Navy (RN) alerted by German signals side stepped the U-Boats and clashed
directly with the German High Sea's Fleet. By the end of the day the Germans had won a
tactical victory, sinking more ships than they lost but they would never venture forth to do
battle again so had lost the strategic war.

With the fleet confined to port and the war drawing to a close, mutiny and revolution were rife
within the ships. When the fleet was ordered out to sea for a last battle in 1918 most of the
sailors disobeyed or simply deserted. This led to the Kiel Mutiny, revolution, abdication and
the end of Imperial Germany. With the war over under the terms of the Armistice, the High
Seas Fleet went into internment at the Royal Navy's base at Scapa Flow in Orkney off the
North coast of Scotland. In "Operation ZZ" on 21 November 1918, sixty Allied battleships
escorted eleven battleships, five battlecruisers, eight cruisers and forty-eight destroyers of the
High Seas Fleet into captivity. On November 21st at 3.57 p.m. just 10 days since the wars
end the German flag was ordered to be hauled down and would not be hoisted again until the
ships were scuttled.

The Germans were not happy at being interned at Scapa Flow as they felt that they should
have been interned in a neutral port, and that the British were breaking the spirit, if not the
word of the Armistice. They were however in no position to do anything about it. Over time
the 20,000 crew of the fleet was reduced just skeleton crews totaling 1700. During this time
peace talks had been dragging on, with several extensions to the armistice. The Allies were
divided over the fate of the ships with many countries wanting a share, while the British as the
key naval power at the time were less keen to boost the strength of rival navies (American
and French in particular). The final version of the Treaty of Versailles involved the surrender
of the interned ships.

Meanwhile the German commander, Ludwig von Reuter, was fearful that the British would
suddenly and without warning seize his ships which had never being defeated in battle and
therefore began to take preparations to scuttle the fleet out of a point of honour. On the
morning of 21 June the British battleships at Scapa Flow left for exercises. Admiral Reuter
chose this moment to start the scuttling of his interned vessels. In the days leading up to the
scuttling the officers kept the task a secret from the crews fearful of a leak but finally told the
men and they prepared for the event. The British were also all too aware of the problems of
taking over the ships to prevent scuttling but had not fully finalised their own plans prior to
leaving on exercise

At 10.30am von Reuter signalled the ships of the fleet "Paragraph 11 – Confirm". This was a
reference to a German naval drinking song that revolved around a line to 'let the water in'. At
noon the bell of the flagship sounded after hoisting the signal flags and repeating the
message via signal lamp. It took over an hour for the message to be relayed to all of the
ships but once received the crews struck down the Royal Navy ensign and raised the Imperial
German flag. Crews rushed to their stations, opening sea cocks and jamming watertight
doors open to allow the water flow through the compartments. Others prepared to repulse
boarding parties arming themselves with chair legs and other weapons they were able to
gather.

The first ship of the German Fleet to sink after the order to scuttle was von Reuter's flagship
the SMS Friedrich der Grosse. This battleship sank beneath the surface at 12:16pm. A group
of Royal Marines, trying to prevent the scuttling of one ship, they killed the captain and first
officer of the battleship SMS Markgraf. Seven other German officers and men were shot
during the operation which caused no British casualties. These men would become the last
men killed in combat during World War One. Less than five hours had passed when the last
ship, the battleship SMS Hindenburg, settled on the bottom. The bill amounted to 53 ships
sunk, 17 beached and only four undamaged. Whilst the fleet was sinking the remaining
British ships contacted the squadron on exercise who rushed back to Scapa Flow but could
do little about it.

The damage was staggering. Of the 16 German battleships and battlecruisers interned,
fifteen were sunk and were a total loss. The only survivor of the battlewagons was the SMS
Baden that was only narrowly saved due to being towed to the beach by fast acting British
tugboats. The rest of the fleet was in the same shape. Four light cruisers were sunk by their
crews and the other four beached. The German destroyer crews took 34 of their craft down to
Davy Jones locker but could not prevent the other 12 to be beached by the British. The only
boats actually floating that were taken over by the British were four small torpedo boats. The
torpedo boats survived because of their size they did not have sea valves to open and the
crews had no explosives to sink them. By the time the sun set on Scapa Flow 400,000 tons of
the Imperial German navy had committed ritual suicide, the largest loss of shipping in a single
day in history. Publicly the British were outraged but in private there was a sense of relief that
the problem of what to do with the fleet was now ended. Considerable efforts were made by
British Intelligence to prove that the scuttling had been authorised by Berlin but they never
found any proof.

Afterwards over the next two decades there were numerous recovery operations in place.
British engineer Ernest Cox purchased 43 of the sunken vessels and salvaged them all to one
extent or another. Starting work in 1922 he designed several revolutionary techniques that
enabled him to actually raise 35 of the vessels and patch them enough to remain afloat
upside-down for salvage. Several ships were towed to Rosyth for scrapping. Cox's company
Cox & Danks and later the Alloa Ship breaking Company continued the work until 1939. A
number of small craft were recovered that had served on board the larger German ships as
cutters and tenders. One of these, a motor launch from the German battle cruiser SMS
Hindenburg renamed the Brenda is still in existence at the Shetlands Museum.

Today only eight of the ships remain on the bottom of Scapa Flow. These consist of the
Battleships SMS Kronprinz Wilhelm, SMS Markgraf, and SMS Konig; and the light cruisers
SMS Brummer, SMS Bremse, SMS Koln, SMS Karlsruhe, and SMS Dresden. They are
registered as memorial monuments and are protected from further salvage efforts. Because
they lie in waters only 25-45m deep they are very popular recreational scuba diving havens.

These ships now constitute the world's largest and best reserve of non-radioactive steel.
Since the metal that was used in the construction of these ships was forged before the advent
of the nuclear age and has been shielded by its watery grave it does not contain radioactive
isotopes. This has turned out to be important in the construction of deep space probes and
other sensitive mechanisms.

So lies von Reuters fleet of Scapa Flow. Never in all his days would he have foreseen that
there would be space travel by the end of the 20th century and that his ships would have
played such an important part of it…

Compiled by Colm Lowney
Sources – Naval-history.suite101.com
Wikipedia
Worldwar1.co.uk

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