Internment of the High Seas Fleet

During the night before 21 November 1918 the whole British Grand Fleet, together with American and French ships, sailed out of the Firth of Forth into the North Sea. It was not going into battle. It was to receive the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, which it had failed to destroy in four years of war. At about eight o’clock the German ships appeared on the horizon: 9 battleships, 5 battlecruisers, 7 light cruisers and 49 destroyers, sailing under the command of Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. Before noon all of them lay at anchor in the Firth of Forth as interned ships. It was the end of the fleet that Kaiser Wilhelm II and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz had spent twenty years building to challenge Britain at sea.

Terms of the armistice

The Armistice of Compiègne required Germany within seven days to disarm and hand over for internment 10 battleships, 6 battlecruisers, 8 light cruisers and 50 of the most modern destroyers. They were to go to a neutral port or, failing one, to an Allied port. The Americans preferred a neutral port, but Norway and Spain refused, so the Allies accepted the proposal of the British admiral Rosslyn Wemyss that the ships be guarded at the main base of the Grand Fleet, Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. The details were settled by the commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral David Beatty, on 15–16 November with the German envoy, Rear-Admiral Hugo Meurer. The day before the meeting at sea, the first U-boats surrendered at Harwich.

The commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Franz von Hipper, refused to lead the fleet into internment in person, so on 18 November the task was taken on at his request by Reuter, until then commander of the I Scouting Group, the battlecruiser force. It was not easy, for since the Kiel mutiny the ships had been run by sailors’ councils, and many officers had lost their authority. The ships were disarmed and their ammunition removed. According to German accounts the sailors’ council won only the concession that the ships sailed with small red pennants, which were hauled down on the open sea. On 19 November the ships left the Schillig roads off Wilhelmshaven. The battleship König and the light cruiser Dresden were not ready to sail and stayed at home. During the passage across the Heligoland Bight the destroyer V30 struck a mine and sank; according to German figures two sailors were killed.

The meeting at sea

The Grand Fleet left the Firth of Forth at a quarter past two in the morning. Beyond the net barriers it formed into two enormous columns made up of thirteen squadrons. According to the American historian Robert Massie it numbered more than 370 ships, counting the American and French ships. The Americans were represented by the 6th Battle Squadron, the French by an armoured cruiser and two destroyers. Beatty’s orders required full readiness for action, since no one was certain that the Germans would not attempt some treachery at the last moment.

The German ships were sighted shortly after eight, about 40 nautical miles east of the Isle of May, which lies at the entrance to the firth. They were led by the British light cruiser Cardiff. At 9.30 a.m. Cardiff brought the German column between the two lines of the Grand Fleet, and Beatty turned the whole fleet through 180 degrees to escort the Germans into the firth. The day was fine but misty, and the ships moved slowly. Without any incident the German ships came to anchor at about noon in several lines in the middle of the firth, between Kirkcaldy Bay and Aberlady Bay, with the destroyers nearer the southern shore.

When the last of them had dropped anchor, Beatty made the signal: the German ensign was to be hauled down at sunset and was not to be hoisted again without permission. As his flagship, the battleship Queen Elizabeth, passed the ships of the Grand Fleet on her way to her anchorage, their crews cheered her loudly. In the afternoon Commodore Michael Hodges went aboard Reuter’s flagship, the battleship Friedrich der Grosse, and informed him that Beatty did not intend to receive him and that the ships would be interned at Scapa Flow. Reuter protested against the order about the ensign but was told that the commodore had no power to change it. The next day the British inspected the German ships and found them completely disarmed.

To Scapa Flow

The British official history, written by Henry Newbolt, observes that Beatty and Tyrwhitt treated the whole operation as an administrative matter not worth describing, but the press described it in the loftiest language it could command, and Newbolt himself considered the surrender an event with few parallels in history. A great fleet that had not been beaten in open battle surrendered without firing a shot, broken from within by revolution and by defeat on land.

From 22 November the German ships sailed in groups to Scapa Flow. The last arrived there on 27 November. The destroyers were moored in Gutter Sound, and the large ships west and north of the islet of Cava. On 6 December they were joined by König, Dresden and a destroyer replacing V30, and in January 1919 by the battleship Baden, handed over in place of the unfinished battlecruiser Mackensen. Of the roughly 20,000 sailors who had brought the ships over, most were sent back to Germany in December. Fewer than five thousand men remained aboard, with no right to go ashore. Their fate was to be decided by the peace conference. On 21 June 1919, when the Allies were about to take over the ships under the Treaty of Versailles, Reuter ordered them to be scuttled.