Scapa Flow in the First World War

Scapa Flow is a wide stretch of water enclosed by the Orkney islands, off the northern tip of Scotland. For most of the war it was the main base of the British Grand Fleet, from which the strongest fleet in the world guarded the northern exit of the North Sea and waited for the German High Seas Fleet. The enemy never struck the fleet inside the bay, although the base began the war with no defences against submarines at all. After the armistice the German fleet was interned here, and in June 1919 its crews scuttled the ships themselves.

A base without barriers (1914)

On 28 July 1914 Winston Churchill ordered the First Fleet to move from Portland to its war base in Orkney. The ships left on 29 July and passed through the Strait of Dover at night, without lights. The choice was deliberate: from a bay far from the German ports the fleet could close the route to the Atlantic to Germany and enforce a blockade. On 4 August command of the fleet, now called the Grand Fleet, was taken over by Admiral John Jellicoe.

The Admiralty believed that the strong tidal currents and the limited range of the U-boats would serve as defence enough. Jellicoe did not share this calm, and on 30 September he wrote to Churchill that he slept far worse in harbour than at sea. When on 16–17 October batteries and destroyers reported a periscope in the bay, an alarm was raised and the whole fleet put to sea. It turned out to be a false alarm, but Jellicoe moved the ships to Lough Swilly in Ireland and Loch na Keal on the island of Mull. In November the fleet returned, and on 23 November the German U-18 tried to force its way into the bay through the Hoxa entrance, but was detected and lost.

A fortress in Orkney (1915–1918)

The entrances to the bay were closed one by one. Old merchant ships were sunk in the narrow channels on the eastern side and in Burra Sound in the west, and the main sounds were barred with nets, opened and closed by small drifters. The first line of barriers in the Hoxa entrance was completed on 29 December 1914, and those in Switha and Hoy in January and February 1915. Guns and searchlights were placed on the shores. From December 1914 the base command had its headquarters at Longhope, while supplies, workshops and communications were for a long time housed on depot ships. Only in September 1916 was it agreed to build a wharf and fuel tanks at Lyness on the island of Hoy.

From the bay the fleet set out on major operations. On the evening of 30 May 1916 Jellicoe led the battleships out from here to the Battle of Jutland and returned before noon on 2 June. On 5 June the cruiser Hampshire sailed from Scapa Flow for Russia with Lord Kitchener aboard and that same evening, off the west coast of Orkney, struck a mine.

The heaviest blow came from within. On 9 July 1917 the battleship Vanguard blew up at her anchorage. 843 of the 845 men aboard were killed, and the most likely cause is considered to be the spontaneous ignition of cordite. On 7 December four American dreadnoughts under Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman entered the bay. In April 1918 Admiral David Beatty moved the fleet’s main base to Rosyth, but Scapa Flow remained defended. In October 1918 UB-116 tried to get into the bay. It was detected by hydrophones, and mines fired from the shore sank it with its whole crew of 36.

Internment and scuttling (1918–1919)

The armistice required Germany to hand over its newest ships for internment. Norway and Spain would not accept them, so the Allies chose Scapa Flow. After the meeting at sea on 21 November, the German ships sailed here in groups from 22 to 27 November. The destroyers lay in Gutter Sound, the large ships near the islet of Cava. Most of the roughly 20,000 sailors were sent back to Germany in December, and fewer than five thousand men remained aboard, with no right to go ashore.

On 21 June 1919, when the Allies were about to take over the ships under the Treaty of Versailles, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter ordered them scuttled. Of the 74 interned vessels, 52 went to the bottom, and nine German sailors were killed. Franz von Hipper expressed his approval of the act in a letter. In the following years salvage firms raised most of the wrecks, but some of the German ships, like the remains of the Vanguard, still lie on the bottom of the bay.