Scapa by Jim Miller

Author:Jim Miller [Miller, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857905628
Publisher: Birlinn

Fig. 44

The North Pier at Lyness, with drifters.

Fig. 45

The King’s Harbourmaster, Scapa Flow, Commander Oswald Frewin RN (centre, behind lifebelt) with his staff.

HMS Scott surveyed the eastern channels before the war to find where the blockships should be placed. The first of these, the Madja, arrived in Water Sound in February 1939 and there were eventually to be twenty, the last one, the Inverlane, being sunk in place as late as May 1944. In keeping with the tradition of penny pinching, the Treasury placed a limit of £10,000 on the cost of a blockship and the purchase of at least one had to be foregone because the price demanded was too high.

On 14 September, Winston Churchill, at this time First Lord of the Admiralty, left London by train for Wick and on the fifteenth crossed to the Flow. He inspected the anchorage and entrances with the booms and nets, and was assured they were as good as in the last war with improvements being implemented or planned. Churchill stayed on HMS Nelson with Admiral Forbes and on 17 September sailed to visit the rest of the Fleet in Loch Ewe, at the time seen by the Admiralty as an anchorage safer from the attention of long-range bombers than Scapa, although its defences were also poor. The First Lord had last visited here in September 1914 to see Jellicoe’s fleet. The problems were still much the same but Churchill also found ‘the perfect discipline, style, and bearing, the ceremonial routine . . . unchanged’. The ships were old and this seemed to produce in him misgivings – ‘a strange experience, like suddenly resuming a previous incarnation’ – but he drew reassurance from the fact that the Empire was still intact and Britain still had command of the sea. When he returned to London, he was greeted with the news of the loss of HMS Courageous, sunk in the Western Approaches by U-29. It was not long before grim news came from Scapa Flow itself.58

The German naval command was well aware in 1939 of the weakness of the defences on the east side of Scapa Flow. Commodore Karl Dönitz, in charge of the U-boat fleet, knew that one of his submarines had the ability to thread its way among the blockships and effect entry to the anchorage, and selected U-47 under Kapitänleutnant Gunther Prien for the task. Hence, on 13 October, Prien and his crew lay submerged off the east coast of Orkney waiting their chance. Shortly after seven o’clock in the evening, U-47 surfaced and set course for Holm Sound, the gap between the mainland and Burray. A passing merchant ship forced Prien to submerge for a short time but by half-past eleven he was on the surface again and conning his ship towards the islands. In his log, Prien recorded that it was a very clear night and, although the land was dark, the Northern Lights were shedding an eerie glow in the sky and the blockships lay like ghosts in the wings of a theatre.

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