CHAPTER 8
The dangers to the fleet at sea from submarines and mines were hazards posed by powerful, new weapons used with increasing skill by a resourceful, determined enemy. Unfortunately, another peril was inflicted on the British Grand Fleet by its own government and Admiralty. No safe harbor awaited Jellicoe and his ships when they returned from the sea. Arriving at Scapa Flow on August 2, the future Commander-in-Chief found the main war anchorage of the Grand Fleet wholly undefended against surface attack—for example, a sudden violent inrush of enemy destroyers launching torpedoes at the lines of anchored dreadnoughts. There were no man-made barriers to prevent silent, invisible penetration by submerged submarines. The fleet’s other northern bases, Rosyth on the Firth of Forth and Cromarty Firth, near Inverness, were scarcely better protected. As a result, during the war’s early months, Jellicoe always felt more secure when his ships were at sea, despite the U-boats and mines that might be in their path. Thus, between August and December 1914, the Grand Fleet steamed 16,800 miles. During this time, Jellicoe’s Iron Duke burned over 14,000 tons of coal, more than half its own weight. The flagship was in harbor for only one day in August 1914, and for six complete days in September. Inevitably, this constant movement meant wear on the ships’ machinery and strain on the men. Postponed maintenance led to increased breakdowns. Gradually, as more and more ships were detached for repairs, the size of the Grand Fleet battle line began to shrink.
Churchill described the situation: “The Grand Fleet was uneasy. She could not find a resting place except at sea. Conceive it, the ne plus ultra, the one ultimate sanction of our existence, the supreme engine which no one had dared to brave, whose authority encircled the globe—no longer sure of itself.” This was more than a predicament; it was a scandal. The Royal Navy had led the world in warship innovations that had revolutionized surface naval warfare. The British fleet was the largest in the world; it dominated the oceans; it was supreme in the North Sea. Yet when war with Germany began, this armada had no secure North Sea base. Scapa Flow, the fleet’s principal war anchorage, which guarded the North Sea and the northern passage around the British Isles, had been left undefended. And one of those responsible was the man who had been First Lord during the two years before the war: Winston Churchill.
Before the rise of the German navy, the threat to British naval supremacy had come from Spain, the Netherlands, and France. The Royal Navy’s principal bases—Chatham, at the mouth of the Thames; Portsmouth, shielded by the Isle of Wight; and Devonport, at Plymouth—all were placed to confront those traditional enemies. But in 1904, when concern over the growth of the German fleet led to the beginning of a massive warship construction program and a projected redeployment of the fleet into the North Sea, those well-defended and comprehensively equipped bases were too far away. For a war with Germany, a new naval base on the North Sea was needed. This requirement had been recognized by the British government more than a decade before Jellicoe took command of the Grand Fleet. On March 5, 1904, Prime Minister Arthur Balfour told the House of Commons that the Cabinet had approved an Admiralty request to establish a new base for battleships at Rosyth, on the northern side of the Firth of Forth. The Forth was only 375 miles across the North Sea from Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven; there was ample accommodation for a large number of ships; the anchorage was connected by rail with all of Britain; its single entrance made it defensible against attack from the sea. A drawback was the giant railway bridge spanning the Firth; if collapsed by shellfire or sabotage, the wrecked bridge might trap the fleet in the anchorage upstream. Parliament weighed these factors and approved a major base on the Firth of Forth.
And then the years went by and nothing happened. Political doubts arose as to the need for the new base: perhaps there would never be a war; why provoke Germany? There were technical arguments: some now said that the long approaches to the estuary were vulnerable to enemy minelaying; others declared that the area of deep water upstream above the bridge was insufficient to berth the growing fleet. Interservice turf wars became a factor. Traditionally, the defense of naval harbors was a War Office responsibility—the army built the forts and supplied the guns and the artillerymen. Nevertheless, not unnaturally, the navy wanted a voice in these matters. Further, the establishment of a major base at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth required the building of a small town to accommodate dockyard workers. Who was to pay for this? The new First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher, disapproved of Rosyth. Soon after his arrival at the Admiralty in October 1904, Fisher advised the First Lord, Lord Selbourne, “Don’t spend another penny on Rosyth!” Fisher believed that the proposed base was too far inland from the open sea and was unsafe because of the presence of the Firth of Forth bridge. He preferred Cromarty Firth, near Inverness, or the Humber River, on the east coast of England. In 1910, Fisher boasted, “I got Rosyth delayed four years as not being the right thing or right place.” Two years later, he wrote to a friend, “As you know I have always been ‘dead on’ for Cromarty and hated Rosyth, which is an unsafe anchorage—the whole fleet in jeopardy . . . and there’s that beastly bridge which, if blown up, makes the egress very risky. . . . Also, Cromarty’s strategically better than Rosyth. . . . I still hate Rosyth.” The result was that during Fisher’s six years as First Sea Lord, no serious work was done at Rosyth. Some in the navy protested; Jellicoe, as Controller at the Admiralty, wrote to Fisher in 1909 that the development of the base was “of the utmost gravity.” Nevertheless, on March 18, 1912, eight years after Balfour’s announcement, the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, informed the House that the two large dry docks at Rosyth would not be ready until 1916.
There was another reason for the delay at Rosyth. When, in 1912, the new strategy of distant blockade dictated shifting the dreadnought fleet to the north to control the gap between Scotland and Norway, work on Rosyth gained in importance, but other northern harbors also came into consideration: Cromarty Firth and Scapa Flow. Cromarty was advocated as an advanced base for dreadnought battle squadrons and Scapa Flow as a war anchorage for light forces. But because war seemed unlikely, work on defense of these harbors proceeded slowly. On the eve of war, Rosyth and Cromarty had been equipped with enough shore artillery to fend off attack by light surface ships, but both remained open to submarines. Scapa Flow remained undefended.
Money, of course, was the primary reason. The Treasury, especially under the Liberal chancellor David Lloyd George, begrudged all money spent on armaments. In allocating the sums it could wring annually from Parliament, the navy thought first of ships, not bases. In 1912, the Admiralty asked for permanent defenses for Scapa Flow. But upon learning that the cost of a modest defense would be £379,000—one-fifth the cost of a new dreadnought—the Admiralty decided that the advantage gained was not worth the cost, and the request was withdrawn. The Naval Estimates for 1913–14 called for an unprecedented £46,409,300, but of this sum only £5,000 was designated for unspecified works at Scapa Flow. The future base of the Grand Fleet was to be left undefended.
Six miles off the northern coast of Scotland, lying in the gray sea that leads to Norway, are the nearest of seventy islands called the Orkneys. There, behind red limestone cliffs and white sand beaches, swept by a wind that makes it difficult for trees to gain a footing, exists a landscape of emerald green. Inhabited since the Stone Age, colonized by the Picts, conquered by the Vikings, and ruled for 600 years by kings of Norway, the Orkneys became a part of Scotland in 1472 and of Great Britain in 1707. For mariners, two features mark the Orkneys. The first is the Pentland Firth, the six-mile-wide gap north of Scotland through which the Atlantic Ocean races into the North Sea at 8 to 10 knots and back again twice a day. The other, just to the north of the Pentland Firth, is a vast, nearly land-locked sheet of sheltered water, ten miles long and eight miles wide, which makes up one of the great natural anchorages in the world: Scapa Flow. Enclosed by a ring of low, gently rounded islands, this great expanse of water covers over 140 square miles. The bottom is sandy and relatively shallow, nowhere deeper than a hundred feet, most of it perhaps fifty feet. It is a harbor large enough to hold all the navies in the world.
In these northern waters, the islands are shrouded, sometimes for days, in mists. But on a summer day, an Orkneyman has written, Scapa Flow becomes a “great seawater lake with its enclosing necklace of islands . . . seeming to float in their own bubble of clear air below the wide arch of a pale blue summer sky.” Crossing the Flow by boat in summer, the visitor travels in brilliant sunshine surrounded by sparkling water, with all the rich green meadows and reddish moors of the Flow acutely visible, only to plunge suddenly into a thick white mist that makes seeing across the deck almost impossible. Then moving back into sunlight, with the mist still blowing off the tops of the hills, the Flow seems even grander, more immense.
The anchorage has three entrances normally used by ships. To the south is Hoxa Sound, four to five miles long and one and a half miles wide at its narrowest, running northward from the Pentland Firth. In the Great War, this became the main entrance for dreadnoughts. The Switha entrance, known as the “tradesman’s entrance,” also opens from the Pentland Firth; it leads to nearby Switha Sound and from there into Longhope Sound, which at first was the base for trawlers, drifters, boom ships, and other small craft. The third entrance, coming in from the west, is the Hoy Sound. In addition, there were other narrower, shallower, and more difficult entrances from the east, used by fishermen. All the entrances are subject to strong tides and tidal currents and water continually flows in and out of the harbor in a powerful, smooth torrent.
As a base for the Grand Fleet, Scapa offered many advantages. Its vast natural harbor was far larger than the anchorages at Rosyth or Cromarty Firth. It was sited on Pentland Firth, the shortest and safest route by which ships on the west coast of Britain could move into the North Sea. It was closer to the gap to be patrolled between Scotland and Norway. Its strong tides and frequent bad weather were expected make its entrances almost invulnerable to hostile warships. There were, on the other hand, drawbacks to Scapa Flow. The island harbor was set apart from the railway system of Great Britain; therefore, everything needed by the fleet—coal, oil, ammunition, food and stores—had to be brought by ship. The tides inside the anchorage would make it difficult to operate large floating dry docks for major ships. And basing the fleet in the Orkneys would place it hundreds of miles away from many vulnerable points the British navy was expected to protect: the Channel and the long, exposed east coast of England. Nevertheless, it was to this remote harbor in a world of mists that, as war approached, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the First Sea Lord dispatched the British fleet. From there, secluded in a place of mystery, it could use its immense power to influence—or, if necessary, to strike—the enemies of Britain.
Although no preparations had been made before the war to develop Scapa Flow as a permanent base, the harbor had served for many years as a summer exercise ground for the Home Fleet. Every year, from April until October, naval vessels appeared in and around the Orkneys. In 1909, when Fisher was First Sea Lord, use of Scapa Flow became extensive. In April of that year, eighty-two warships, led by the new Dreadnought and including thirty-seven other battleships and cruisers and forty-four destroyers, sailed into the Flow through Hoxa Sound. A few weeks later, in June, eight battleships, seven cruisers, and twenty-seven destroyers returned to the harbor. The national press began to speculate that Scapa Flow was to become a permanent first-class naval base and the Liberal government was pressed to embark on this project, but the new First Sea Lord, Sir Arthur Wilson, was unenthusiastic. Nevertheless, the fleet continued to appear. In 1910, ninety warships, commanded by Prince Louis of Battenberg and including battleships and battle cruisers, cruisers, and destroyers, used the base from August through September. In 1911, destroyer flotillas exercised in and around the Flow, and in October battleships came to train in night firing.
Up to this point, the enormous harbor had been equipped with only token protection against surface attack: four small, mobile guns were manned by local Territorial Army artillerymen whose civilian occupations often made them unavailable. “The great majority of the men are unable to attend camp owing to the fact that the training season coincides with the season of herring fishing upon which their livelihood depends,” explained a report to the War Office. In 1912, the Admiralty considered stationing a permanent garrison of 250 marines at Scapa Flow to prevent a coup de main, but nothing was done. Instead, during maneuvers that year, a force of 350 Royal Marines and Royal Artillerymen was landed. The troops spent a week on one of the islands and then were reembarked. In 1913, proposals were made to install twenty-two permanent guns and a number of searchlights in concrete emplacements. Nothing was done. In November 1913, Churchill announced that Cromarty had been chosen as a major base over Scapa Flow. “Having to choose between the two,” Churchill informed Battenberg, “we deliberately chose Cromarty as the vital place to be fortified.” And now that this decision was made, Churchill told the First Sea Lord, he wanted no further debate over the relative merits of the two bases: “The Admiralty have been so frequently charged with changeableness in its views that the greatest care must be taken to avoid any [further] accusation. . . . Unjust disparagement of Cromarty would have the worst effects. . . . It ought to be possible to make the case for some light armament for Scapa Flow without reflecting on Admiralty policy regarding Cromarty.” Nine months later when the war began, therefore, Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet confronted this situation: the work at Rosyth, officially described as the fleet’s principal North Sea base, was still unfinished; at Cromarty, the only entrance to the base was comparatively narrow and well defended by gun emplacements, but there were no obstructions against submarines; and Scapa Flow remained naked.
On July 29, 1914, as the British fleet sailed north from Portland, the Orkney Territorials were called out and small groups of men drawn from the Ork-ney Royal Garrison Artillery made their way to their war stations. Normally, these guard parties consisted of ten men, but the detachment at Rackwick in Hoy numbered twenty, for this was where the all-important telegraphic cable from the Admiralty in London emerged from the Pentland Firth and came ashore. Colliers and tankers had been arriving for several days; the first warships to arrive in the Flow were destroyers of the 4th Flotilla, which had been patrolling the Irish Sea during the Home Rule crisis. The arrival of the dreadnought fleet on July 31 was largely hidden by a summer fog, but for hours battleships, cruisers, and destroyers slipped quietly through Hoxa Sound; that night, over a hundred warships lay in the Flow.
From the first day of August, the great fleet lay at anchor, stretched out in lines off Scapa Pier on the north side of the Flow. The Grand Fleet itself then numbered ninety-six ships, including three battle squadrons comprising in all twenty-one dreadnoughts, eight predreadnoughts, and four battle cruisers. Attached were eight armored cruisers, four light cruisers, nine other cruisers, and forty-two destroyers. On arrival, the ships finished clearing for war. Wooden fittings and anything else likely to burn were wrenched away and taken ashore or dumped over the side. Soon, the shores of the Flow were strewn with mahogany and teak fittings while boats piled high with chests of drawers, chairs, and an occasional wardroom piano made their way to the pier. Surplus ships’ boats were sent ashore and hauled up on the beaches while elegant steam pinnaces, gleaming with brass brightly polished for the naval review only the previous week, were permanently moored in sheltered bays.
The first official indication that the Flow had achieved the status of a war harbor came on August 2 with the posting of notices that harbor navigation lights might soon be extinguished. The remainder of the Orkney Territorials were called out on August 2 to join marines from the ships preparing emergency gun positions. Shadows of an enemy presence flickered with the news that the German liner Prinz Friedrich Wilhelm with 500 passengers had been anchored in Kirkwell Bay only eight days before war began. The German cruise ship Kronprinzessin Cecilie, a regular visitor to the Orkneys in prewar days, was reported to have passed through Stronsay Firth only twenty-four hours before the expiration of the British ultimatum. And then on August 5, the first day of war, the first German prisoners were landed at Scapa pier. They were thirteen unlucky members of a fishing-boat crew caught at sea by the coming of the war.
Inside the anchorage, a small fleet headquarters was established at Scapa Bay on the northeastern shore of the Flow. This consisted of a few auxiliary vessels, mostly drifters (small fishing boats), and two seagoing repair ships, Cyclops and Assistance, anchored off Scapa pier. Cyclops was connected to a shore telegraph cable that ran to Kirkwell Post Office, thence across the Pentland Firth to Scotland, London, and the Admiralty. Because the harbor was essentially undefended, Jellicoe’s predecessor, Sir George Callaghan, did what he could to improvise. Field artillery pieces and Royal Marines were landed from the fleet and small guns were mounted at entrances to the anchorages. There were, however, no searchlights, so the artillery was of little value at night and the guns’ caliber was too small to be effective even against unarmored ships. In addition, Callaghan stationed destroyers and light cruisers at the main harbor entrances and set patrols at sea to the east of Pentland Firth.
These emergency measures were designed to guard against the threat that, in the first days, most worried Callaghan and, subsequently, Jellicoe: a surprise attack on the anchored British fleet by German destroyers. “I often wondered,” Jellicoe said later, “why the Germans did not make greater efforts to reduce our strength in capital ships by destroyer . . . attacks on our bases in those early days. . . . In August 1914, Germany had ninety-six destroyers . . . with a speed of at least thirty knots. . . . They could not have put them to better use than in an attack on Scapa Flow.” But German destroyers did not come, perhaps because of the risk of interception by a superior force during the 900-mile round-trip passage across the North Sea. Another reason, however, was that the German Naval Staff, with its professional approach to war, never imagined that their powerful maritime enemy could have left the defense of its primary wartime base to nothing more than rocks, tides, and weather. This was Jellicoe’s view. “I can only imagine that the Germans credited us with possessing harbor defenses and obstructions which were non-existent,” he said. “It may have seemed impossible to the German mind that we should place our fleet, on which the empire depended for its very existence, in . . . [this] position.”
Nor, in turn, did the British ever attack German harbors. Jellicoe later explained that when the war began Britain was critically short of the fast, modern destroyers and submarines needed to carry out such an operation. In the autumn of 1914, Britain had in home waters only seventy-six destroyers; of these, forty were allotted to the Grand Fleet, where they were desperately overworked; the remaining thirty-six were based at Harwich. Britain’s older destroyers, although numerous, had limited fuel capacity and were used only for patrolling outside east coast harbors or in the Straits of Dover. Jellicoe and the Admiralty, aware of the powerful modern artillery and extensive minefields that defended the German naval bases, decided that to throw Britain’s limited modern destroyer force against these defenses would have been grossly irresponsible. Jellicoe also argued against a submarine effort to penetrate the German bases. Owing to the shallowness of German rivers, British submarines could not enter in a submerged condition. “It appeared to me,” Jellicoe concluded, “that an attack on their ships in harbor would meet with no success and that we could not afford to expend any of our exceedingly limited number of destroyers or submarines in making an attack . . . [probably] foredoomed to failure.”
Despite this assessment, Jellicoe soon realized that a far greater danger than German destroyers menaced his fleet when it lay at anchor: German submarines. Before the war, no one had imagined that such a thing was possible. Because British submarines had never been able to remain at sea long enough to reach Heligoland from Scapa Flow, the Admiralty had been convinced that Scapa was beyond the range of U-boats from Germany. This belief was short-lived: the ramming of U-15 by Birmingham off Fair Island in the first week of the war gave Jellicoe early evidence that German submarines were already operating in the northern North Sea. Even so, the Admiralty at first did not believe the submarines were coming from Germany; instead, it imagined that the Germans must have a secret base somewhere on the coast of Norway.
Distance was expected to provide an outer shield for Scapa Flow, but the main defense of the anchorage was believed to have been generously provided by other elements of nature. There were simply too many natural obstacles—tides, currents, rocks—to permit navigation by a submerged submarine. The approaches to Hoxa Sound, the only wide and deep entrance, lay through the Pentland Firth, a race of fiercely turbulent tidal streams flowing around the northern tip of Scotland at a rate of 8 to 10 knots. Churchill accepted the conventional belief that these factors made the Flow impenetrable: “No one, we believed, could take a submarine submerged through the intricate and swirling channels.” Jellicoe, on the other hand, believed that a submarine “could master the currents by proceeding on the surface at night, or submerged with a periscope showing by day,” especially if the effort was made at slack water. Experienced British submarine offi-cers shared Jellicoe’s opinion and believed that passage through the lesser channels would be difficult, but that the main Hoxa Channel, if otherwise undefended, could be penetrated by a determined submarine commander.
On Monday, September 1, Jellicoe’s fears appeared to have been realized: a submarine was reported inside Scapa Flow. The episode, which came to be known as the First Battle of Scapa Flow, began on a quiet evening when the anchorage was shrouded in rain showers and driving mist. Twelve dreadnoughts, armored and light cruisers, and the 4th Destroyer Flotilla were anchored off Scapa pier engaged in coaling, taking on stores and ammunition, and cleaning boilers. Those battleships equipped with antitorpedo nets had spread them out. About 6:00 p.m., as dusk was deepening, the light cruiser Falmouth, anchored near the northeastern entrance to the Flow, suddenly opened fire on what she reported as a submarine periscope. Other “sightings” followed: the dreadnoughtVanguardfired on an object reported as a periscope; a destroyer on patrol near the Hoxa entrance opened fire; the armored cruiser Drake signaled that she had sighted a submarine. Who knew what had been seen? The sky was darkening in rain and mist and the eyes of the lookouts were reddened by strain. Jellicoe, taking no chances, ordered the fleet to raise steam and “prepare for torpedo attack.” The light cruisers and destroyers weighed anchor and began signaling and racing about. More guns boomed as ships fired at new “sightings,” and shells landed and exploded on farms and fields on the surrounding islands. Picket boats, trawlers, and other small craft cruised up and down the lines of big ships to confuse the “submarine,” to force it to keep its periscope down, and, if it was sighted, to ram it. Searchlights played back and forth across the water. Colliers and store ships were ordered alongside battleships lacking antitorpedo nets to take the blows of attacking torpedoes. By 9:30 p.m., with black funnel smoke adding to the thickening murk, the dreadnoughts began to feel their way out to the Pentland Firth. It required seamanship, with no navigational lights and visibility dropping at times to less than a hundred yards. Nevertheless, by 11:00 p.m. the fleet had cleared not only the Flow but the Pentland Firth, and the admiral could breathe more easily. By midnight, the vast anchorage was empty except for Cyclops with her vital telephone line and the destroyers left behind thrashing the Flow in search of a U-boat.
Later, Jellicoe reported of this “battle”: “No trace of a submarine was discovered and subsequent investigation showed that the alarm may have been false, the evidence not being conclusive either way.” The Commander-in-Chief maintained, however, that the only possible action when such an alarm was raised was to take the fleet to sea despite the dangers of haste, fog, or stormy weather. The incident also convinced Jellicoe that “the fleet could not remain at a base that was so open to this form of attack as Scapa Flow.” From that moment on, the insecurity of his naval bases haunted Jellicoe; on any night, he feared, submarines might come into the anchorage and send his fleet to the bottom. Feeding his nightmare was the torpedoing of Pathfinder on September 5 off the entrance to the Firth of Forth, and the dramatic loss of the three Bacchantes on September 22. “I long for a submarine defense at Scapa,” he wrote to Churchill on September 30. “It would give such a feeling of confidence. I can’t sleep half so well inside as when outside, mainly because I feel we are risking such a mass of valuable ships in a place where, if a submarine did get in, she practically has the British dreadnought fleet at her mercy up to the number of her torpedoes.”
There were other episodes when U-boats were believed to be inside British anchorages. Jellicoe’s “First Battle of Scapa” was followed in mid-October by Beatty’s “Battle of Jemimaville.” As Beatty’s battle cruisers steamed slowly into Cromarty Firth, the bow wave of a destroyer was misidentified as the wake of a U-boat periscope. A 4-inch gun opened fire, causing damage to a roof and chimney in the nearby village of Jemimaville. A baby lying in a cradle was slightly injured; the parents were soothed when a fleet doctor told them that at least two submarines had been sunk. Then, on October 16, one day after the cruiser Hawke was sunk with a loss of 500 lives, Jellicoe again was told that a U-boat was inside Scapa Flow. Once more the waters of the Flow were churned by propellers as the fleet put to sea. Although Jellicoe reported the next day that he believed the report was false, he also told the Admiralty that he could not continue using Scapa Flow until an effective submarine defense was in place. He took the fleet and retreated west to the remote bases of Loch-na-Keal, on the Isle of Mull in western Scotland, and Lough Swilly, on the north coast of Ireland. He did not return to Scapa Flow until November 9. Even then, when Admiral Sir Percy Scott, the Royal Navy’s premier gunnery expert, spent a night on board Iron Duke at Scapa Flow, Scott asked before retiring, “Shall we be here in the morning?” “I wonder,” Jellicoe replied.
The Commander-in-Chief was not the only British admiral alarmed by the vulnerability of the Grand Fleet’s bases. On October 17, Beatty took the unorthodox step of writing directly to the First Lord, sending his letter by hand with an officer going to London. Beatty had been the First Lord’s naval secretary, knew Churchill well, and thus emboldened, skipped the official chain of command—including Jellicoe.
“I think it is right that you should know how things generally affect the fleet,” he told the First Lord.
At present we feel that we are working up for a catastrophe of a very large character. The feeling is gradually possessing the fleet that all is not right somewhere. The menace of mines and submarines is proving larger every day and adequate means to meet or combat them are not forthcoming and we are gradually being pushed out of the North Sea and off our own particular perch. How does this arise? By the very apparent fact that we have no base where we can with any degree of safety lie for coaling, replenishing, refitting and repairing, after two and a half months of war. . . .
As it is, we have no place to lay our heads. We are at Loch-na-Keal, Isle of Mull. My picket boats are at the entrance, the nets are out and the men are at the guns, waiting for coal which has run low, but ready to move at a moment’s notice. Other squadrons are in the same plight. We have been running now hard since 28th July; small defects are creeping up which we haven’t time to take in hand. Forty-eight hours is our spell in harbor with steam ready to move at four hours’ notice, coaling on an average of 1,400 tons a time; night defence stations. The men can stand it, but the machine can’t and we must have a place where we can stop for from four or five days every now and then to give the engineers a chance. Such a place does not exist, so the questions arises, how long can we go on? . . . The remedy is to fix upon a base and make it impervious to submarine attack. . . .
I think you know me well enough to know that I do not shout without cause. . . . I would not write thus if I did not know that you with your quick grasp of detail and imagination would make something out of it.
Beatty’s letter helped to galvanize Churchill. On October 23, the First Lord wrote to Jellicoe, “Every effort will be made to secure you rest and safety in Scapa and adjacent anchorages. Net defence hastened utmost and strengthened. . . . I wish to make absolute sanctuary for you there. . . . Ask for anything you want in men, money, or material. You must have a safe resting place; tell me how I can help you.” On November 2, two days after Fisher returned as First Sea Lord, specific reinforcements were ordered: forty-eight armed trawlers were to go to Scapa Flow; rafts and barges were to be fitted with antisubmarine nets and sent north; twelve additional destroyers would join the Grand Fleet immediately; another light cruiser squadron was to be formed for North Sea patrol work; heavy booms and electrically operated mines for the anchorages were to be supplied without delay.
When the war had been won and the answers mattered less, questions finally were asked: Why did the Grand Fleet begin the war without a North Sea base? Why had it taken so long to choose among the various alternative sites? Why, in varying degrees, had they been left undefended? Who was responsible? Jellicoe, the man who had been most immediately affected by the lack of a protected base, pointed no finger at any individual. In his book The Grand Fleet, published in 1919, he employed his usual measured language: “In pre-war days, though it had been decided that the use of northern bases would be necessary in the event of a war with Germany, the bases had not been prepared to meet the new situation. . . . In fact, the situation was that, whilst we had shifted our fleet to the north, all the conveniences for the maintenance of that fleet were still in the Channel ports.” Specifically, as to Scapa Flow, he continued, the question of providing shore-based defenses had been discussed “on more than one occasion,” but nothing had been done because of lack of funds.
Churchill took some passages in Jellicoe’s book as criticism of himself. When the former First Lord’s own five-volume work about the war, The World Crisis, began to appear in 1923, he defended himself by placing responsibility in part on Jellicoe. In 1923, as in 1914, Churchill believed that Jellicoe’s anxiety concerning submarines had been excessive:
No one seriously contemplated hostile submarines in time of war entering the war harbors of either side and attacking the ships at anchor. To achieve this the submarine would have to face all the immense difficulties of making its way up an estuary or inlet amid shoal water and intricate navigation, submerged all the time and with only an occasional glimpse through the periscope; secondly, while doing this, avoiding all the patrolling craft which for many miles kept watch . . . thirdly, to brave the unknown and unknowable terrors of mines and obstructions of all sorts, with which it must be assumed the channels would become increasingly infested. It was thought these deterrents would prove effectual. Looking back, we can see now that this assumption was correct. There is no recorded instance of a German submarine having penetrated into any British war harbor.
Nevertheless, Churchill continued, “all of a sudden, the Grand Fleet began to see submarines in Scapa Flow. . . . Guns were fired, destroyers thrashed the waters, and the whole gigantic armada put to sea in haste and dudgeon. . . . Of course, there never was a submarine in Scapa Flow. None during the whole war achieved the terrors of the passage . . . none ever pene-trated the lair of the Grand Fleet.”
Then the former First Lord turned to defend himself:
Reproach has been levelled at the Admiralty for not having accurately measured this danger before the war and taken proper precautions against it. It would have been a matter of enormous expense to create a vast system of booms with deep nets and other obstructions for the defense of all our northern harbors. I should have had the very greatest difficulty in coming to the Cabinet and Parliament with such a demand during 1913 and 1914. Not only was every penny of naval expenditure challenged, but this particular expenditure would have been clearly of a most alarmist character. . . . Still, if the Sea Lords and the Naval Staff had recommended solidly and as a matter of prime importance the provision of these great obstructive works at the Forth, at Cromarty, and at Scapa, it would have been my duty to go forward. But no such recommendation was made to me in the years preceding the war. . . . It certainly does not lie with anyone who was a member of the then Board of Admiralty to level such reproaches. [Jellicoe then had been Second Sea Lord.] Sir John Jellicoe’s book, although no doubt not intended for such a purpose, has been made a foundation for several reflections upon our pre-war arrangements. . . . He recounts the dangers to which his fleet was subjected; but had he, either as Controller or Second Sea Lord, foreseen these dangers, he would of course have warned his colleagues and his chief. It is clear therefore that if the Admiralty is to be criticized in this respect, it would be unfair to cite him as an authority.
Churchill’s defense was well constructed. When he says that as First Lord he acted (or failed to act) in accordance with the professional advice he received, his position appears reasonable. But, elsewhere in The World Crisis, we read Winston Churchill’s description of his own role in the administration of the Admiralty: “I interpreted my duty in the following way: I accepted full responsibility for bringing about successful results and in that spirit I exercised a close general supervision over everything that was done or proposed. Further, I claimed and exercised an unlimited power of suggestion and initiative over the whole field, subject only to the approval and agreement of the First Sea Lord on operational matters. Right or wrong, that is what I did, and it is on that basis that I wish to be judged.”
Once Churchill concentrated his mind on Jellicoe’s needs, the work was accelerated. By the end of October, the defenses of Rosyth were completed and the entrance to Cromarty was secure. By the end of November, the land defense of Scapa Flow had been reinforced by heavy guns. The ancient battleship Hannibal, carrying four 12-inch guns, had been anchored to cover the Hoy entrance while her sister Magnificent guarded the Hoxa entrance. More 6-inch and 4-inch guns, manned by Orkney Territorials and Royal Marine reservists, were mounted in shore batteries. Antisubmarine obstructions multiplied. The first of these were simply buoys moored across the channels with herring nets strung between them. As autumn turned to winter, the weather and tides tore them to pieces. Stronger steel nets were laid, and double lines of drifters moored to nets were stationed in strings across Hoxa, Switha, and Hoy Sounds. Fifty trawlers, fitted with guns and explosive sweeps that could be detonated from the towing ship, patrolled the entrances. Electric contact mines were laid and booms constructed of miscellaneous rafts and barges carried torpedo nets. These obstructions were maintained by trawlers moored in positions in which they were exposed to the whole fury of winter gales; in many cases they were within a few yards of a rocky coast with heavy seas breaking over them and bringing on board tons of water. The trawler captains knew that, for the safety of the fleet, they had to remain where they were and maintain the barriers.
Also during November, the first block ships, elderly but still serviceable merchant ships, were sunk across the eastern channels. These sacrifices were only partly successful. The block ships were brought up to the Flow light, with no cement ballast. Ideally, they were to be sunk quickly by blowing their bottoms out, but it was difficult to make them go down in just the right spot with 8- and 9-knot tides pushing against their hulls. It could be done only during the brief intervals of slack water when the tide was turning. And, once in position, there was danger of winter gales shifting them or even breaking them up. Still, they were better than nothing. By the end of 1914, sunken ships had been placed across all of the narrower channels. In time, these rusting, reddish-brown hulls and superstructures would become part of the Orkneys scenery. Particularly conspicuous for many years in Kirk Sound was the rusty but still graceful Thames, with her three masts, two funnels, and clipper bow with its bowsprit rising above the surface. This left the three main entrances of Hoxa, Switha, and Hoy sounds to be closed by buoys and drifters with steel nets and booms with “gates” to permit the entry and exit of friendly ships.
Scapa Flow was so large that high winds and bad weather created dangerous conditions even inside the harbor. At the end of October 1914, the exposed nature of Scapa Bay and its pier on the northern side of the harbor dictated removal of the fleet anchorage and base across the Flow to the southwestern side. The dreadnought battle squadrons now lay north of Flotta Island, and the destroyer flotillas, fleet auxiliaries, and base ships for administration, communications, repairs, ship maintenance, ordnance, hospital ships, and supply ships were placed in rows up and down Longhope, Gutter, and Weddell Sounds, and along the Hoy shore. Even so, conditions worsened in winter. Darkness set in at 3:30 p.m. The wind howled continuously and winter gales sometimes reached a hundred miles an hour. Even inside the Flow, heavy seas damaged large ships, immobilized destroyers, and made it impossible to lower boats. The first of these winter storms came on November 11 when most of the Grand Fleet was present. All work on harbor defense stopped and all ships kept up steam for sea. Again, at the beginning of December, Scapa Flow was struck by a three-day gale. Every ship had two anchors down, yet several battleships still dragged their anchors and four seamen were washed overboard and drowned.
From November to February, bad weather, the short hours of winter daylight, and delays in the supply of necessary materials held up the work. The first line of permanent obstructions in the Hoxa entrance was completed only on December 29, 1914, the first line in Switha Sound on January 12, 1915, and that in Hoy Sound on February 19, 1915. All the while, Jellicoe bombarded Churchill and Fisher. “It seems to be impossible to get the departments at the Admiralty to realize that this is a base and the most important one in the country [and] that the fleet here is enormous,” he wrote to Fisher in January. Defensive minefields were laid in the principal entrances to the Flow in February 1915; by the end of May, a second line of submarine obstructions had been completed. Thereafter, when the Grand Fleet lay at Scapa Flow, its Commander-in-Chief began to feel secure.
There was a moment following the German battle cruiser raids on the English east coast when Churchill and the Admiralty argued that Scapa Flow was too remote to permit the Grand Fleet to intercept the raiders. They favored bringing the fleet down to the Firth of Forth. Jellicoe disagreed. The Forth, he pointed out, with its single exit, could be closed by mines or bad weather while the Flow, with its several exits, was less vulnerable to these factors. Moreover, the fleet could reach the open sea more quickly from the Flow. In addition, Scapa had the advantage of being so large that ships could train without leaving the harbor. In the great stretch of water between its sheltering ring of islands, there was ample space for exercise grounds and, beginning in November 1914, gunnery and torpedo practice took place inside the Flow itself. Guns of up to 6-inch caliber were used in both day and night firing; this continued for the rest of the war. In this argument, Jellicoe had his way and, for as long as he remained Commander-in-Chief, Scapa Flow remained the primary base of the Grand Fleet.
During the fifty-two months of the Great War, only two German U-boats actually attempted to penetrate the anchorage at Scapa Flow. The first of these efforts occurred on the morning of November 23, 1914. The previous night, Captain Heinrich von Hennig, commanding U-18, was passing eastward off the Orkneys when he saw that the Pentland Skerries navigation light was lit and decided to make the attempt. He used the light as a guide to cruise on the surface as far as the Skerries where, his batteries fully charged, he dived. By 11:00 a.m. on the morning of the twenty-fourth, U-18 was moving up Hoxa Sound. There, however, her periscope was sighted by a patrolling trawler, which promptly rammed the intruder. The wounded submarine managed to crawl away to the east, but Hennig was finally forced to scuttle his craft near the Pentland Skerries. He and his crew were rescued by British destroyers.
Four years later, on October 25, 1918, UB-116 sailed from Heligoland. Technology had advanced enormously since Jellicoe’s anxious days in the autumn of 1914. Hoxa Sound, which the submarine’s captain intended to enter, was defended by hydrophones that picked up the sound of all approaching ships, by seabed cables that caused the needle of a galvanometer to flick when an electric current was induced by the magnetic field of any crossing vessel, and by mines that could be detonated electrically from the shore. The hydrophones gave first warning of UB-116 approaching Scapa Flow after nightfall on October 28. No friendly ship was expected. The mine-field was activated and searchlights swept and probed the waters. The submarine’s captain, apparently believing that as long as he remained submerged he could not be detected, continued forward. He was not actually sighted until 11:30 p.m., when he came up to periscope depth, probably to check his position. He was seen near the boom entrance heading straight for it. Two minutes later the submarine’s magnetic field activated the needles on shore. A button was pressed. The mines detonated and UB-116 was instantly destroyed, leaving oil on the surface and a mass of crushed, twisted metal on the seabed. There were no survivors.UB-116 was the only submarine destroyed by a shore-controlled minefield during the Great War, and the last U-boat sunk during that war.
Twenty-five years passed and, in a new war between Great Britain and Germany, the main British fleet once again was based at Scapa Flow. Winston Churchill had returned to the Admiralty as First Lord. And, once again, a German submarine attempted to penetrate the great anchorage. The operation was carefully planned by the supreme German submarine commander, Admiral Karl Doenitz, who selected U-47, commanded by Captain Gunther Prien, to perform the mission.
At 7:00 p.m. on October 13, 1939, Prien surfaced near Scapa Flow. High tide that night on the eastern side of the Flow was at 11:38 p.m. At 12:27 on the morning of October 14, U-47 entered Kirk Sound. The tide was unusually high, but it required all of Prien’s skill to maneuver the 100-foot-long U-47 through the swirling waters and past the old block ships in the sound. On the surface and hugging the northern shore, he edged the submarine past the sleeping village of St. Mary’s. No one saw him, although the shore was close and a man on a bicycle was seen pedaling home along the coast road. Prien rounded a point and suddenly he was in the open Flow. There, against the land to the north, he could see the huge shadow of a battleship with its tall mast rising above it. Just before 1:00 a.m., remaining on the surface, he closed to 4,000 yards and fired three torpedoes from his bow tubes. No result was seen from U-47, but on board Royal Oak, people heard a muffled explosion near the bow. So incredible did it seem to the admiral and captain on board that a torpedo could have struck them, safe in Scapa Flow, that they attributed the explosion to some internal cause, possibly in one of the forward storage rooms. Twenty minutes passed while U-47 reloaded her tubes; then she fired a second salvo. Three torpedoes, striking in quick succession amidships on the starboard side, ripped the bottom out of Royal Oak. At 1:30 a.m. the battleship rolled over and went to the bottom, taking with her more than 800 men of her crew of 1,400. U-47 crept away. Running on the high tide, Prien successfully navigated the unblocked channel on the south side of Kirk Sound, almost scraping the side of the sunken block ship Thames. An hour later, he was out of the Flow, heading for Germany.
The impossible had happened: a battleship of the Royal Navy had been torpedoed and sunk inside its main war harbor. Churchill, who years before had boasted that no German submarine “ever penetrated the lair of the Grand Fleet,” was not held responsible this time; he had been in office only six weeks, and he survived to become prime minister. Immediately after the sinking, he ordered all smaller entrances to Scapa Flow permanently barricaded with massive concrete blocks dropped from overhead wires running on pulleys across the channels. Now these tumbled-together “Churchill Barriers” are a permanent part of the Orkneys landscape. So also is a large buoy marking the position in Scapa Bay where Royal Oak rests on the bottom.
