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Scapa
 | Price: £9.99 Supplier: Birlinn Ltd |
At the final closing ceremony of the Scapa Flow naval base at Lyness in March 1957, the people of Orkney were thanked for helping to make it 'probably the finest naval base in the world'. This book, full of eye-witness accounts and archive photos, tells the story of the base during the two World Wars and of the scuttling and salvage of the German fleet in the inter-war years. It is a very entertaining read, packed with information and with anecdotes that really give the feel of what life was like in the Flow.
Hardback, 189 pages, over 130 photos
Published 2000
ISBN 1843410052
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After the alarms and excitements of the first year of the war, the men on the anti-aircraft batteries passed their time waiting for attacks that never came and had to put up with endless practice sessions and exercises to keep them on their toes and, as one man put it, 'Just to ensure that every man woke up at least once a month, the Orkney barrage was fired'. The Pioneer Corps were busier - they had to build and maintain the encampments and installations, by no means a cushy number in the northern winter. Then there were base workers: ship repairmen and any number of clerks, orderlies, cooks and storekeepers. A floating dock big enough to accommodate a destroyer arrived in August 1940, just a couple of months before it was required to take in HMS Mendip after she blew off her stern with own of her own depth charges. AFD 12, as the dock was termed, had a busy existence and by the time she was towed away to the Far East in June 1945 she had docked 343 ships.
A fleet of small craft acted as tenders to the capital ships, as messenger boats and ferries, and worked to maintain the defensive booms. Some of these - the drifters and armed trawlers, with mixed crews of some navy regulars or reservists among the ex-fishermen - might find themselves patrolling or minesweeping in monotonous regularity and could spend days at sea within sight of the shore but without setting foot on land. The Lunar Bow, the Belfast’s tender, was a typical drifter, with high bows and a tall funnel that belched black smut-filled smoke from her coal-fired boilers. The wardroom, wireless office and magazine were squeezed into the fish-hold, and the open bridge exposed the officer of the watch to the prevailing wind, and also to showers of cinders when it was a fair one. The funnel often became red-hot but, wrote Roddy Macdonald, [ the first lieutenant, later Vice-Admiral Sir Roderick Macdonald KBE] ‘it was not considered polite when in close company to make toast on other ships’ funnels.’
‘Except for the bloodshot eyes of the officer of the watch,’ he continued, ‘the drifters had no means of detecting submarines [one of their main duties early in the war]. The two depth charges were a menace. The ship was so slow that, had we fired them, they would have removed the stern. We mounted a three-pounder gun and even carried out a practice shoot. The first salvo was a hit but this was not surprising as the target was a hundred-foot cliff. A large section of rock descended into the sea with a noise like thunder, while we steamed away trying not to look like a very small ship that had recently caused a landslide.'
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