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The Grand Scuttle
 | Price: £9.99 Supplier: Birlinn Ltd |
Familiar as Orcadians are with the story of the scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet and its subsequent salvage, it’s easy to overlook what a remarkable story it is. The author, maritime historian Dan van der Vat, describes it as the greatest act of self-destruction in the history of navies and its salvage as the greatest recovery operation ever mounted.
Drawing on German archive material, eye-witness accounts and the memories of survivors, he has written the story of the High Seas Fleet from its creation to its salvage. Van der Vat was a journalist for twenty-five years and the book packs a great deal of interesting information into its 216 pages.
Paperback, 216 pages
Published 1997, re-printed 2002
ISBN 1843410001
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General British response, especially in the Grand Fleet, to the horrified reaction of the Germans to their new surroundings was a mixture of grim satisfaction and mockery of their complaints. The Times on 14 January 1919 carried an article by an anonymous British naval officer which reflected these views. "To the British naval officer, the fact that the Germans are being forced to live at Scapa Flow in their own ships is one of the most perfect examples of poetic justice in the whole war..."
The article however does go on to give a clue to the reasons for the German misgivings by recording the following exchange between two other British officers:
"If the Hun is squealing after four weeks at Scapa, I wonder what he would have done if he had our four years of it?"
"You would howl yourself inside of four weeks if you had to stick it in a Hun ship."
The Germans had every reason to anticipate acute discomfort in a prolonged period at anchor cut off from shore. The way of life in the German navy bore little resemblance to that in the Royal Navy, which was accustomed to inordinately long periods at sea (and did not forbear to complain). The German ships were not intended to be lived in and were not built for anything but very short periods of occupation (a fact which gave them certain structural advantages over their British counterparts - " the bulkheads for example were much stronger because rather fewer doors were needed). The relationship between a German sailor and his ship was comparable with that of a soldier in an armoured regiment and his tank… The German capital ships, with as little as one third the coal capacity of the British, were built for short forays relatively close to their home ports. In between times, they tied up at the quays and the crews messed and slept in barracks ashore. Thus only the most rudimentary facilities were provided aboard, including storage space, because the ships were not expected to go to sea for more than a few days at a time.
But for some of the internees, Scapa Flow did manage to offer occasional consolation. In his book, Reuter recalls the scenery as harsh and desolate more than once, but at the same time peculiarly attractive. The sunsets were spectacular, and every now and again the Northern Lights would appear in the night. He concludes his description of internment conditions with the words: "There is still a God."
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