From Jutland to Junkyard: The raising of the scuttled German High Seas Fleet from Scapa Flow - the greatest salvage operation of all time

by George, S. C.

  ‘Marine salvage is the term generally applied to the saving of ships and cargoes from loss or partial loss by wreck, whether due to storm or tempest, fire, collision, enemy action etc. The term is equally applicable to the saving of flotsam and jetsam and to the payment made to salvors by way of awards for services rendered.’ This definition prefaced a paper written by T. McKenzie, who was the man most closely connected with practically the whole of the work in raising the scuttled German fleet. His definition must in this case be modified to the extent that the sunken vessels were sold by the Admiralty to the salvors who then made what profit they could from the deal.

  6

  The Destroyers

  STHE DESTROYERS, AS LISTED by von Reuter in his book Scapa Flow – Das Grab der deutscher Flotte (The Grave of the German Fleet) are shown at Appendix 4.

  V70, upright in only 50 feet of water, was an obvious first choice for lifting. She had a standard displacement of 924 tons and lay only half a mile from Lyness where Cox had bought the abandoned naval camp and air station in which his men were accommodated.

  The usual method adopted by marine salvage companies when using pontoons or lifting craft was to pin them to the wreck at low water and use the rising tide as a lifting agent, the wreck being beached again and repinned at successive low tides. The lifting of ships, however, was something new to Cox, and his mind was receptive to any idea which seemed practicable. The scheme evolved by McKenzie was new, but it commended itself to Cox and he decided to try it.

  So much had already been spent on equipment that Cox decided to use the cables and 3-inch chains from his own enormous stock rather than buy great quantities of new 9-inch circumference steel-wire rope.

  In March 1924 the two docks, which were in reality floating platforms, were moored on either side of V70. Lifting chains were placed in position under the destroyer’s hull by divers working in pairs on each side of the vessel. But first the stern had to be raised by wires under the propeller shaft to get the lifting chains into position.

  At low water the sea level fell from ten to 12 feet at spring tides. In theory, therefore, if the slack of the lifting-wires was taken up, V70 would be lifted by the rising tide ten feet from the bottom without the use of any other mechanical aid. Then the ship could be towed into shallower water, and the whole process repeated as often as was necessary until the wreck was beached. The use of hand-winches increased the height to which the ship could be lifted from the bottom. The load on the pulley blocks could be estimated roughly by the number of men it took to wind the hand-winches. Four meant they had a safe load, but six indicated an unacceptable degree of danger. Lowmore chains were used for lifting. At the end of each chain was a hook, and this was made fast to any hole in the hull or the superstructure.

  The preliminary work was completed in ten days. Three or four ropes were adequate for raising the stern. Further ropes placed under the ship’s bottom were so arranged that, as the ship was carried from deep to shallower water, their length could be altered conveniently as required. With this in view, they were divided into different lengths connected by large shackles. When necessary, divers bored small tunnels under the ship and passed ‘messenger’ wires through them to which the lifting-wires could be attached and drawn under the wreck. The method is illustrated in Figure 1.

  Sea conditions were ideal on the Saturday evening preceding the attempted lift. At the close of day, all the hawsers were hauled tight, leaving the bow above water. The final operations began on Sunday morning, but when the destroyer was seven feet clear of the bottom, the load was so great that the hooks tore through the steelwork and the docks heeled inwards with the weight. Suddenly one of the 3-inch chains snapped under the load, the first of all but two as the lifting gear exploded in all directions and flew about like shrapnel. The sound was described by one of the salvage officers as being like an artillery bombardment. Happily no one had been injured, though 25 men had been working on each pontoon.

  In this condition it was considered unsafe to lower the dock and destroyer into shallow water, so the winches were run back and the ship allowed to sink, and a few minutes later 100 workmen were putting on their coats and being taken in Ferrodanks to Lyness. This was an instance where Cox had ignored the advice of his salvage staff. Just as a walking stick can support as much from its handle as the holder can raise in a vertical lift but will break easily when snapped across the knee, so the giant links easily took the load of the upward lift but broke when bent over the small pulley winches. Cox had received an expensive lesson. Some of the workmen described the chains as having snapped like carrots.

  Figure 1. Arrangements of ropes for lifting destroyers.

  New 9-inch steel-wire ropes with a breaking strain of 250 tons were obtained from Glasgow. These were flat wire slings 15 inches broad which were passed under the hull to form a cradle. The dock was prepared for a fresh lift, and at 16.00 hrs on 31 July 1924 the second attempt was made at dead low tide. Ninety-six men began to turn the 24 winch handles. The sea was calm. Inch by inch, aided also by the tide, V70 rose from the sea-bed until she was only two feet below water, the whole of her upperworks being visible at high water. Like all wrecks subsequently raised, the bright incrustations of marine growth soon became a dirty brown and began to stink, yet there had been little rusting. Four similar lifts were made at successively shallower depths before V70 could be beached on a sandbank at Mill Bay on the Saturday morning, just ten years after the declaration of war. She survived an uncomfortable night’s tow in a howling gale to Lyness. The lifting and beaching had occupied only a little more than seven hours though, because of the mishap with chains, the whole operation had been spread over six weeks. This time it had proceeded so smoothly that not a hammer or a spanner had been needed during the lift which had been performed solely by turning the winch handles.

  Then it was discovered that pirate divers had stripped the destroyer of her gun-metal torpedo tubes and everything else which could be lifted. Moreover the price of scrap had slumped unexpectedly from £5 to about £1 15s per ton so, instead of reducing V70 to scrap, Cox made her hull watertight, pumped her dry, renamed her Salvage Unit No 3, and used her as a floating workshop.

  The next destroyer selected for lifting lay on her side. As only the middle portion rested on the bottom, it was relatively easy to pass ropes under the fore and aft portions. To begin with six ropes were passed under the stern, and as these were wound up, additional ropes were passed through, 12 being found sufficient for the ship to be towed ashore. But the problem was how to turn the destroyer into a vertical position so that she could be lifted into the narrow opening between the two platforms. She was therefore towed into deeper water. Then the pulley-blocks were paid out on one side and wound up on the other and by this method, which was followed in subsequent operations where a ship was not vertical, a destroyer could easily be turned over in a single morning. If, however, it was completely upside down, resting on its bridge and forward gun, ropes could be passed under the hull, most of which was six feet from the bottom, and the vessel turned after two days’ work. The first destroyer was raised in a total of 12 days’ work; the third destroyer took only six days, while the last was raised in only four days. It became a familiar sight: the panting, powerful tugs, the great towering walls of the dock with a wreck between them, its hull so encrusted with marine growths of every kind that the bridge could not be distinguished from the gun platform or the forecastle from the after deck, resembling a submarine reef more than a ship.

  Some of the destroyers were more than 300 feet long, while the salvage platforms were only 240 feet. Sometimes their position over the destroyers was misjudged, but on the whole the work proceeded smoothly, though the diver’s work was always hard and dangerous. A.S. Thomson recalled how divers had frequently surfaced in such a tangle of air and life-lines that it reminded one of a cat playing with a ball of string.

  At first divers used hacksaws to cut mooring ropes from destroyers when lashed together,
but on one occasion, as this released the load on the severed ropes, the upward rush of freed metal knocked the diver off his feet and a giant mooring buoy shot out of the water bearing with it a heavy anchor chain.

  Only one flame cutting tool, a French one, was effective at depths greater than 15 feet, so McKenzie began to use gelignite charges when ropes had to be severed.

  Meanwhile Robertson had been running into trouble with his attempts at balloon lifts. A spirit of rivalry had grown between the two competing salvage teams, but Cox was lifting his third destroyer on 29 August 1924, the day when Robertson lifted his first. This was the only occasion on which two ships were raised on the same day.

  Robertson’s destroyer was S131 on which preliminary work by a salvage gang of a dozen men had taken two months. The United Kingdom Salvage Company was associated with Robertson’s company in this attempt. The destroyer’s masts were removed to obviate interference with the lifting gear. One funnel had disappeared and others were badly dented. The little gun on the foredeck was in a state of decay and covered with weeds. The ‘camels’, or balloons, were inflated by a compressor on one of the barges after they had been submerged and attached to the vessel. The tackle consisted of 16 10-inch wire belts attached to 5-inch wire hawsers which in turn were shackled to 1½-inch cables. The Lowmore iron chains were hand-forged and were carried with pulleys to 2¾-inch screws operated by powerful spanners. Thus each of the eight sets of girders had double lifting tackle consisting of 16 belts, 32 wire hawsers and 32 chain cables. The breaking load of the chains was 65 tons, and of the belts 100 tons, which provided an ample safety margin. As the balloons were inflated S131 gradually rose, and the more orthodox lifting tackle was then brought into use to relieve the strain. The hawsers had been made tight at low water, and when the tide had risen 12 feet, which further assisted the lift, Trustee, in a stiffish breeze and a slight ground swell, towed Robertson’s first prize shorewards.

  Cox’s work proceeded more rapidly. Some labour trouble arose during the lift of the fifth destroyer when certain employees needed for manning the winches had to return home to help with the harvest. However, the crew of the Longhope lifeboat took their places and the work went on. While Cox was well advanced with work on his sixth destroyer, the Scapa flow Salvage Co were gradually moving their second ship, but operations were delayed by the bursting of one of the balloons. On 13 November 1924 Robertson successfully lifted his third ship and began work on his fourth and last, while Cox suspended operations until winter was over. Shortly before this Cox had suffered an accident during the erection on the pier of a large electric crane, but he soon recovered.

  In December Robertson secured his barges to the destroyer and, though salvage work was slow in the dull short days, he successfully raised the ship. In the following month, on 22 January 1925, he suffered some financial loss when a severe gale dragged the anchors of his concrete barges, landing them high and dry and giving him considerable trouble before they were floated away. Incidentally, they had been built of concrete because of the shortage of metal at the time.

  Cox now had the fleet to himself, but on 22 April 1925 fire broke out on the ex-German floating dock which had enough explosives in her store to have blown her sky-high but for the prompt action of T. McKenzie, who was assisted by Carmichael, one of the divers. The ninth destroyer had been successfully lifted, and a fireman was banking the furnace for the next shift and cleaning out the ashes. As usual, the sea around the destroyer was covered with a thick deposit of oil. The fireman thoughtlessly threw a shovelful of hot ashes into the sea through an opening in the dock. The oil burst into flame and the fire spread rapidly, enveloping the dock in a sea of flames. The working party was hurriedly recalled as it was leaving after the day’s work, but their efforts would have been unavailing but for McKenzie’s presence of mind. Within three minutes he brought into action a submersible pump with which he extinguished the fire. Although the workshops on the lifting dock were badly burned, the lifting gear suffered only slight damage and work was soon back to normal.

  In June the first fatal accident occurred. Donald Henderson, one of the labourers, was killed by the collapse of an electric crane when its jib fell upon him. Henderson had worked 18 hours on the Wednesday, 18 hours on Thursday and had begun work again at 16.00 hours on Friday, the day of his death. The crane had been run continuously for 35 hours, but no fault had been found with it, all routine inspections had been carried out, and a jury found no blame attributable to anyone.

  By the beginning of 1925 six destroyers had been raised, seven were lying on their sides in 60 feet of water, and several which had been beached lay in a vertical position on the sea bottom. Preparations were already in hand for raising more ships, and a second and larger floating dock was bought. In this dock, which had walls 40 feet high, a large central opening about 30 feet wide and 36 feet high was cut in the end wall so that it could accommodate the bow of a destroyer. It was furnished with eight sets of 6-inch pumps of submersible type manufactured by Submersible Motors Ltd of Southall, and power was generated by a 70-kilowatt Bellis and Morcom steam-driven generator set designed for 220-volt working. It had five main compartments which could either be pumped out separately or joined one to another by bulkhead valves. On Thursday 27 August 1925 the tugs Plover and Homer, owned by Lawson Batey Ltd of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, took the dock in tow at about 18.30 hours and at high tide brought it clear of Queensborough Pier. The voyage to Lyness took ten days.

  Cox intended to use the two smaller docks to manoeuvre the big destroyers on to the floor of the new dock which was to be sunk on to the sea bed and then raised with the wreck.

  On the upper part of each dock, hand-winches were set about 20 feet apart. These were provided with 100-ton pulley blocks attached to circular lifting-wires of 9-inch diameter. In order to right a ship, the two docks were again positioned over the sunken vessel. Divers passed the ten ropes from one dock under the hull of the wreck and attached them to pulley blocks on the other dock so that the wreck rested on a cradle of ten lifting-wires. All that was then necessary was to take a weight of 370 tons which was approximately half the wreck’s tonnage, and then pay out rope on one set of winches and take it up on the other set. On the paying-out side, the sheaves of blocks were about 20 feet apart to begin with, and 36 feet apart when the ship was righted. The friction between the lifting-ropes and the skin of the ship was sufficient to manoeuvre the wreck gradually, in about six hours, into a vertical position without parbuckling of any kind. (A parbuckle is the purchase formed by a single rope round a heavy object for hoisting or lowering on an inclined plane, the object itself acting as a movable pulley.)

  The scuttled destroyers which had been lashed together were now a tangled mass of cables, chains, guns, funnels and masts. These wrecks had to be separated before any attempt at lifting could be made.

  The Germans had done their work thoroughly. An inspection of four destroyers disclosed that condenser doors had been removed and that all auxiliary valves, sea connections in boiler rooms and magazine valves had been opened. Hatches and watertight doors had been raised. They had even left unfastened the ports and lavatory connections, and they had removed all the plates which indicated the positions of the various valves they had opened.

  Aware that many well-known experts prophesied failure, Cox began lifting more destroyers. By the end of 20 months, 24 had been lifted. In one period of 39 weeks, and without Sunday work, 14 were raised, one of them, S65, in the record time of only four days from the commencement of the work. Ten were rendered sufficiently seaworthy to be towed to Rosyth for breaking up by the middle of 1925. Several were sold to shipbreaking firms, and others were dismantled and broken up by Cox & Danks at Lyness. This achievement enabled Cox to recoup half his outlay. By October 1926 only a few bare hulls were to be seen in Mill Bay.

  While they had been working on the fourth destroyer an unpleasant accident occurred when a diver went down between two ships which were lashed together, and was t
rapped by a funnel which had fallen, his only exit being jammed by it. His line was caught, and he could not move. He kept up his spirits by singing Home, Sweet Home while other divers managed to secure wires round the funnel so that it could be slung clear, and he was soon released, unharmed by his experience.

  Meanwhile, an attempt had been made to manoeuvre the first of the large destroyers, G103, into the big floating dock, but the gap between the 40-foot walls was not wide enough to admit the two L-docks with the destroyer between them. So the big dock was beached, one side was removed, and it was towed out again. G103 was again raised, and this time manoeuvred on to the floor of the big dock and secured to its wall. But the dock keeled over with its weight, and G103 slid down the sloping deck, one corner of which struck the sea bed. The bottom tanks were flooded, and both dock and destroyer sank to the bottom. Their refloating proved to be one of the most difficult operations with which the salvage team had had to deal, and thereafter Cox used the big dock only as a workshop and as a platform for boilers.

  The floating docks were moored over the 11th destroyer, S65, on 12 May 1925, and on Saturday 16th she had been lifted in a record time of four days.

  After one of the destroyers had been raised, a diver reported that he had found the ship’s safe below, and Cox assembled a small party to watch it being opened on deck. Everyone crowded round wondering what items of value could have been locked in it before the ship was scuttled. Cox was the only one not to laugh when the sole object inside it was brought out – a chamber-pot, and this was solemnly presented to Mrs McKenzie, the only lady aboard at the time. Was it the joke of a young high-spirited officer who guessed that eventually the safe would be found? Or was it a last gesture of contempt?

  The 13th destroyer, S32, took twice as long as its forerunners and the working time occupied nine days, a gale blowing almost from the time the floating docks were moved out. It was after the first 18 had been salved that work began on the seven large 320-foot destroyers.