Nightmare at Scapa Flow: The Truth About the Sinking of HMS Royal Oak

by H J Weaver

  The log of Southampton contains the entry for October 12: ‘Repulse . . . to sea.’ The battlecruiser’s log shows that by 2249 on the Thursday night she had crossed the Moray Firth and was some 10 miles off Fraserburgh (Rattray Head 174º, Kinnaird’s Head 210º). Repulse entered the Forth next morning, passed the boom defence at 0845, passed beneath the Forth Bridge at 0902, secured to No. 14 buoy at 0946, proceeded to Rosyth Dockyard at 1415 and entered dry dock at 1540. A start was made on pumping out the dock at 0900 on the Saturday morning and from 1300 hours hands were employed painting the ship’s bottom. Repulse left dock on Tuesday, October 17, and sailed at 1233 on October 18 for Loch Ewe.

  Ashore and afloat, Friday, October 13, passed much like any other day at Scapa Flow while U-47 lay off the Orkneys, waiting for nightfall.

  Ships came, ships went. The light cruisers HMS Delhi and HMS Colombo arrived early in the morning and joined Caledon and Calypso in the main Fleet anchorage (and almost certainly Cardiff as well, although Cardiff’s log does not give an anchor bearing). Southampton weighed anchor at 1016 and sailed to patrol off the Shetlands, escorted by Matabele, Jervis and Jupiter, plus the destroyers HMS Jackal and HMS Janus, which had arrived from Rosyth. Sturdy left for Rosyth at 1145. HMS Belfast, newest and largest cruiser in the Royal Navy, entered harbour at 1500 hours – the last-but-one ship movement of the day – and anchored at 1520 in the main Fleet anchorage, half a mile off the island of Flotta. Even now, James Sutherland, a farmer who lived in a house called Whanclett, slightly west of where Belfast let go her anchor, remembers her arrival. ‘I could always tell the Belfast and the Edinburgh by the arrangement of their funnels,’ he explained. ‘The second mast was in front of the second funnel instead of being the other way around.’

  On land, the war had already begun to swamp the Orkney port of Kirkwall. At the Royal, the one hotel to escape requisitioning, residents slept on the floor and before one meal was finished long queues had begun to form outside the dining-room for the next. Like the staff at the Royal, Robbie Tullock, owner of a Kirkwall garage, was run off his feet. The demand for his big black Ford V8 taxi with the registration number BS 1654 was endless. Once again he could not see much prospect of getting to bed before midnight: events would prove him right.

  Wrens had already appeared in Kirkwall at this time and made the depressing discovery that it was not exactly the Mayfair of the north. There was little in the way of amusement after working hours. But, as they went about their duties on that Friday, they had something to look forward to. There was to be a dance in the Drill Hall at St Mary’s and a special bus had been arranged to take them down to the shores of Kirk Sound, six miles away.

  Aboard Royal Oak, four Engine Room Artificers and a Canteen Assistant spent the afternoon packing their kit. Before the day was out they were due to make the journey across the Flow to the main Fleet anchorage, the ERAs to carry out repairs to the cruiser Colombo, the Canteen Assistant to join the crew of the cruiser Delhi. Some of Royal Oak’s crew went ashore for the afternoon. Among them was Chief ERA Wilson, who after pay parade had been seized by a sudden complusion to buy a torch. Less than 12 hours later it would help to save his life. One of Admiral French’s cooks aboard Iron Duke went ashore as well. He would never cook another meal: after missing his liberty boat at Scapa Pier, he went to spend the night with a friend in Royal Oak and was lost.

  For the crew of U-47, the time for patient waiting was over. The U-boat surfaced at 1915. Torpedoes had already been placed in rapid-loading positions, explosive charges made ready in case of the need to scuttle. Their cook had done them well – soup, salt pork and vegetables, a pudding and coffee – for a meal which seemed quite likely to be their last at sea until the war was over and quite possibly their last anywhere.

  It was a fine clear night with light cloud behind which flickered the Northern Lights.8 They were an unforeseen and unexpected hazard, but, although deprived of his promised cloak of total darkness, Lt. Prien decided it would be unfair to his keyed-up crew to postpone the mission for another 24 hours. Once supper was over, he set course for Rose Ness at the entrance to Holm Sound. From there he would have roughly three miles to cover before reaching the entrance to Kirk Sound, then the better part of another two miles before emerging into Scapa Flow. Kirk Sound posed the main threat to the success of the exploit, both in terms of detection and navigation: it was little more than 600 yards wide at its narrowest point and, apart from the four periods of slack water each day when the tide turned, the current ran like a mill race.

  Timing of the approach was therefore critical and had to take into account the additional complication that slack water did not coincide with high water and low water. The main tidal flow in the Orkneys is between the Atlantic and the North Sea, and, in the days before the eastern entrances were sealed off with road-topped stone barriers, the sea flowed into Scapa Flow through the eastern entrances and out through the western entrances for most of the time that the tide was falling in the anchorage. The opposite phenomenon occurred when the tide was rising. Slack water, when the current was about to reverse itself, began 25 minutes before high and low water.

  On the night of October 13, 1939, high water in Kirk Sound was at 2333.9 Conditions for penetrating the anchorage would therefore be ideal shortly after 2300 hours. U-47 came ghosting in towards Rose Ness right on time. But Lt. Prien did not have the Pentland Firth to himself. Out of the night loomed a ship, forcing U-47 to dive to avoid possible detection. Lt. Prien later noted in his log that he could not make out the ship in either of his periscopes, despite the brightness of the night and the fact that she carried navigation lights.10

  The difference between the success and failure of an undertaking often depends on factors which nobody could expect to foresee or cater for. The encounter with the mystery ship off Rose Ness caused a delay of half an hour and meant the passage through Kirk Sound would now have to be made with a following tide, a daunting prospect given a submarine’s habit of yawing about under these conditions.

  On the other hand, but for the delay U-47’s mission would almost certainly have ended in the disaster foreseen at U-boat HQ. For, at the time Lt. Prien was forced to submerge with the narrows of Kirk Sound three miles away, Chief Warden Alfred Flett of the Civil Defence was walking along the normally deserted north shore of the Sound, returning to his home in St Mary’s after a special mission.

  Earlier the last ship movement of the day had taken place at 2024 with the sailing of the cruiser Calypso, and some time after that – he is not sure precisely when – the telephone rang in Warden Flett’s home. It was ARP headquarters at Kirkwall with an order which was urgent, even if 40 years later it also sounds somewhat quaint. ‘We’ve had a report that German aircraft are dropping mines in the eastern approaches to Scapa Flow,’ he was told. ‘Take a walk out towards the open sea and let us know if you can hear anything.’

  Warden Flett welcomed the instruction as a break from his routine task of ensuring that the blackout was correctly observed in St Mary’s. To be fair, he found the local residents co-operative, but the same could not be said, in Warden Flett’s view, of O Company of the 7th (Mar and Mearns) Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders.

  O Company, consisting largely of untrained men, had descended on St Mary’s at the very start of the war. They lived in tents behind the Drill Hall, they used the kitchen of the Drill Hall as a guardroom, and they were responsible for guarding ‘vulnerable points’, which, generally speaking, meant points at which telephone cables disappeared under the sea to emerge in some other part of the Orkneys.

  One of these points was at Howequoy Head where Kirk Sound broadens out into Scapa Flow. Warden Flett had discovered the Gordons with lights on in their tents at Howequoy. His protests about this and other incidents had not, he felt, been treated with the seriousness they deserved. Basically, it seemed to Warden Flett that we would have a better chance of winning the war if O Company went over to the enemy. When the occasion demanded, they were incline
d to say: ‘Come oot and see if Ah ken ye’, rather than using the more military: ‘Advance friend and be recognised’; they had shot a local cat in mistake for a German commando; and they had arrested Warden Flett himself in mistake for a German spy. The arrest had happened on just such a night as this when Warden Flett was out on a similar mission. A sergeant and two privates had taken him into custody, marched him to the Drill Hall and kept him under guard for an hour until their C.O., Captain Innes Stuart, appeared from his billet at the other end of the village and said he could be released.

  On the night of October 13, 1939, Warden Flett strolled out to the seaward end of Kirk Sound, listened, heard nothing and strolled home again. At the Drill Hall, the dance was well under way. ‘I don’t remember any Northern Lights,’ says Mr Flett, ‘but it was a very clear night, considering there was no moon, and there was a very high tide. It was just about full when I got back to St Mary’s.’

  The height of the tide and the clearness of the night made him think about U-boats. Although the Admiralty took a more optimistic view, nobody in St Mary’s had any doubts about the vulnerability of Kirk Sound: apart from local vessels, German trawlers had used it regularly to enter and leave Scapa Flow between the wars. It was right on the stroke of 2330 when Warden Flett reached home. He says: ‘I remember quite distinctly remarking to my wife: “If ever there was a night for a submarine to come up, this is it.” ’

  One minute later, U-47 re-surfaced off Rose Ness.

  Robbie Tullock had been right in thinking that he faced a long day. It was getting on for midnight before he finished the last scheduled trip in his taxi and made for home. On the way he was waved down by two young men who worked at the Royal Hotel and recognised his car.

  ‘There’s a dance at St Mary’s,’ they said. ‘Will you take us down?’

  Mr Tullock refused: with another job at six o’clock in the morning, he was anxious to get to bed.

  ‘Aw, come on,’ they pleaded. ‘We’ve been working all day and we’re fed up. We want a bit of fun.’

  Mr Tullock still refused, but they argued some more and eventually he changed his mind and said: ‘All right, jump in.’

  It is arguable that, if he had stuck to his original decision, the whole story of that night might have worked out very differently and the controversy which has surrounded the loss of Royal Oak for 40 years would not have existed. Mr Tullock drove first to the Royal Hotel, where he picked up a couple of girls on the staff who also wanted to go to the dance, then he took the road south, past the RDF station at Netherbutton and on down to the shores of Kirk Sound. At that time, he says, the night was so bright – ‘All the hills and fields were lit up’ – that he was surprised when I told him there had been no moon.

  Inside Scapa Flow were 51 vessels of the Royal Navy, 18 of which might be described as fighting ships – Royal Oak, the heavy cruiser Belfast, the light cruisers Aurora, Cardiff, Caledon, Colombo and Delhi, the Tribal class destroyers Somali, Ashanti, Mashona, Eskimo and Tartar (which had defects), the minesweepers Hazard, Hebe, Seagull, Sharpshooter and Speedy, and the A/A ship Curlew. With the exception of those on watch, nearly all of their crews had turned in for the night. They slept soundly. Apart from the danger of air attack, they knew they were safe in Scapa Flow.

  On the night of October 13–14, 1939, there were, in fact, no fewer than 11 flaws in the Scapa Flow defences (see Appendix B) which might have been exploited by a U-boat to gain access to the anchorage – through, under and around booms and via the eastern entrances where there were no minefields, coast watchers, guns, searchlights or patrol vessels.

  Kirk Sound, which had been selected for U-47’s attempt, was supposedly sealed by three wrecks. Taking them from south to north, there was the Minich, which had been broken up by the tides; the Thames (bows pointing south); and the Soriano (bows pointing north). From the bows of Soriano stretched a metal hawser attached to her anchor, which had been placed close to the north shore. Between the stern of Thames and the stern of Soriano there was a gap 136 feet wide. This had been sealed off a month earlier by linking the sterns of the two ships with a 12-inch hemp and an arrangement of heavy wires dangling at various depths. In addition, two more wires ran diagonally across the gap from the sterns of the two ships and were attached to massive anchors on the seabed.

  These arrangements, however, still left Kirk Sound highly vulnerable. On the night of October 13–14, with its exceptionally high tide, there was still a gap 200 feet wide, offering a depth of 24 feet at high water, north of Soriano, and another gap, 400 feet wide, to the south of Thames. A U-boat using this second gap could count on a depth of 33–35 feet at low water (U-47 drew 15½ feet).

  Both Admiral Forbes, C.-in-C., Home Fleet, and Admiral French, ACOS, had shown active concern about the situation. Back in the summer, Admiral Forbes had sent a submission of protest to the Admiralty following a decision not to spend any more money on blockships. He complained that ‘three large-scale surveys of Kirk and Skerry Sounds show that three straight channels exist through which enemy submarines or destroyers could enter Scapa Flow and attack the Fleet.’ Admiral Forbes went on to quote from a letter which Admiral French, then ACOS delegate, had written to him following a recent visit of inspection to Scapa Flow; It said: ‘. . . I went down to Kirk and Skerry Sounds and went in and out of both of them on a young west-going tide in a picket boat. I would have no hesitation in doing either of them in a submarine or destroyer provided I could see and select slack water to do it in. Under these conditions it’s complete rot talking about the swirls and eddies putting you on the beach or sunken ships. The sunken ships provide you with an excellent beacon.’

  This submission caused the Admiralty to modify its views. Two more blockships were ordered, the Cape Ortegal and the Lake Neuchatel. On October 13, Cape Ortegal was already in position in Skerry Sound: Lake Neuchatel, destined to seal off the 400-ft southern gap which Lt. Prien would use for his escape, was scheduled to arrive that very weekend and be placed in position a few days later.

  The rest of the Scapa Flow defences were in a similar state of disarray. To guard the Royal Navy’s main base, Admiral French had a patrol force consisting of six Fleet drifters, two of which were usually boiler-cleaning at any given time. On the night of October 13–14, only two of the six drifters were in use. One was patrolling at Hoxa, one of the two southern entrances to the Flow. The Hoxa entrance, a mile and a half wide, was vulnerable in three ways to penetration by a U-boat. At the western end of the boom was a wide gap with 15 feet or more of water at high water; the boom itself did not reach the sea bed (it was 35 feet above the sea bed at high water springs); and no hydrophone or Asdic watch was kept when the boom was open. The other drifter was at the Hoy entrance, 1.7 miles wide, the north-west entrance to the Flow. Here, as well as a boom, there was a gap 500 feet wide, offering 30 feet of water, at the southern end of the boom. Neither at Hoxa nor at Hoy was a watch kept from the shore.

  One can only feel sympathy for Admiral French. He did not have sufficient patrol vessels; he had no anti-submarine officer; his Chief of Staff did not arrive until October 13, just a few hours before Royal Oak was sunk; he was overwhelmed with administrative work and most of his officers had emerged from retirement and, in many cases, very long retirement. The situation is still a vivid memory for Commander Charles Harper, RN, who was the Admiral’s assistant secretary at the time. ‘One of the officers on the Admiral’s staff had only one arm, having lost the other in the first World War, and another did not even have a uniform,’ he told me. ‘As Iron Duke’s ensign was lowered at sunset, he used to salute by raising his bowler hat. He was still wearing his bowler when he went over the side on October 17 after Iron Duke was bombed and holed and had to be beached.’

  The unwillingness of the government to spend money on defence, allied to various changes of plan and an unrealistic assessment of the range of German bombers, had helped to ensure that the land defences of Scapa Flow, under the nominal control of the Army, we
re as frail as the Navy’s. On the night of October 13–14, they consisted of a laughable total of 16 guns, none of which could be fired without the permission of ACOS, and five coastal defence searchlights, all of which pointed out to sea and could not be elevated. The Army had only recently been given permission to switch the searchlights on from time to time, without asking ACOS, in order to make certain that the Orkneys were not about to be invaded.

  In 1937 it had been agreed that, in the event of war, Rosyth was to be the main base of the Home Fleet with three battlecruisers and three aircraft carriers stationed at Scapa Flow. A year later, however, it was decided to leave the final choice to the C.-in-C., Home Fleet. He settled for Scapa Flow. It was generally accepted that, should there be air attacks, the Fleet would defend itself with its own guns. Even as late as August, 1939, it was believed that Scapa Flow was at the maximum range for German bombers and the anchorage was unlikely to be raided or, if it were, the raids would be minor ones. By September 3, this view had changed dramatically and the Chiefs of Staff agreed in principle that 80 heavy AA guns, 53 light AA guns, 108 searchlights and as many AA balloons as were required should be provided for the defence of Scapa Flow. The first guns under this programme were due to be loaded at Portsmouth on October 18 and the first searchlights at Aberdeen on October 22.

  Thus, on the night of October 13–14, there were eight 4.5-inch AA guns on Hoy to defend the oil fuel depot; two 6-inch guns and one 4.7-inch gun, plus three searchlights, at Stanger Head at the entrance to Hoxa Sound; two 6-inch guns and two searchlights at Ness in the north-east corner of the Flow; and three 40-mm Bofors guns at Netherbutton to defend the RDF station. The searchlights were set in emplacements of corrugated iron and the war diary of the Orkney (Fortress) Company, RE (TA), which was responsible for manning them, recorded rather plaintively that the shutters of the emplacements were so heavy that, in a gale, a Searchlight Operator ‘unassisted may be unable to open them’. When this company was made responsible for manning rifle positions at Stanger Head in the event of a German landing, the war diary complained: ‘The problem of effective defence – did the need arise – would have been aggravated by the fact that the allowance of small arms ammunition was only five rounds per man.’