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

by H J Weaver

  Living conditions were terrible. The officer commanding one battery of four AA guns to the west of Lyness naval base was Captain Pat Scott, OBE, TD, DL, now managing director of the Highland Park Distillery at Kirkwall. ‘We lived and slept in tents dating from 1915,’ he recalls. Shortly before the outbreak of war, the 5th/7th Battalion, the Gordon Highlanders, had been divided, with most of the trained troops going to the 5th Battalion. Four officers and 155 other ranks, mostly raw recruits, from the 7th Battalion arrived in the Orkneys on September 7. Among the members of O Company, stationed at St Mary’s, was Private William Anderson of Glenanan, Aberdeenshire. ‘Our first meal when we arrived was tinned herring, and the smell in our mess tins lasted for days,’ he remembers. ‘We seemed to get a lot of tinned herring in our rations, but the country grocers’ vanmen were quite willing to swop them for something else and some of the lads weren’t slow at going and pinching a hen.

  ‘I remember a few of us trying to wash with face towels and cold water under the village pump in St Mary’s and we didn’t get a bath for weeks. Eventually it was arranged for us to have baths at the Highland Park Distillery. One of the big tubs that was normally used for making whisky was filled with hot water and we jumped in, ten at a time.’

  Lieut.-Colonel (then Major) D. Polson Hall, second-in-command of the 7th Battalion, was at Aberdeen when the Orkney detachment assembled to board a ship for Kirkwall and immediately christened them the ‘Odds and Sods’. Later in the month he was sent up to the Orkneys to see how the ‘Odds and Sods’ were settling in. On his return he reported that he considered the situation a ‘shambles’. ‘They were doing their best, considering that the officers and NCOs were inexperienced and the troops, to a very large extent, recruits and untrained,’ he told me. ‘But they hadn’t been issued with any ordnance stores for cooking and protection against the elements, and there weren’t enough trained cooks to go around all the vulnerable points that had to be guarded.’ Among the vulnerable points were selected telephone poles. He also reported that he considered ‘guarding a telephone pole a complete waste of time when there were miles of unguarded overhead lines’.

  That was Scapa Flow on the night of October 13–14, 1939, the Scapa Flow which Admiral Dönitz believed to be so well protected that ‘the Admiralty, with all its great experience in these matters, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, must have complete confidence in the effectiveness of the measures taken and felt quite sure that the British warships were perfectly secure in their anchorage’.

  U-47 was having a rough passage in the following tide, despite being trimmed down to reduce her buoyancy. Lt. Prien had decided to make his penetration by the gap to the north of the blockships and, way behind schedule, now found himself being borne along at ‘unbelievable speed’ by a current that flowed faster by the minute. It foamed against the wire which stretched from the bow of Soriano to her anchor close to the shore. At the moment Lt. Prien spotted the obstruction, U-47 yawed towards the shore and grounded while the current rammed her stern hard against the anchor cable. Lt. Prien blew his ballast and diving tanks.11 U-47 hung for a moment. Then, with rudder hard to port and the cable holding her stern, her bow came back on course and her stern scraped free. The defences of Kirk Sound had been breached.

  Around the corner at the far end of the village appeared the lights of Robbie Tullock’s taxi . . .

  It is 200 yards to St Mary’s general store and post office from the point at which the Kirkwall road joins the shore. Robbie Tullock covered the ground in a matter of seconds, turned left into Hall Road beside the post office and drove up the 70-yard slight incline to the Drill Hall, where he dropped his passengers off. From inside the hall came the sound of music. At the door stood three guards, members of O Company, wearing greatcoats and tam o’shanters and carrying rifles with fixed bayonets. They were chatting to some girls and readjusting the blackout curtain whenever anyone went in and out of the hall. It struck Robbie Tullock as a peculiar place for armed guards to be.12

  Once he had been paid, he drove forwards and backwards a couple of times to turn around. At the bottom of Hall Road, he stopped before turning right into the shore road, and remained there for an appreciable time, his one masked headlamp shining on the water. ‘I had never seen such a high tide there before,’ he told me when I finally found him. ‘I looked out across Kirk Sound. The visibility was good – it was still a very bright night – but I didn’t see anything. There had been some talk about whether it might be possible for a U-boat to get into the Flow, but it had not occurred to me that a submarine might enter on the surface. I assumed if there was an attempt the U-boat would be submerged.

  ‘I didn’t get out of the car and, after a while, it struck me that such a bright night would be a good one for an air attack on the RDF station at Netherbutton, which was between me and home. I switched off my headlamp because I could see quite well without it and drove off at full speed, using just my sidelights. But, after I had passed the RDF station, it grew dark and began to rain. I remember quite clearly switching on my headlight again and the windscreen wipers. It was about twenty to one when I got back to Kirkwall.’

  Out in Kirk Sound, U-47, using only her electric motors, slid quietly past St Mary’s and rounded Skaildaquoy Point.13 The time was 0027. It was Lt. Prien’s custom always to keep his crew informed about what was happening. Now he announced briefly: ‘We are in.’ Laid out before him was the vast, historic anchorage of Scapa Flow – and there wasn’t a ship in sight.

  4

  What the Hell was that, then?

  There are three basic aspects to the events which occurred in Scapa Flow in the next hundred minutes or so: the recollection of the Royal Oak survivors . . . the German story . . . and the facts, many of which are printed here for the first time.

  It would be naive to expect all three aspects to tally. The impressions of men who have had a 29,000-ton battleship sink under them in less than a quarter of an hour must inevitably be coloured by the experience. Nor can one expect Lt. Prien and his crew, cruising around the main anchorage of the Home Fleet in the middle of the night and expecting that death or capture might be their imminent reward, to be the most reliable of witnesses. The passage of 40 years has not helped either.

  Not long ago Herbert Herrmann paid his first visit to the Orkneys since 1939, went down to Kirk Sound, and later told me that it gave him ‘the creeps’ just to look at it. ‘I don’t know if you can put yourself in our position,’ he explained. ‘If you were breaking into somebody’s house, you wouldn’t be yourself. You’d see things that weren’t there, you’d hear things that weren’t there, the slightest noise would make you jump. That was how we felt. This was my first trip, but everybody thought much the same as I did: “Bloody hell, we’ll never get out again. This is the end.” We knew two U-boats which had attempted the same feat in the first World War had been destroyed. That sticks in your mind. You were afraid, you were always afraid, and wondered if each trip would be your last.’

  The following account of events in Scapa Flow is based upon Lt. Prien’s log. The criticisms of the Royal Oak survivors, plus the facts, have been interpolated without, at this stage, any real attempt to resolve the discrepancies which arise.

  When U-47 cleared Howequoy Head and entered Scapa Flow, the nearest ship to the U-boat was Royal Oak, anchored some 5,600 yards away, west of north, with her entire silhouette (bow to north-east wind) visible from the U-boat’s bridge. Yet there has never been any suggestion that Lt. Prien or his crew saw the battleship at this point, The obvious deduction must therefore be that visibility was less than 5,600 yards.

  U-47 headed westwards towards the main Fleet anchorage on the far side of the Flow, bounded to the south by the island of Flotta, to the west by the island of Fara, and to the north-west by the island of Cava. But, after approximately three miles, Lt. Prien decided to abandon his approach, a course of action to which he devotes some space in his log. The entry reads:

  It is disgu
stingly bright. The whole bay is fabulous to survey. To the south of Cava lies nothing. I go farther in. To port I recognise the Hoxa Sound guard, to which the boat must very soon offer itself as a target. Then everything would be lost; at present south of Cava no ships can be made out, although everything is clearly recognisable at a great distance. 005514 So, decision: South of Cava lies nothing, therefore, before any prospect of success is placed at risk, achievable results must be obtained.15

  It is this early in the proceedings that the Royal Oak survivors part company with Lt. Prien. They say it was not a spectacularly bright night, with visibility in excess of five miles, but a dark night – and, on the evidence available, it is difficult not to agree with them.

  The only other person to suggest that the night was bright rather than just clear is Robbie Tullock, and even he says that it had grown dark and begun to rain by the time he returned to his home in Kirkwall at about 0040 hours. Marine Alan Lawrence, who stayed talking with a friend on the deck of Royal Oak until around midnight, remembers the night as dark. ‘I could just make out the shore about half a mile away, but only because the cliffs were even darker than the sky,’ he says.

  This assessment is supported, at least by implication, by the silent testimony of the logs of most of the naval vessels in Scapa Flow at the time. When the weather was noted as a matter of routine with the change of watch at midnight, nobody thought the visibility worthy of special mention, although watchkeepers in harbour tend to seize on anything to break the monotony, and the estimate of cloud cover ranged from 25–75 per cent to more than 75 per cent.

  But Lt. Prien’s assertion that he could be absolutely certain at a range of five miles that there were no ships south of Cava raises more serious difficulties than this. Firstly, the nearest and quite the largest ship to him was still Royal Oak, now some 6,500 yards to the north-east. Yet there has again never been any suggestion that the crew of U-47 could see the battleship at this range. And secondly, despite Lt. Prien’s confident statement to the contrary, there were ships south of Cava.

  Admittedly, they would have been difficult to detect, bow-on to a north-east wind against a background of land, but when Lt. Prien abandoned his approach to the main Fleet anchorage he was 6,600 yards and 7,500 yards respectively from the cruisers Caledon and Belfast, anchored about a thousand yards off the north shore of Flotta; and roughly 9,200 yards from Delhi and Colombo, anchored close to each other between south and south-east of Cava.16

  In the light of these facts it seems fair to conclude that Lt. Prien’s estimate of visibility was at the very least exaggerated.

  U-47 made a turn to port and retraced her course towards Kirk Sound. Apart from the throb of the U-boat’s engines, the Flow remained silent. Lt. Prien cut diagonally across the face of the Sound, then turned north by the coast. At this point, U-47 was just over 5,000 yards from Royal Oak. For yet a third time, there is no suggestion, and never has been, that the battleship was visible at this range.

  The only other naval vessel in the north-east corner of the Flow at the time was the comparatively tiny, 25-year-old seaplane carrier Pegasus, anchored 1,500 yards virtually due north of Royal Oak. This is the position given by the bearings in her log: 205º, 9.2 cables (1,840 yards) from Scapa Pier light. But, according to Lt. Prien, gradually a shadow, followed by a shape – then two shapes – came into view.

  Two battleships are lying there, further inshore destroyers at anchor. Cruisers not to be seen, attack on the two fat fellows. Distance 3,000 metres [note: roughly 3280 yards]. Estimated depth, 7.5 metres. Impact firing. 0116 [time queried in pencil, 0058 suggested, names of Repulse and Royal Oak added in pencil.] One shot at the northern ship, two at the southern. After a good 3½ minutes, a torpedo detonates on the northern ship; of the other two nothing is to be seen. About 0121 [time queried in pencil, 0102 suggested]. Shot from the stern tube.17

  Again, there are a number of factual errors in this entry, which is not, of course, to say that the errors were not made in good faith, particularly if it was not a spectacularly bright night. There were no destroyers anchored closer inshore: all of the destroyers were anchored in Gutter Sound, all of the minesweepers in Long Hope, nearly 10 miles away on the other side of the Flow. Nor was there a northern ‘fat fellow’, anchored, according to the U-47 map, some 600 yards beyond Royal Oak.

  None of the Royal Oak survivors attempted to reach any inshore destroyers or the northern ‘fat fellow’ anchored close to them. The inshore destroyers and the northern ‘fat fellow’ did not send boats to Royal Oak. Nor did the northern ‘fat fellow’ have to undergo repairs as a result of this attack.

  The whereabouts of ships under repair during the war was concealed by giving them job numbers, which were announced in the weekly Confidential Admiralty Fleet Orders. The only ‘fat fellow’ mentioned in the weeks immediately after the loss of Royal Oak was Hood, allocated the number D57 at the end of October. The battlecruiser subsequently spent from November 11 to November 28, 1939, in Devonport Dockyard where, according to her Ship’s Book, which lists all alterations and repairs, she was fitted with a new plotting table, had some work done to the Admiral’s and Captain’s sea cabins, and had extra weather protection fitted to the Admiral’s bridge.

  Lt. Prien’s account of this first attack on Royal Oak does provide some additional, and fairly precise, information about visibility, if one assumes – which seems logical – that he would not in the dangerous circumstances approach any closer than necessary to his target.

  At a range of 5,000 yards, he could not see Royal Oak. At a range of 3,280 yards (estimated) he was able to carry out an attack on the battleship. In actual fact, the range was probably slightly greater than that. The speed of G7e torpedoes, the type used, was 30 knots, a thousand yards a minute. This suggests a range of just over 3,500 yards – which puts U-47 5,000 yards from Pegasus. The implication must therefore be that the British version of events (Lt. Prien mistook Pegasus for Repulse) is more generous than realistic. If Lt. Prien and his crew could not see Royal Oak (620 feet long, 29,150 tons) from a range of 5,000 yards when they began to proceed north by the coast, how could they see the much smaller Pegasus (360 feet long, 6,900 tons) from a similar range a few minutes later?18

  Lt. Prien was right in thinking that the only one of the torpedoes fired in his first attack which reached a target struck the bow of a ship. It did not strike the bow of Repulse, which was not there; it did not strike the bow of Pegasus, which he could not see; it blew a hole 40 to 50 feet wide and three plates deep in the starboard bow of Royal Oak, starting one plate below the waterline.

  The explosion came at 0104 and was followed immediately by a deafening rumble as both anchor chains ran out. Leading Signalman Fossey, on watch on the flag-deck, saw a spout of water shoot into the air and cascade onto the forecastle-deck. Below, opinions about the intensity and effect of the explostion varied from one part of the ship to another. Forward, men were blown out of their hammocks and a steel shelf snapped in two. Amidships, Petty Officer Dick Kerr recalls having the impression that it sounded like ‘a large zinc bath falling on the deck of the Wardroom bathroom’ above his head. In the stern, where most of the officers had turned in for the night, it felt as if a giant terrier had picked Royal Oak up in its teeth and shaken her.

  Royal Oak’s captain, Captain William Benn, went forward to investigate, and was informed that air gushing from the vents of the inflammable store suggested that there had been an internal explosion and the store was flooding. The matter was not at this time considered serious: the trim of the ship had not been affected and the flooding could easily be contained. While arrangements were made for dealing with the problem, the ‘buzz’ which swept the ship was that one of the CO2 bottles in the refrigeration plant, also in the bows, had gone up. Many of the crew, reassured, simply turned in again: others, more cautiously minded and thinking that a German plane might have glided over and dropped a bomb, took refuge beneath the armoured deck, a decision which would short
ly condemn them to death.

  At the time of the first explosion, Chief ERA Charlie Cartwright was asleep in his hammock next to the anchor cable locker: ‘The cable ran out with a great roar. I thought it was going to burst out of its locker. The whole place shook and there was dust everywhere. Then the noise stopped as suddenly as it had started. I couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be going on, and in the end I gave up thinking about it, turned over and went back to sleep.’

  Vincent Marchant, then 18, jumped out of his hammock in the seamen’s mess, next to the boys’ mess, amidships on the starboard side, and went forward in his vest and underpants to see what was happening. Outside the cells, from which two prisoners had been released as a precaution, there was smoke and ‘a funny smell’, but the Master-of-Arms was telling everyone in sight: ‘Get back. There’s no need to panic.’

  George White, now security officer at the British Embassy in Amman, was asleep in the 6-inch gun casement immediately above the boys’ messdeck. ‘I was an Instructor Boy, exactly a month short of my 17th birthday,’ he told me. ‘The boys’ messdeck was full to overflowing and I decided to sleep in the casemate because the air was fresher there. I think that is why I was one of 32 boys saved out of a total of 175. We all turned out after the first explosion but were ordered to turn in again a few minutes later by our PT instructor.’

  Acting Petty Officer Tom Blundell had dozed off in a mood of quiet contentment. Apart from the war, it had been a good year for him: his first child had been born, a three-month-old daughter he had yet to see; he had been promoted; and, just a few hours earlier, he had picked up six and a half months’ back promotion pay with the result that he had the astronomical sum of £13.1s. tucked away in his green money belt. His hammock was slung under a ladder with a large hatch above it and a manhole in the centre of the hatch. After the first explosion had woken him, he lay looking at the manhole for several minutes, wondering what might have happened. ‘Then,’ he says, ‘I decided I had better turn out and go and see whether I was needed for a fire party.’