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

by H J Weaver

  It was not until May 23 that the German High Command announced that Lt. Prien and U-47 had failed to return from patrol. The brief communiqué ended: ‘He and his brave crew will live forever in German hearts.’

  9

  Things Bad Begun

  The controversy which surrounds the loss of Royal Oak is nearly as old as the sinking and it is easy to trace the process by which it has persisted and grown.

  It was born in two places, 700 miles apart, on the night of Tuesday, October 17, 1939. One was the London office of the Daily Express newspaper, the other Thurso, most northerly port on the British mainland. In the Daily Express office, Mr Churchill’s statement to the House of Commons was already in type when news agency tapes began to tap out a contradictory version of events. It was a translation of a broadcast by Lt. Prien which had been put out simultaneously by every German radio station, and it read: ‘It was quite a job to smuggle ourselves into Scapa Flow through all the British defences. Bearing in mind the sinking of the German Fleet there in 1919, I was determined something must be done to avenge them. I saw two British warships to the north of me and discharged two torpedoes at them. I at once turned my boat and left the harbour because I did not want my ship and my crew to be captured. We want to do more work.

  As I left port, I heard two explosions and saw a column of water rising from the ship furthest north. This was followed by three columns of fire, one red, one blue and one green. A moment later the other ship exploded. I saw parts of her blown in the air, then the whole ship disappeared. Then I realised the northern ship, too, was seriously damaged. She had two funnels, which proves she was not Royal Oak. Just as we were leaving port, intense activity began there. The surface of the sea was lit by British searchlights and several depth charges exploded behind me. And we were fired on, too. You cannot imagine how cheerful and happy I felt when, a few minutes later, a thundering cheer echoed over the sea from my crew.

  The text of this broadcast, in tone and content, bears a strong resemblance to the story which was to appear in Der Angriff, the newspaper of Dr Goebbels, next day. It contains some inaccuracies which seem pointless (two torpedoes instead of four) and some which were presumably intended for dramatic effect (the reference to depth charges and being fired on). The Daily Express was not impressed. The Admiralty denied that any other ship had been damaged in the action. This denial, plus Mr Churchill’s statement in the Commons and what little information it had been possible to glean from Royal Oak survivors, led the newspaper to begin its story next morning in the following uncompromising terms:

  At eleven o’clock last night every German radio station broadcast what they announced as a ‘how-I-did-it’ talk by the commander of the U-boat which sank the Royal Oak at anchor in Scapa Flow. It was a fake. It differed so much from Mr Churchill’s official version – in the House of Commons seven hours earlier – and stories by survivors that it was obviously told by someone who knew nothing about it.

  The same conclusion had already been arrived at in Thurso by four Royal Oak survivors. Twiddling the dial of the radio in the house where they had been billeted following their evacuation from Scapa Flow after the air raid on Iron Duke, they picked up an English version of Lt. Prien’s broadcast. Naturally enough, they listened to the story he had to tell – and, at the finish, they turned to each other and said: ‘The bloody liar.’ There had been no twin-funnelled ship near them and most of the broadcast was at such variance with their experience that they concluded, like the Daily Express, that it had been made by someone without any personal knowledge of the raid.

  One of the four survivors present, Acting PO (as he then was) Tom Blundell, remained convinced that, whoever sank his ship, it was not Lt. Prien. Only when four members of U-47’s crew – Wilhelm Spahr, Ernst Dziallas, Kurt Römer and Herbert Herrmann – made the journey to Southsea in 1967 to attend the first Royal Oak reunion did he, somewhat reluctantly, change his mind: ‘I decided they must have been responsible, otherwise they wouldn’t have had the nerve to put in an appearance.’

  It is understandable that, from the Royal Oak survivors’ point of view, a critical climate existed when Lt. Prien’s official account of his exploit, his log, eventually appeared in translation in the 1948 edition of Brassey’s Naval Annual. This was not dispelled by the subsequent publication in Britain of Lt. Prien’s autobiography; the memoirs of Admiral Dönitz, indicating that Lt. Prien had positively identified his two victims as Royal Oak and Repulse; and a spate of books by German writers which perpetuated the legends, many of them false, of that disastrous night for the Royal Navy.

  Now that the truth is clear, the problem remains of explaining why, taken in all its aspects, Lt. Prien’s story is so frequently at variance with the facts. Certainly the following questions need to be answered:

  • Lt. Prien gave an exaggerated account of visibility in Scapa Flow. Why?

  • Lt. Prien said he torpedoed a ship which wasn’t there. Why?

  • Lt. Prien is at some pains to justify his decision to break off the action and escape from Scapa Flow. Why?

  • Lt. Prien speaks in his autobiography of destroyers and U-boat chasers flitting about Scapa Flow. This is obviously nonsense, even without knowing the facts. It argues that the Admiralty knew Scapa Flow was vulnerable, but instead of rectifying the situation kept a force of ships with steam up, night after night, to ensure a suitable reception for the first U-boat commander to take advantage of their generosity. Why did Lt. Prien lend his name to this lie?

  • Lt. Prien speaks in his autobiography (as he spoke in his broadcast) of depth charges being dropped as he left Scapa Flow. This again is clearly nonsense: U-47 was on the surface and the sea was full of men swimming for their lives. In any case, no depth charges were dropped until the following morning. Why did Lt. Prien lend his name to this lie?

  • Lt. Prien speaks in his autobiography of being challenged by a destroyer which, ‘wonder of wonders’, turned aside, despite not having received an answer after asking for a recognition signal. Not only did this incident not occur: to say that it did occur could only make Lt. Prien look a fool. In wartime, destroyers which fail to receive a recognition signal do not obligingly turn aside. They repeat the request with a gun – and if they still do not receive a reply it is time to make one’s peace with God. Why did Lt. Prien lend his name to this lie?

  • In his log Lt. Prien speaks only of a northern and a nearer ship. Yet, according to Admiral Dönitz, he identified them positively in a radio signal a few hours later as Royal Oak and Repulse. What happened to make him so positive?

  • On his return to Germany, Lt. Prien showed some reluctance about identifying his northern ship. In his broadcast, for example, he said: ‘She had two funnels, which proves she was not Royal Oak.’ In Der Angriff, he said the northern ship ‘looked like Repulse’. Why this reluctance?

  The notion that the Royal Oak survivors have not, as far as memory allows, told the truth about the night their ship was lost does not stand serious examination. What would they have to gain? At the same time, it is difficult to believe that the man who took a U-boat into the main anchorage of the Home Fleet, sank a battleship and escaped unharmed would lie about it. Apart from the question of character, what would be his motive after the successful accomplishment of a perilous mission?

  Yet the German story contains a large number of inaccuracies, as a consequence of which Lt. Prien suffers from a somewhat tarnished reputation outside his own country, and to rewrite it on the assumption that, by and large, Lt. Prien told the truth appears to raise difficulties of credibility. Rewritten, the story would have to read like this . . .

  Lt. Prien was cool, courageous and dedicated, a man who did not suffer fools gladly. He had volunteered for a highly dangerous mission; he knew it was considered unlikely that he would return alive; but he was determined to do what he had been sent to do and to bring his U-boat and his crew safely home.

  At the crucial stage, things began to go wrong. First,
there was the unexpected encounter with the merchant ship off Rose Ness which meant he faced a difficult passage through Kirk Sound with a following tide. No sooner had that been accomplished than Robbie Tullock’s taxi appeared out of the night, stopped facing the sea, then drove off rapidly towards Kirkwall.

  The reasonable deduction was that the driver had seen the U-boat and driven off to give the alarm. If this were the case, U-47 could not count on very much time in which to accomplish the mission which had brought her across the North Sea. Nevertheless, Lt. Prien set course across Scapa Flow towards the main Fleet anchorage.

  Visibility was about two miles except at odd moments when Northern Lights flickered behind the clouds. Short of the Hoxa boom, which he thought had sophisticated defences, he decided to turn back. There were no targets ahead of him as far as he could see, and, if he continued his course and the car driver raised the alarm, he would have the Hoxa boom between himself and his escape route, Kirk Sound. The chances were that he would then lose both his ship and his crew without accomplishing anything.

  U-47 back-tracked, cut across the face of Kirk Sound, found Royal Oak . From a range of around two miles, it seemed to Lt. Prien that there were two ships, not one. In his running commentary to the crew, Herbert Herrmann recalls, he ‘definitely said there were two ships there’. It is an easy-enough mistake to make, particularly on a night which was not spectacularly bright.

  In the first attack, three out of four torpedoes disappeared without trace. Lt. Prien again headed for Kirk Sound, but when the Flow – doubtless to his astonishment – remained silent, returned for a second attack. This was followed by sufficient activity to make him feel that Scapa Flow was about to become an extremely unhealthy place for uninvited guests.

  One of the uppermost emotions in his mind on regaining the open sea was disappointment at not having achieved more. Another was anger that a dangerous mission had been made even more hazardous, and the whole outcome placed in jeopardy, by a 75 per cent torpedo failure in his first attack.

  When he sat down to write his log, he was in no mood to invite cross-examination by gold-braided gentlemen who, having spent the night safely in bed, often suffer from the delusion that they would have done better, had they been at the scene of the action. He therefore took the sensible precaution, like many another hero before and since, of answering a couple of questions before they were asked.

  Why had he not attacked the ships in the main Fleet anchorage? There were no ships in the main Fleet anchorage. How could he know that when U-47 turned back before approaching a point level with the Hoxa boom? It was a very bright night.

  That night he sent a radio message that U-47 was safe, one ship had been sunk, another damaged. By this time the Admiralty had announced the loss of Royal Oak. For some reason, those in high places in Germany had come to the conclusion that Lt. Prien’s second ship was Repulse. Admiral Dönitz therefore put a name to both ships when he wrote his war diary.

  Lt. Prien arrived home safely, was told he had torpedoed Repulse, heard the evidence and didn’t like it. Except when cornered by questions, he avoided positive identification of Repulse whenever possible. It was not an easy task. His exploit was turned into a propaganda circus, in which he was expected to play his part for the greater glory of the Third Reich. The circus culminated in the publication of a supposed autobiography which was, in fact, largly a fake and could in the long run serve only to make a braggart and a liar of him.

  And that, unlikely as it may seem, is precisely what happened.

  The book Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow is an extraordinary one. The original German version bears a 1940 date, but it was actually published in Berlin in January, 1941, just two months before Lt. Prien’s death, and became a best-seller. By 1952, when the remaining copies were pulped, there were only 140,000 remaining out of a total print of 890,000. Even allowing for the fact that the book had the support of theNazi regime, a sale of 750,000 copies is a remarkable achievement by a work which, in any contest to find the war memoirs containing the most falsehoods and errors, would start as an odds-on favourite.

  Its other remarkable achievement is that it should ever have been taken seriously, particularly by writers versed in these matters. A foreword, dated August, 1940, and ostensibly written by Lt. Prien, contains the assurance: ‘In all cases I have adhered to the truth and nearly always I have given to things and persons their proper names . . .’ This declaration has obviously carried a good deal of weight.

  But the obvious nature of some of the errors in the story of the sinking of Royal Oak have already been dealt with, and, if you examine the account in Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow of some of Lt. Prien’s other exploits, the situation does not improve. The following is a somewhat condensed version of the sinking of Lt. Prien’s first victim, the freighter Bosnia, on September 5, 1939. All of the statements underlined are quite definitely either inaccurate or invented.

  The Bosnia was sighted ‘early on the morning’ of September 5 as ‘the sun rose, blood red’. U-47 surfaced astern and fired two warning shots. Bosnia tried to escape and transmitted an SOS, whereupon U-47 fired two more shots which struck the freighter, the second setting the cargo of sulphur on fire. The account goes on: ‘The crew of the Bosnia had been over-hasty in their efforts to escape. One boat had filled with water and was foundering.

  ‘By now the lifeboat of the Bosnia had filled with water and the sea had swept over it. A few heads were floating close together, then a wave separated them. In space of a few seconds only a handful were left. A few non-swimmers thrashed about with their arms. Others were swimming with long strokes towards the seaworthy lifeboat of the Bosnia . . .’

  Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow goes on to describe the rescue of two members of the Bosnia’s crew. The first was a mess-boy, whereupon the following conversation is reported to have taken place:

  ‘Are you the mess-boy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Where are you bound for?’

  ‘Glasgow.’

  The story then continues: ‘He spoke in a Cockney accent . . . a boy from the London slums. “You are trembling. Are you afraid?” He shook his head. “No, I’m only cold, sir.” “You will have a spot of brandy later on,” I said. He nodded his head and added, perhaps to show his gratitude, “Of course, we got a fright, sir, you can’t imagine what it’s like; you looks over the water and sees nothing, on’y sky and water, and then suddenly a bloomin’ big thing pops up beside yer, blowing like a walrus. I thought I was seein’ the Loch Ness monster.” ’

  The Norwegian tanker Eidanger had by now appeared on the scene. In addition, U-47 had rescued a ‘skinny’ stoker and also taken on board one of the Bosnia’s officers who was ‘pale, fat and tired’. The ‘skinny’ stoker was ‘painfully thin and his ribs showed up clearly like the bars of a cage. Dittmer grasped him by the arms and began artificial respiration. The First Officer of the Bosnia was standing beside me. Looking down at the man he said abruptly, “You Germans are good-hearted people, sir.”

  ‘I looked at him standing there, fat, well-fed and probably mighty satisfied with himself. I could not contain myself and said gruffly: “It would have been better if you people had given that poor fellow something to eat in your ship.” ’

  It is easy to detect the hand of the ghostwriter in the clichés of the Cockney accent and the Loch Ness monster, and the hand of the Propaganda Ministry in the clumsy attempt to suggest that the Bosnia was a starvation ship, the contemptuous assumption presumably being that nobody in Germany had ever heard of, or guessed at, the existence of the National Union of Seamen.30

  It is also interesting to compare the truth with the above account. The Bosnia, which belonged to the Cunard Steamship Co., had spent the last week of August loading her cargo of sulphur at Licata in Sicily. The radio was full hourly of rumours of war. Nobody was sure which horse Mussolini would back if hostilities broke out as expected, and, not wishing to anticipate matters, the dock staff at Licata made it as difficul
t as possible for the Bosnia to obtain stores and water and make ready for sea. Finally, Captain Walter Poole, the freighter’s Master, sent a raiding party ashore at night to plunder whatever could be found in the agent’s store, and, once the party was safely back on board, slipped out of harbour under cover of darkness and set course for Gibraltar. The Declaration of War found the Bosnia passing through the Straits. On September 5 she was off the north-west coast of Spain.

  Denis Bird,31 a 19-year-old cadet, had come off watch at 0800 hours and sat down to the predictable, but satisfying, breakfast that was served every Tuesday morning aboard the Bosnia – porridge, followed by steak, onions and sauté potatoes. ‘Our ships were known as good-feeding ships all over,’ he recalled when I eventually traced him to his present home in Cheltenham. ‘Breakfast went to a set routine but was always substantial – curry and rice on Monday, bacon and two eggs on Wednesday, steak, onions and potatoes again on Thursday, boiled fish on Friday, steak, onions and potatoes a third time on Saturday, and bacon and eggs on Sunday.

  ‘There was a joint of the day for the officers’ dinner, served at noon each day, and the next day it was heated, covered with hot gravy and served to the rest of the crew. Tea was a fry-up at 6 p.m. Sandwiches of corned beef or cold meat were left out for the night watches and the two-gallon coffee pot was never off the stove, day or night.’

  After finishing breakfast, Cadet Bird did some washing, then had his usual shave. He had just undressed and was about to turn in when the ship’s siren began to sound the alarm signal of continuous blasts. At 0919 a lookout had spotted the periscope of U-47 about a quarter of a mile astern. Captain Poole immediately ordered full speed ahead. A minute later, the U-boat surfaced and fired two warning shots. Bosnia responded by transmitting an SOS, whereupon U-47 fired two more shots, which struck the freighter and set her cargo on fire. Captain Poole promptly gave the order to abandon ship.