Scapa Flow, HMS Royal Oak and Gunther Prien

HMS Royal Oak (Crown Copyright)

On the outbreak of war in 1939, the Royal Navy's Home Fleet had returned to it's northernmost wartime base of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, from whence the immense Grand Fleet had sailed for the Battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland and where the German High Seas Fleet had ignominiously surrendered in 1918, as well as being the scene of the 'Grand Scuttle' in 1919, when the officers of the Imperial German Navy destroyed their own ships rather than allow them to fall into the hands of the victorious Allies.

Scapa Flow had been selected to serve once again due to it's distance from German airbases but in the intervening years following the end of the Great War, it's defences had been allowed to fall into disrepair; the anti-aircraft defences were inadequate and the blockships sunken during the 1914-18 conflict had largely collapsed through corrosion. Anti submarine nets had been installed across the three main entrances to the naval base but in the early days of the war, these only consisted of single stranded wires and at this stage of the war, there was a distinct lack of anti-submarine patrols by destroyers and smaller craft. Measures were being put in place to rectify these shortcomings but on 14th October 1939, the base was still largely in it's pre-war state of preparedness. 

Two days earlier, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had made an uncharacteristically tough talking speech in which he had rejected Hitler's peace proposals made to the Reichstag six days previously. The German reply was an audacious attempt to hit the Royal Navy hard on it's own doorstep and the man chosen to lead this attack was 31 year old Kapitanleutnant Gunther Prien, a former Merchant Navy office but now one of the rising stars of Donitz's U-Boat fleet. In January 1932, Prien had passed his Master Mariner's examination but had subsequently been unable to find employment and frustrated at this situation had briefly joined the Nazi Party. However, a year later Prien applied to join the Reichsmarine and was forced to renounce his Nazi membership as the Navy would not accept members of political parties. Prien quickly rose through the ranks of the embryonic Kriegsmarine, as the German Navy had by now become and in December 1938, he was appointed to the command of the new submarine U-47 and promoted to the rank of Kapitanleutnant.

Gunther Prien (Bundesarchiv)

Prien had been personally selected by Admiral Donitz to undertake this daring mission as he had proved to be one of the most determined of all of the new breed of U-Boat commanders. Despite the fact that the defences had been allowed to run down over the years, the British countermeasures were still formidable and apart from the blockships and anti-submarine nets, there were also extensive minefields but German air reconnaissance had revealed the possibility of a narrow channel between the blockships in Holm Sound that could possibly be negotiated by a U-Boat on the surface at the turn of the tide. This was a hugely risky undertaking and would need all of Prien's determination and daring in order to make it a success.

On the evening of 13th October 1939, the majority of the British Home Fleet was not actually at Scapa Flow; following a fruitless search for the German battlecruiser Gneisnau, the fleet had returned to Scapa on 12th October but a sighting of a German reconnaissance aircraft had convinced the Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet, Sir Charles Forbes that an air attack was imminent and he therefore ordered the bulk of the Home Fleet to disperse to other ports on the west coast, out of range of German bombers. However, one battleship remained behind; HMS Royal Oak, a 25 year old veteran of the Great War.

HMS Royal Oak had been built at Devonport Dockyard and commisioned just in time for the Battle of Jutland in May 1916. Never the fastest of ships, Royal Oak and her four sister ships were obsolete by 1939 and in the normal course of events would have been replaced by the new Lion class then under construction by 1942. However, the outbreak of war changed all that and Royal Oak had to carry on despite her lack of speed and a modern anti aircraft armament. This lack of speed was the main reason why she was still at Scapa Flow on this fateful night; nominally capable of 21 knots, the hunt for the Gneisnau had proved that she was not even capable of achieving this modest speed. She had lagged behind the faster units of the Home Fleet and had suffered in the heavy weather encountered, having several of her boats and liferafts smashed by the huge seas. Whilst the remainder of the Home Fleet's battleships had been dispersed elsewhere, Royal Oak remained behind to lick her wounds and to augment the anti aircraft defences ashore should the expected German air raid materialise.

Back on the U-47, Prien surfaced his boat late on the evening of 13th October and in a textbook manoeuvre, guided his submarine through the narrow channel, which was there just as the intelligence photographs had suggested. Apart from his skill in manoeuvring his vessel through the narrow channel, luck was also with Prien, because if he had attempted this entry just twenty four hours later, he would have found the channel blocked by a new blockship which was en route even then. As it was, shortly after midnight in the early hours of the 14th October, Prien had entered Scapa Flow. Shortly after this, one of the bridge lookouts identified "two battleships lying at anchor." Prien correctly identified the nearest vessel as being one of the Revenge Class, whilst the furthest ship he mistook as being a battlecruiser of the Repulse class, which was in fact a seaplane carrier, HMS Pegasus. At 0058, Prien fired a salvo of three torpedoes, two of which failed to find a target, with the other one striking the anchor cable of Royal Oak. On board the battleship, it was thought that perhaps there had been some sort of internal explosion and orders were given to inspect ammunition magazines for overheating and the forward paint store, in case of an explosion there. Many of the ship's complement returned to their hammocks, unaware that their ship was in fact, under attack. Undeterred by this initial failure, Prien fired a salvo from his stern torpedo tubes, all of which missed their target. By this time, three of the bow tubes had been reloaded and this time, the salvo of three torpedoes all found their mark. Massive internal explosions rent the stricken battleship and at 01:29, just thirteen minutes after Prien's successful strike, Royal Oak rolled over and sank, taking with her 833 officers and men, including over one hundred boy seamen below the age of eighteen. At this time, the Royal Navy was still persisting with the practice of taking boy seamen between the ages of fifteen to seventeen to sea on it's warships, a practice which abrubtly ceased in wartime with the loss of the Royal Oak.

Capt WG Benn RN (Unit Histories)

Heroic efforts by the tender Daisy 2, moored alongside Royal Oak for the night and usually used for ferrying men to and from the battleship, ensured that some 386 survivors were pulled from the water, including Captain William Benn, the battleship's commanding officer. Rear Admiral Henry Blagrove, commander of the Second Battle Squadron was not so fortunate and went down with his flagship. For his rescue efforts, the skipper of Daisy 2, John Gatt RNR was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Apart from the terrible loss of life, the loss of an obsolete battleship was not a huge material blow for the Royal Navy but the fact that a German U-Boat had managed to enter the Home Fleet's main base was a massive humiliation for the Royal Navy and was a shocking revelation to the British public of the vulnerability of one of their principal naval bases.

Following the attack, Prien managed to extricate U-47 relatively easily in the confusion of the old battleship's sinking and the rescue efforts for the survivors. He returned to Wilhelmshaven on October 17th to a hero's welcome, being met by Admirals Raeder and Donitz, who immediately awarded the Iron Cross First Class to Prien and the Iron Cross Second Class to every other crew member. As can be imagined, much was made of the triumph by Dr Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry, which whisked Prien and his crew off to Berlin, for a motorcade from Templehof Airport, a meeting with Adolf Hitler and a stay at the prestigious Kaiserhof Hotel. During his meeting with the Fuhrer, Prien was presented with a new award, the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross, or the Ritterkreuz as the U-Boat crews immediately dubbed it.

Following this devastating attack on the Royal Navy's prestige, Scapa Flow was temporarily abandoned as an operational base whilst urgent upgrades were made to the defences; new blockships were hurriedly installed and the channel that Prien had used to enter the flow was permanently blocked with a causeway carrying a road, which was built largely by Italian prisoners of war. Although the base was quickly brought back into use, some of these new defences were ironically not completed until after VE Day and the base itself was closed in 1956.

Captain William Benn was later appointed to command the new cruiser HMS Fiji, before being promoted to Rear Admiral and ending the war as Director of Navigation at the Royal Navy's Hydrographic Department. He retired in 1946 and passed away in 1962, aged 73.

Gunther Prien was nicknamed 'The Bull of Scapa Flow' and continued in command of U-47 and during his career, in addition to the Royal Oak, sank thirty merchant ships totalling 162,769 gross register tons, including the notorious sinking of the troopship Arandora Star described in the July 2010 edition of this blog in which some 713 German and Italian POWs being transported to Canada were lost.

HMS Wolverine (Naval History.net)

Prien's career ended abruptly on 7th March 1941, when U-47 formed part of a Wolf Pack attacking Convoy OB203. Prien, by now promoted to the rank of Korvettenkapitan, was attempting to attack the convoy on the surface. Spotted by the destroyer HMS Wolverine, Prien managed to crash dive just as the destroyer dropped a full pattern of depth charges. Working in tandem with another escort, HMS Verity, Commander JM Rowlands in the Wolverine attacked U-47 for over five hours. The two destroyers maintained this relentless attack despite Prien's best efforts to evade them, until finally an oil slick came to the surface and at 0500 the ASDIC operator on HMS Wolverine reported loud clattering sounds. Twenty minutes later, Prien surfaced again and attempted to creep away on the surface but had to crash dive when he saw the British destroyer preparing to ram. This time, the full depth charge pattern resulted in a massive underwater explosion and a dull red glow beneath the surface.

The end had come for The Bull of Scapa Flow.

Printed Sources:

Battleship at War - Cdr BR Coward RN, Ian Allan 1987

Battleships of World War 1 - Anthony Preston, Arms & Armour Press 1972

Engage The Enemy More Closely - Correlli Barnett, Hodder & Stoughton 1991

Hitler's U-Boat War: The Hunters 1939-1942 - Clay Blair, Cassell 2000

The Battle of the Atlantic - John Costello & Terry Hughes, Collins 1977

1939: The first wartime Christmas, The Phoney War and a victory at sea

The Graf Spee (Bundesarchiv)

The winter of 1939 was to prove one of the coldest for many years. In Germany there was thick ice in the Baltic, the Kiel Canal and the Rivers Elbe and Jade which hampered trade almost as much as the British naval blockade, which was beginning to affect the supply of food and essential products into the Reich. In France, the soldiers of the newly arrived British Expeditionary Force found the ferocity of the winter had frozen the ground so hard that they were unable to make much progress in digging the trenches and defensive systems that were seen as essential to the sort of war they were expecting to have to fight. In December 1939, the BEF introduced a forces’ leave service so that at least some of the men who had been in France since the previous September were able to spend Christmas at home with their families.

At home in Britain in December 1939, people were beginning to come to terms with the blackout. In September 1939, the casualty figures for road traffic accidents had increased by almost 100 percent over peacetime figures. This didn’t include people who suffered from other blackout-related mishaps, such as falling from railway platforms, walking into canals or falling down steps. By December, the imposition of more severe petrol rationing forced most private cars from the road, so traffic accidents began to decrease almost by default. A slight relaxation in the blackout also permitted civilians to carry hand torches, albeit masked but sufficient to help in finding one’s way around more safely. The dance halls, cinemas and theatres were packed out once again but the cold weather was beginning to play havoc with the public transport system; some main line express trains from Scotland and the north of England ran over a day late!

Although there had been no actual air raids over British cities by December 1939, there was no shortage of alerts, which showed up the many flaws and deficiencies in the ARP system, some of which were still apparent when the shooting war started in the spring and summer of 1940. This then, was the "Phoney War."

At sea however, this phrase was an anathema to the men of the Royal and Merchant Navies. The first ship to be sunk was the liner Athenia, torpedoed by Fritz Julius Lemp in the U-30 with heavy loss of life on 3rd September, just hours after the declaration of war. The Royal Navy had also suffered an early loss when the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous had been torpedoed by U-29 with the loss of 519 officers and men, including her captain. The Royal Navy had begun to sink U-Boats and was beginning the long and painful battle to overcome this menace but in December 1939, despite these and other high profile sinkings, the U-Boat was not a major threat. There were insufficient numbers of ocean-going submarines and without the French Atlantic coast bases that the Germans were later to capture, those submarines that were in commission did not yet have the direct access to the Atlantic convoys that was later to cause such carnage to Britain’s life lines.

In December 1939, the main threat to Britain’s merchant fleet came from the surface raider. Apart from the converted merchant vessels that tended to prey on vessels sailing alone, the Kriegsmarine had three specialised Panzerschiffen, known to the rest of the World as ‘pocket battleships’, so called because they were not armed quite to the same level as the conventional battleship but still powerfully equipped with six 11 inch guns and a heavy secondary armament. They were powered by diesel engines which gave a speed in excess of most British heavy units and more importantly gave these vessels a tremendous level of endurance, especially when operating in tandem with a supply tanker, meeting at pre-arranged rendezvous points in the open ocean.

One such vessel, the Graf Spee (pictured at top), under the command of Kapitan Hans Langsdorff (pictured below), had sailed from Wilhelmshaven shortly before the outbreak of war, on the 20th August 1939 and had been undetected as she sailed via the Norwegian coast and through the Denmark Strait into the Atlantic and her war station in the South Atlantic. The British only realised that she had sailed on the 31st August, some eleven days after she had departed. By then it was too late; units of the British Home Fleet patrolled the area around Norway and the Shetlands but Graf Spee was long gone and especially in these pre-radar days, finding a ship in the Atlantic that did not want to be discovered was like the proverbial needle in the haystack story.

Hans Langsdorff (Bundesarchiv)

It was only when British merchant ships began to disappear in the South Atlantic, around the Cape, off the coast of Lourenco Marques and finally off the coast of South America that British suspicions of a raider at large were confirmed. Graf Spee was operating in tandem with her supply vessel, the tanker Altmark and proved to be a formidable and elusive enemy. The Royal Navy immediately mobilised hunting groups of warships to track down the enemy and one of those hunting groups was the South Atlantic Squadron under Commodore (later Admiral Sir Henry) Harwood, flying his broad pennant in the cruiser HMS Ajax with two further cruisers Exeter and the New Zealand manned Achilles. These vessels more than matched the Graf Spee for speed but were vastly outgunned by the German vessel. Nominally Harwood had a fourth cruiser, the Cumberland but she was at Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands undergoing a self-refit, so already Harwood’s force was somewhat depleted. However, Henry Harwood was a shrewd operator and he had been using the intelligence available to him to try and calculate where he could intercept the raider. Many of the British ships sunk by the Graf Spee had bravely transmitted an ‘RRR’ signal together with a position, which indicated that the vessel had been attacked by a surface raider. It was doubly brave to send these warning signals as the Germans threatened dire consequences for any radio officers sending these messages. Fortunately for the British, Kapitan Langsdorff was an honourable man who did not take reprisals against his captives and was scrupulous in his fair and humane treatment of prisoners. The same could not be said of his counterpart, Kapitan Dau of the supply ship Altmark and the British merchant seaman held on board this vessel, whilst not physically harmed, were kept in squalid conditions in one of the ship’s holds. A number of British Merchant Navy officers were transferred to the Graf Spee for her anticipated voyage back to Germany and the difference in the treatment they received on the pocket battleship was notable.

Not all of the vessels intercepted by Graf Spee managed to send an ‘RRR’ report but enough did to allow Harwood to undertake some inspired detective work. Piecing together the reported positions of the sunken vessels, he was convinced that Graf Spee would return to the South Atlantic for one final tilt at the constant stream of British merchantmen heading from the River Plate with much needed meat for the home market.

Having made his dispositions accordingly, Harwood concentrated his three cruisers off the River Plate and waited for Graf Spee to appear. On December 13th 1939, the German pocket battleship obligingly sailed over the horizon. Harwood’s plan for this contingency was to split the enemy’s fire by dividing his own force; the two smaller cruisers Achilles and Ajax formed one division, whilst the more heavily armed Exeter was to fight alone. It was at this early point in the battle that Langsdorff made his first and ultimately fatal error. On approaching the British vessels, Langsdorff wrongly assumed that Exeter was the sole cruiser and that the two smaller vessels were escorting destroyers and closed accordingly to make a quick kill. Once he closed the range and had realised his mistake, it was too late. The three cruisers tore into the pocket battleship and harried her relentlessly. At first Exeter bore the brunt of the raider’s counter attacks and was soon turned into a blazing, sinking shambles with all of her main armament knocked out. At first Captain Bell of the Exeter considered ramming Graf Spee, but he was ordered by Harwood to retire from the battle and was soon heading towards the Falkland Islands which she eventually reached in order to lick her wounds. The remaining two lightly armed cruisers kept up the pressure, closing the range and hitting Graf Spee and hitting hard. Fearing that the two British vessels were leading him onto superior heavy forces, Langsdorff inexplicably turned and ran; heading towards the River Plate, he eventually reached the sanctuary of the River Plate within the territorial waters of the neutral country of Uruguay. She had suffered thirty seven men dead and fifty seven wounded and whilst the ship was in no way mortally wounded, she had been hit over fifty times and had suffered extensive damage. Unknown to the pursuing British forces, there were sixty one British Merchant Navy officers aboard who had fortunately been unhurt in the battle. Once the fighting was over, a different kind of battle was about to begin, involving diplomacy, bluff and counterbluff that was ultimately to cost Langsdorff his life.

Despite the strain he must have been under, Langsdorff once again proved his humanity and sense of honour by releasing his erstwhile prisoners according to international law. Afterwards, these officers to a man had nothing but praise and respect for their former captor.

It was estimated that Graf Spee’s battle damage would take fourteen days and during this time, Langsdorff knew that the British would be mustering reinforcements but what he was not to know was how long it would take for these reinforcements to arrive. It was now the 14th December and the nearest heavy British unit, the battlecruiser Renown and the aircraft carrier Ark Royal could not reach the River Plate until the 19th December but Langsdorff was not to know this. The British ambassador to Uruguary, Eugen Millington-Drake (pictured below with Harwood) and his naval attaché, Captain (later Admiral Sir Henry) McCall, used every trick in the book to conjure up an imaginary British fleet massing just over the horizon. German requests to charter light aircraft to survey this fleet were always rebuffed; no aircraft were ever available. The British also tried their hardest to get Graf Spee interned; Langsdorff must have been in mental turmoil.

Sir Henry Harwood

Faced with an impossible situation, he decided to scuttle his ship and on the 17th December moved his ship into the shallower waters of the River Plate and after evacuating the remainder of his crew, shortly before 20:00 she blew up; demolition charges had been set by the crew and the Graf Spee was no more.

The watching British on the two remaining cruisers, by now reinforced by the Cumberland, which had made a helter-skelter dash from the Falklands watched with incredulity and relief; they had expected another bloody battle and could not have been certain of the outcome. As it was they had won a great victory, partially through hard fighting and partially through bluff but the Royal Navy had won the first major engagement of the war.

For the crew of the Graf Spee, internment in Argentina was on the agenda but for Langsdorff, and honourable man to the end, there was to be no such escape. On the evening of the 19th December, after addressing his officers and men for one last time, he retired to his hotel room, wrote three letters to his wife, his parents and one to the German Ambassador to Argentina. He then shot himself whilst wrapped in the ensign of the old Imperial Navy, rather than the Nazi flag.

Back home, the victorious ships’ companies marched through London and Winston Churchill, not yet Prime Minister but still at that time First Lord of the Admiralty proclaimed that the victory “in a dark cold winter, it warmed the cockles of the British heart.”

For those at sea, there was no Phoney War; for those at home, the war was still distant but 1940 would see a change that would bring the conflict home to everyone.

Published Sources

BEF Ships before, at and after Dunkirk – John de S Winser, World Ship Society, 1999
London at War 1939-1945 – Philip Ziegler, Sinclair Stevenson, 1995
The Battle of the River Plate – Dudley Pope, Secker & Warburg, 1987
The People’s War; Britain 1939-1945 – Angus Calder, Jonathan Cape, 1969
War in a Stringbag – Charles Lamb – Cassell, 1977