Just before noon on midsummer’s day, 1919, the interned battleships, cruisers, destroyers and torpedo boats of the German High Seas Fleet, which had for nine months been rusting at anchor in the great natural harbour of Scapa Flow in Orkney, started to sink, scuttled by their skeleton crews.
Their commanding officer, Vice Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, fretting over the scraps of news coming out of Versailles, judged that the fleet might at any moment either be handed over to the allied powers, or boarded and captured in an immediate resumption of hostilities. As a crucial deadline for ratification passed to the best of his knowledge unrespected, he took matters into his own hands.
Covert preparations had been going on for weeks. Doors below decks – “all doors in longitudinal and athwartships bulkheads, gangway hatches, ventilators, square ports etc.” – were either opened, left open, or in some cases welded open. When the order came and with the water gushing in, threads on the sea cocks were shredded, and valve-wheels and keys chucked overboard, according to plan and directive.
At sixteen minutes past twelve, as a single bell tolled on the admiral’s flagship, Emden, the battleship Frederich der Große started to list. Others rapidly followed, and the British became aware that something was amiss. The German sailors, their below-decks havoc wreaked, were now putting off on lifeboats which had been cleared on purpose; the crews of the attendant British gunboats and destroyers started to fire seemingly at random on the unarmed boats in an attempt to force the Germans back on board, have them reverse the irreversible damage. British officers wildly threatened to shoot on the spot the captain of any ship that sank.
Regardless, the drama continued to play out in a counterpoint of slow motion and maddened frenzy. British sailors, having scrambled aboard the stricken leviathans, lost valuable time fiddling with knots and ropes, trying to haul down the Imperial German Ensign which had been hoisted in defiance over every ship. On the battleship Derfflinger, the crew sang an old hunting song, Wohl aus Kamaradan, as near them Moltke went down. And in and amongst the mayhem, an admiralty tug, the Flying Kestrel, steamed this way and that, with on board three hundred children from Stromness public school on a day outing, the colossal ships of war unaccountably sinking around them.
The British finally managed to get towlines attached to one battleship (SMS Baden), four light cruisers and fourteen torpedo boats, and drag them up on to various beaches. But the rest – ten battleships, five battlecruisers, four light cruisers and thirty-two torpedo boats – sank beneath the grey waves, settling, finally, awkwardly, on the shallow sea floor.
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Admiral von Reuter survived to write a bitter and self-justificatory and rather tedious book about the affair. His was a practical, seafaring mind, uninterested in the ritual implications of his midsummer, votive act.
In the middle to late Bronze Age, as the great symbolic landscapes of Stonehenge and Avebury, Brú na Bóinne and Brodgar, fell into desuetude, and tastes for ritual expression changed, a mania took hold for tossing metal objects into shallow waters. People were concerned that, for example, the rising North Sea should encroach no more, or that it should continue to provide fish, eels, oysters, wildfowl, or that the ancestors whose blurry, muffled underwater world this was, should be armed for fights to come. So in went axe, sword, knife, as once, millennia before, antler masks had gone in.
But Admiral von Reuter tossed not an axe nor a sword nor an antler mask but a whole steel fleet into the waters, a fleet, moreover, many of whose ships bore the names of the great ancestors of the German Reich – SMS Friedrich der Große, SMS Kronprinz Willem, SMS Moltke – to appease the gods of sea-war whom they had failed, and who would as it happens repay the wild and devoted Germans with newer faster better capital ships: Bismarck, Tirpitz, and Graf Spee – the latter itself destined for a scuttle of its own in far off Montevideo.
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The 21st June, 2019, the centenary of the scuttle, was marked by various commemorative activities. The war graves of the nine German dead at Lyness, on Hoy—the last German casualties of the Great War—were reconsecrated. British and German navy divers laid wreaths on the hull of the SMS Dresden. No votive metal was cast into the waters on this occasion, but the bell of the SMS Von der Tann which had been brought specially from Germany, was rung by the grandson of Admiral von Reuter.
I happened to be in Orkney that day, away for a spell between the death and funeral of my mother; but I did not attend the ceremonies. My shamanic business was elsewhere. Although towards the end of the afternoon, at about the hour the battlecruiser Hindenburg finally went down and all that was left of the fleet were the funnels and superstructure of some of the ships sunk in shallower waters and the carcasses of a few other dragged up on to beaches, I did drive to Orphir Bay, parked the car at the heritage centre, and walked down to the coast.
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The low cliffs overlooking Scapa Flow are approached by a path that takes you, inevitably in these parts, through a walled graveyard with only the ruins of a round church and the foundations of a Viking drinking hall to anchor it in this world; you pass in at one gate, and out at the side and down to the coast, as though you must pay silent respect to the ancestors—all those generations of Leasks and Linklaters—before you walk their paths.
When I gain the cliffs, there is nothing to see. The Flow is empty, the surface of its waters still. One of the sinking ships, the light cruiser Bremse, was dragged to the beach in the next bay to prevent its sinking, although it toppled over before it could be got properly in, and sat half out of the water. But now there is only a handful of studious oystercatchers going about their business, and some gulls gliding overhead.
A fleet at anchor or at sea is a floating city, with its bustle and its rhythms, its complex differentiation of roles. The British fleet anchored here for much of the First World War and also during World War Two, in both cases doubling the population of Orkney.
But sunk, or scuttled, it is a different sort of city. A city of dead sailors, ghostly hulls motionless under the weight of the cold grey waters. Not many died in the scuttle, but elsewhere on the bed of Scapa Flow lies the wreck of the battleship HMS Royal Oak, now a protected war grave, sunk in 1939 by a German mini-submarine in a deliberately symbolic act, early retribution for Von Reuter’s High Seas Fleet. The Royal Oak had, as it happened, fought at Jutland. Eight-hundred-and-thirty-four men and boys died, and a white ensign is laid by Royal Navy divers on the anniversary of her sinking each year.
Diving the wreck of the Royal Oak is prohibited, as is diving the wreck of HMS Vanguard, a dreadnought which exploded at anchor in Scapa Flow in July 1917 when unstable cordite set off the magazines, killing eight-hundred-and-forty-three members of its crew. But you can still dive some of the German wrecks of Scapa Flow – the König, the Kronprinz Willem, the Markgraf, the Dresden, the Cöln.
They are decaying fast. However, divers relate that as the ships dissolve and buckle in the salt waters, so do they open their interiors to inspection. For a brief window of time, some fresh entry, or insight, may be gained.
