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

by H J Weaver

  At 0116, 12 minutes after the first explosion, there had been three more shattering explosions, roughly between A and X turrets, accompanied by columns of water. ‘The ship at once started to heel to starboard, and, with only a slight hang for perhaps three or four minutes, heeled over with increasing velocity until she capsized about 0129’, the Board explained. ‘From the moment at which the second [series of] explosion[s] occurred it was practically impossible to do anything effective to save the ship . . .’

  An officer and warrant officer, who had gone below to make an inspection, were in No. 3 dynamo room when the second, third and fourth explosions took place. In their opinion, the second explosion had been well forward, the third abreast of the boiler rooms, and the fourth probably at the starboard wing engine room. ‘After the fourth explosion,’ said the report, ‘the forward bulkhead of the dynamo room and the wing engine room began to bulge inwards and steam began to escape . . .

  ‘. . . the Marines’ messdeck was swept by flames and full of smoke and fumes. Several hammocks caught fire and were extinguished by men near them. There is also evidence that holes appeared in the decks and that the decks caved in . . . During this period there are several reports of men being blown through doors, up hatches and out of scuttles. By the time the ship capsized a large number of men had reached the water via the forecastle and quarter-deck. It appears that few men were saved from the engine and boiler rooms . . .

  ‘Men who tried to man the launch at the starboard lower boom had a terrifying experience. They could not cast off from the boom and saw the ship turning over on top of them. Metal from the foretop fell into the launch and sank her, and the funnel came down into the water between the launch and the ship’s side. One man from the sunken launch was partially sucked into the funnel and then blown out again. Others saw A and B turrets swing round and “fall into the sea.” ’

  This report goes on to say: ‘Considering that the ship was in harbour and the sea was calm, the loss of life appears to have been very heavy. We put this down to the fact that the ship was at air defence stations so that an abnormally large number of men were stationed below the main deck. Their escape from the ship was probably impeded by the number of watertight doors that were closed. It has also been stated that a number of men probably took shelter under armour and between decks in the belief that an air raid was taking place . . . In regard to the scuttles and deadlights, we do not consider that closing these would have saved the ship. It might, however, have caused her to sink more slowly and to heel over less violently in the first five or 10 minutes. Had this happened the loss of life would probably have been smaller.’

  The separate sub-committee appointed to consider the whole question of the Scapa Flow defences in more detail consisted of the Second and Fourth Sea Lords, assisted by Admiral Drax, and its report made sorry reading. For 21 months the matter of the vulnerability of the eastern Sounds had been under review without being satisfactorily resolved. There had been constant changes of opinion about what channels existed and what ought to be done about them, the whole situation being aggravated by the reluctance of the Admiralty and the government to spend money.

  A similar situation existed over patrol craft. ACOS had informed the Admiralty on September 8 that he needed 15 fast craft to patrol booms and indicator nets in his command because drifters were too slow. This request was approved on September 20. But just how ill-prepared Britain was for war is highlighted again by the subcommittee’s admission that there had been ‘some difficulty in finding and manning suitable craft’ with the result that the first four did not leave the Clyde for Scapa Flow until October 25, more than a week after Lt. Prien’s exploit.

  The sub-committee then proceeded to give its summary of the situation on the night Royal Oak was lost. ‘Our main comment is on the absence of patrol craft or guns and searchlights at the eastern Sounds. The Admiralty view was that any attempt to enter the Flow by any of the eastern Sounds was extremely unlikely. At the same time it recognised that security was not complete without patrol craft. That the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, shared this view and considered that patrolling the eastern Sounds was necessary was shown by his asking (after the Admiralty decision not to carry out further blocking) for three craft for this purpose, and by his letter of June 28, 1939, in which he said that, if three channels then still considered to be open were to be closed by blockships, patrol vessels would be unnecessary.

  ‘But it was known on the night of October 13 that one at least of these channels remain unblocked. It is true that the Admiral Commanding, Orkneys and Shetlands, had only five drifters29 at his disposal at the time, of which one would be boiler cleaning and two were patrolling the booms, but the local orders made no provision for patrolling the eastern Sounds. We conclude that the risk of an enemy submarine entering by the eastern Sounds, which the Admiralty itself had considered to be very slight, was accepted by the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, and the Admiral Commanding, Orkneys and Shetlands.

  ‘As regards blockships, we are left with the impression that the problem of blocking the eastern Sounds before the war was not handled as adequately as its importance deserved . . . On May 26, 1939, as we have observed, the Admiralty decided against buying further blockships. On July 10, in response to representations by the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, the Admiralty modified their decision in respect to the gaps in Kirk Sound and Skerry Sound. Had this decision been taken in May the last ship would no doubt have been sunk in Kirk Sound before October 13 instead of after.

  ‘We do not wish to imply that the Admiralty decision of May was necessarily wrong. The real fault lay in the variety of views of what was required. The report of the Commanding Officer, Coast of Scotland, early in 1939, his second report in March, 1939, and the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet, in June, 1939 . . . all gave different estimates of the requirements.’

  And so 833 officers and men of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines met their death at a time when they believed themselves safe in an unassailable anchorage. On November 8, Mr Churchill rose to make his second statement in the House of Commons. ‘It is now established,’ he said, ‘that the Royal Oak was sunk in the early hours of October 14 by a German U-boat which penetrated the defences of the land-locked anchorage of Scapa Flow . . . Neither the physical obstructions nor the patrolling craft were in that state of strength and efficiency to make the anchorage absolutely proof, as it should have been, against the attack of a U-boat on the surface or half-submerged at high water. Measures had been taken and were being taken to improve the physical obstructions, and the last blockship required reached Scapa Flow only on the day after the disaster had occurred.

  ‘. . . the long and famed immunity which Scapa Flow, with its currents and defences, had gained in the last war, had led to a too-easy evaluation of the dangers which were present. An undue degree of risk was accepted, both at the Admiralty and in the Fleet. At the same time, I must point out that many risks are being accepted inevitably by the Fleet and by the Admiralty as part of the regular routine of keeping the seas, and these risks, which were unadvisedly run at Scapa Flow, seemed to highly-competent persons to be no greater than many others.

  ‘No more striking measure of the strong sense of security against U-boats which covered Scapa Flow can be found than in the fact that, after one torpedo from the first volley had struck the Royal Oak, none of the vigilant and experienced officers conceived that it could have been a torpedo. The danger from the air was the first apprehended, and large numbers of the crew took up their air raid stations under the armour, and were thereby doomed, while at the same time the Captain and Admiral were examining the alternative possibilities of an internal explosion. It was in these conditions that the second volley of torpedoes was discharged.’

  The report on the loss of the Royal Oak had by then begun its circulation around the Admiralty, in the course of which it picked up two annotations from the Director of Naval Ordnance. The first dealt with the possibility of a magazine explo
sion: ‘The report and the evidence indicate that the explosives carried on board did not contribute the loss of HMS Royal Oak.’ The second was concerned with the vulnerability of the battleship’s protective blisters below the waterline. ‘The bulge protection of ships of the Royal Sovereign class [note: this included Royal Oak] was added about 1922,’ it said, ‘and was estimated to be proof against a torpedo warhead with a charge content of 450 to 500lbs. Royal Oak was hit by at least four in number torpedoes. It is believed that the charge carried is as potent as that carried by British 21-inch torpedoes, viz. 7501bs TNT. It is to be expected therefore that the bulge protection would be defeated although there is direct evidence of this only in the case of the torpedo which struck abreast of the starboard wing engine room.’

  Only one ritual now remained in order that the incident might be considered closed, at least for the time being – the selection of a scapegoat. The axe fell upon the man who, back in the summer when the world was still at peace, had warned the C.-in-C., Home Fleet, that he would be perfectly willing to take a destroyer, let alone a submarine, through Kirk Sound if the conditions were right. Admiral Sir Wilfred French, ACOS, was placed on the retired list.

  ‘I think they always blame the man on the spot, don’t they?’ says his widow, Lady French. ‘I was just happy to know that he was going to be home for Christmas.’ Placing the blame solely upon Admiral French, however, appears to have been an excessively harsh and unjust decision. It was hardly his fault that the eastern Sounds were not adequately blocked, were not patrolled and were not defended by searchlights and guns. For patrol purposes he had at any given time two Fleet drifters, which were committeed to the booms, thought quite rightly to be, if anything, more vulnerable than the eastern Sounds; the five searchlights in the Orkneys were set in emplacements pointing out to sea in the hope of detecting a seaborne German invasion; and, of the 16 guns on land, five were married to the searchlights as an anti-invasion measure; eight were committed to the defence of the oil fuel depot at Lyness against air attack; and the three Bofors at Netherbutton were to provide the same service for the RDF station.

  That blaming Admiral French was a piece of political tidying-up is suggested by the fact that he was shortly afterwards given a supervisory job concerned with British ports, and, from 1941 to 1944, served as British Administrative and Maintenance Representative in Washington. ‘When we came home,’ says Lady French, ‘it was only because of our daughter’s schooling. The Admiralty wrote me a very nice letter when my husband died.’

  A small contribution towards righting the wrong done to Admiral French is contained in the first volume of The War At Sea, the official history of the naval war between 1939 and 1945, by Captain Stephen Roskill, which says: ‘. . . the First Lord finally reported to his colleagues that the senior officers on the spot had not taken adequate measures to improve the defences of the base. The just allocation of responsibility must always in such cases be difficult, but it does now seem that the true causes went deeper than the conclusion quoted above and that the loss of the Royal Oak was the result not so much of a failure by the officers on the spot, who had in fact several times represented the weaknesses for which they were censured and had done their best to remedy them, as the policy of the government of the day and the failure of the Admiralty to obtain proper priority in time of peace for the defences of the Fleet’s chosen base.’

  In 1941, when Admiral French left for Washington to take up his new post there, Royal Oak had already been avenged . . .

  In the first week of March, 1941, U-47 was one of a pack of three U-boats harrying convoy OB293. At 0010 on the night of March 7–8, the 5,258-ton British merchant ship Dunaff Head, bound from Glasgow to St John, Newfoundland, was torpedoed some 300 miles off the coast of Iceland. Although it was a misty night with visibility less than a mile, Lt.-Cdr. James Rowland, commanding officer of one of the escort vessels, the destroyer Wolverine, did not fire a starshell but simply maintained course and speed.

  Twenty-three minutes later, her crew sighted smoke resembling diesel exhaust. Almost simultaneously hydrophone effect was reported on the same bearing. Wolverine altered course, increased speed to 18 knots and signalled her companion escort vessel, HMS Verity. At 0026 Wolverine sighted first a wake, then a U-boat. Lt.-Cdr. Rowland ordered full speed and course was altered to keep bows-on to the U-boat, which was zig-zagging. It had been decided not to fire until close enough for an attack to be decisive. When Wolverine was still 1,400 yards from her target, however, Verity fired a starshell and the U-boat immediately dived.

  For several minutes contact was lost, but at 0038 Wolverine picked up another firm echo at a range of 1,300 yards. For the next two hours, the destroyer and the U-boat played cat-and-mouse in the mist and darkness. Finally, at 0359 loud hydrophone effect was picked up again, indicating that the U-boat had surfaced. A quarter of an hour later it was confirmed that a U-boat was the source. Wolverine increased speed to 18 knots and the events of the next 90 minutes were later the subject of a dramatic description in one of the Admiralty’s Monthly Anti-Submarine Reports:

  There followed a remarkable chase of the U-boat on the surface . . . for which the greatest credit is due to Wolverine. The U-boat was followed at 20 knots with reductions of speed to eight knots every five to 10 minutes in order to regain hydrophone effect. At 0518, while proceeding at 20 knots, Wolverine sighted the wake of the U-boat fine on the starboard bow and, one minute later, the U-boat itself. Wolverine altered course a few degrees and increased speed to ram, but the enemy dived when she was 200 to 300 yards distant.

  Phosphorescence and crystal-clear water enabled the U-boat’s position to be judged with considerable accuracy. A rush of bubbles was creating disturbed water out of which ran a V-shaped track about 20 yards in length, tapering finely and curling to starboard. Bubbles could be seen underwater near the point of emission. Wolverine’s commanding officer was firmly convinced that the track was caused by air escaping from the bow buoyancy vent. The large patch of disturbed water was thought to be air from the main ballast vents and possibly some phosphorescence around the conning tower.

  As Wolverine’s bridge passed over the centre of the large patch, the order, ‘Fire one and hard a-port’, was given. Nine more charges with shallow settings were fired at four-second intervals . . . Great disappointment was felt when wreckage did not appear after this attack.

  Briefly, Wolverine lost all contact with her target, but echoes were picked up again at 0531. Ten minutes later, the destroyer fired another pattern of depth charges. This attack was followed by what seemed to be a faint orange light, subsequently thought to have been a rescue buoy. Then all contact was lost.

  Wolverine did not stop for any protracted investigation, but rejoined the convoy. It later became clear, however, that three U-boats had been involved in a concerted attack on OB293 – U-47, which had discovered the convoy in the first place; U-70 (K/Lt. Joachim Matz), sunk the previous afternoon by HMS Arbutus, which picked up 26 survivors, including the commander and three other officers; and U-99 (K/Lt. Otto Kretschmer), sunk later.

  U-47 was never heard from again after the attack by Wolverine. There would seem to be no grounds for doubting that Lt. Prien’s distinguished and courageous career came to an end in the darkness of that March morning. Yet his death, like his life, has become the subject of dispute. It has been claimed that, although U-47 was lost, Lt. Prien was not in command at the time, having been arrested for mutiny and either executed, or thrown into a concentration camp, or sent to fight on the Russian front. However, no concrete evidence has ever been produced to support this story.

  Lt.-Cdr (now Captain) Rowland, who was awarded the DSO for the destruction of U-47, lives today in retirement in Perthshire. During his naval career he served in submarines himself for nearly six years, and from 1932 to 1934 did a commission in Royal Oak. On reflection he is convinced that it was his first attack which sank U-47.

  Over lunch one day he told me: ‘Just when I increase
d to full speed and gave orders to stand by to ram, the U-boat altered course to starboard under full helm and began to dive. I still remember very clearly giving the order: “Starboard 30”. I don’t think I missed the conning-tower by more than a few feet, perhaps a few inches. The 10 depth charges we fired fell exactly on the spot where the submarine dived. From where I was standing on the bridge it was exactly like throwing something out of the window of a railway carriage and watching it hit the bank.

  ‘I could see the depth charge from the forward starboard thrower describe an arc through the air and fall just where the bows of the U-boat had been. The U-boat was moving forward as the depth charge sank through the water so it must have exploded much nearer the conning-tower.’

  At the time, although convinced the attack had been successful, Captain Rowland had no means, of course, of knowing the identity of his victim. After seeing OB293 safely on its way, he picked up an inward-bound convoy and returned to Liverpool. During his short spell in port, Mrs. Rowland, who was making her contribution to the war effort by working on the land, presented him with a box of bright yellow primroses, which she had picked herself.

  ‘I put the primroses in a vase in my cabin,’ he said. ‘Shortly afterwards we sailed again to escort another outward-bound convoy. When we arrived roughly at the spot where I was pretty certain I had sunk a U-boat on the previous trip, I took the primroses out of their vase, went up on deck and scattered them on the sea. It seemed a suitable gesture for one submariner to make to another.’

  On his subsequent return to Liverpool, he received a signal from the Admiralty, timed 1334/April 9. It read: ‘Their Lordships consider your attack on a submarine on 8th March probably achieved the destruction of a German U-boat. They congratulate you, your officers and ship’s company on the skill and perseverance with which both the 20-miles chase and the subsequent attack were carried out. It is possible that the U-boat was U-47, commanded by Prien.’