The scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow

Shortly before noon on 21 June 1919 a flag signal was hoisted on the mast of the light cruiser Emden, lying at anchor in the British base of Scapa Flow in Orkney: “To all commanding officers and the leader of the torpedo boats. Paragraph eleven of today’s date. Confirm.” It had been issued by Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, commander of the ships of the German High Seas Fleet that had been interned since November 1918. At the agreed signal the crews opened the seacocks, smashed pipes and left the watertight doors open. In less than six hours 52 of the 74 ships went to the bottom, including 15 of the 16 battleships and battlecruisers. The British squadron that was supposed to guard them was out at sea on exercises at the time. It was the largest scuttling of a navy in history and, at the same time, the last act of the naval war between Germany and Britain. The British regarded it as a breach of the armistice and a disgrace; the Germans as the salvation of the navy’s honour.

A fleet in captivity

Under the Armistice of Compiègne of 11 November 1918 Germany had to surrender all its submarines and disarm its newest surface ships and hand them over for internment in a neutral or Allied port. Norway and Spain refused to take the German fleet, so the Allies agreed that it should be guarded by the Royal Navy in its main war base. Article 31 of the armistice forbade the Germans to destroy any military equipment before it was handed over. The ships were to wait at Scapa Flow until the peace conference decided their fate.

The fleet that in October 1918 was to have sailed out for a last battle with the Grand Fleet was no longer the same fleet. Since the sailors’ mutiny, which had grown into a revolution, sailors’ councils had run the ships and the officers had lost their authority. The commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Franz von Hipper, refused to lead it into internment. On 18 November Reuter, until then commander of the scouting forces, took on the task at his request. On 21 November the German ships, led by the light cruiser HMS Cardiff, steamed in between two columns of the British Grand Fleet and anchored in the Firth of Forth. Admiral David Beatty ordered the German ensigns to be hauled down at sunset and not to be raised again without permission. Between 25 and 27 November the ships were taken to Scapa Flow. The destroyers anchored in Gutter Sound, the large ships to the west and north of the islet of Cava. In December they were joined by the battleship König and the light cruiser Dresden, which had been unable to put to sea earlier, and by the destroyer V129, replacing V30, which had been sunk by a mine; and on 9 January 1919 by the battleship Baden, surrendered in place of an unfinished battlecruiser. In all, 74 ships were interned: 11 battleships, 5 battlecruisers, 8 light cruisers and 50 destroyers.

Of the roughly 20,000 men who had brought the ships over, only skeleton crews were left on board. In December 1918 most of the sailors were sent home by ship, and more left in the months that followed. The ships were disarmed, with no ammunition and no breech blocks for their guns. The sailors were not allowed ashore or to visit other ships, their mail was censored, and monotonous food was sent from Germany twice a month. The British historian Arthur Marder described the mood aboard the interned ships as one of complete demoralisation. On 25 March 1919 Reuter, ill and surrounded by insubordinate sailors, transferred his flag from the battleship Friedrich der Grosse to the smaller Emden, because members of the so-called Red Guard gave him no peace on the former flagship. From 18 May the interned ships were guarded by the 1st Battle Squadron of the British Atlantic Fleet under Vice Admiral Sydney Fremantle.

The dispute over the spoils

In Paris, where the peace conference had been sitting since January, the fate of the German fleet was a matter of dispute among the victors themselves. France and Italy each wanted a share of the ships to strengthen their own navies. Britain preferred to destroy them, since any division would reduce its lead over the world’s other fleets. The peace terms handed to the Germans on 7 May 1919 provided for the surrender to the victors of all the ships interned at Scapa Flow. Reuter learned of them from the press and from then on prepared a plan to scuttle the fleet. He is said to have mentioned the possibility to his chief of staff as early as January. On 31 May, the third anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, the German ships raised their war ensigns, and the British did not react.

On 16 June the Allies rejected most of the German counter-proposals and issued an ultimatum: if Germany did not sign the treaty within five days, the armistice would expire and the victors’ armies would advance beyond the Rhine. The deadline was noon on 21 June. In Weimar, Philipp Scheidemann’s government did not want to sign the peace and resigned on the night of 19–20 June. Reuter had no communication with Berlin and got his news from British newspapers, which reached him several days late. It looked as though the armistice would expire at noon on 21 June and the British would seize the ships. He did not know that the Allies had extended the deadline to the evening of 23 June. Fremantle later claimed that before putting to sea he had unofficially let Reuter know that the armistice was still in force. Reuter maintained that he had not known of the extension.

On 17 June Reuter sent the ships’ commanders secret orders, which reached them on 18 June. They were to prepare their ships at once for scuttling so that they would sink as quickly as possible once the order was given. In the eleventh paragraph of the order he wrote that he intended to scuttle the ships only if the enemy tried to seize them without the consent of the German government; if the government agreed in the treaty to their surrender, the ships would be handed over, “to the lasting disgrace of those who have put us in this position”. That same day two transports took about two thousand sailors home, mostly men whom Reuter did not trust. Some 1,800 men remained on board. Whether Reuter acted solely on his own responsibility has never been fully established. Erich Raeder, later commander of the German navy, wrote in his memoirs years afterwards that Reuter knew the fleet was to be scuttled at all costs.

The British expected such an attempt. The commander of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Charles Madden, and Beatty had approved a plan to seize the ships should the Germans try to scuttle them. On 16 June Fremantle submitted a plan to take over the German ships at midnight on 21–22 June, after the ultimatum expired. When he learned from the press that the deadline had been extended, he postponed the operation to 23 June. He had also long been under orders to carry out exercises in repelling torpedo attacks, for which good weather was needed. On the evening of 20 June the weather improved.

Paragraph eleven

At nine o’clock on the morning of 21 June the 1st Battle Squadron left Scapa Flow for exercises. Only three destroyers, one of them under repair, seven trawlers and a few drifters remained in the base. That day the vessel Flying Kestrel was also sailing around the anchorage with some two hundred schoolchildren from Stromness, who had gone out to look at the German ships.

At about ten o’clock Reuter, in full-dress uniform and wearing his decorations, ordered the ships to stand by for a signal. At around 11.20 a.m. the order with paragraph eleven was hoisted, repeated by semaphore and searchlight. The ships acknowledged it one after another. According to an anecdote told in Germany, the code word also alluded to the eleventh paragraph of a facetious student beer-drinking code, which commanded that one keep on drinking. The crews had long been prepared. The seacocks had been greased and set so that they could be opened with a single movement, hammers lay beside them, scuttles had been loosened, and on some ships holes had been drilled in the bulkheads so that the water would spread faster.

For the first hour nothing was noticed from the shore or from the British vessels. Around noon Friedrich der Grosse began to list visibly to starboard, and the imperial war ensigns appeared on the masts of all the ships. The crews began to take to the boats. At 12.16 p.m. Friedrich der Grosse, the fleet’s former flagship, was the first to sink. Then, at short intervals, the others went down: the battleship König Albert, the light cruiser Brummer, the battlecruiser Moltke, the battleships Kaiser, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinzregent Luitpold, Grosser Kurfürst, the battlecruiser Seydlitz, hit many times at Jutland, Kaiserin, König, Von der Tann, Bayern and Derfflinger, which Reuter himself had commanded at the Battle of the Dogger Bank. The last to sink, at 5 p.m., was the battlecruiser Hindenburg, which settled on the shallow bottom with her masts and funnels still above the water. The schoolchildren from Stromness watched as the huge ships capsized or plunged bow first, venting steam, oil and air from their ventilators with a piercing hiss.

Fremantle received the first reports at 12.20 p.m.; fifteen minutes later he broke off the exercise and headed back at full speed. By radio he ordered all vessels in the base to save the ships or, if that proved impossible, to tow them into shallow water. He returned with part of the squadron at about 2.30 p.m., when only the largest ships were still afloat. The British managed to beach the battleship Baden, the light cruisers Emden, Frankfurt and Nürnberg, and more than a dozen destroyers. In all, 10 battleships, 5 battlecruisers, 5 light cruisers and 32 destroyers sank.

The last dead

British sailors in boats and guard vessels, taken by surprise and angry, opened fire on the Germans abandoning their ships and on boats heading for the shore. Some tried to force the Germans back on board to close the seacocks. On the battleship Markgraf her commanding officer, Commander Walther Schumann, was shot dead. According to the most frequently cited figures, nine Germans were killed and about sixteen wounded. Reuter himself gave lower figures in his book, and some German tallies speak of five wounded. The dead were buried in the naval cemetery at Lyness on the island of Hoy. They are often called the last casualties of the First World War, since a state of war with Germany formally lasted until the peace treaty came into force.

The British pulled 1,774 Germans out of the water and from the boats. Fremantle declared that, being guilty of breaking the armistice, they were prisoners of war. The ships of his squadron carried them to Invergordon, from where they were sent to prisoner-of-war camps. Reuter and his officers were lined up on the quarterdeck of the battleship HMS Revenge, Fremantle’s flagship. The British admiral addressed them through an interpreter. He told them that, while the armistice was in force, they had committed an act of war without warning by hoisting their ensigns on the interned ships and scuttling them; that they had had no grounds whatever for believing the armistice had expired; and that they had added another breach of faith and honour to those Germany had committed in this war, beginning with the invasion of Belgium. According to accounts, Reuter replied that any British officer in his place would have done the same. Fremantle later admitted privately that, despite everything, he felt a certain sympathy for Reuter, who had kept his dignity in an extremely unpleasant situation into which he had been placed against his will.

Reactions

London protested officially, but many admirals received the news with relief. The First Sea Lord, Rosslyn Wemyss, wrote privately that he regarded the scuttling of the German fleet as a real blessing, since it disposed once and for all of the thorny question of how the ships were to be divided. The French, who had counted on a share of the German vessels, were disappointed. The Germans, who on 21 June were forming a new government in Weimar under Gustav Bauer, had to accept the treaty without any reservations within two days.

In Germany the news from Scapa Flow was received with pride. Admiral Reinhard Scheer, who had commanded the fleet at Jutland, declared that he rejoiced, because the stain of surrender had been washed from the escutcheon of the German fleet and the ships’ last act had shown that the spirit of the fleet was not dead. Hipper expressed his approval in a letter. The navy, whose mutiny in November 1918 had set off the revolution and whose admirals had become a symbol of the lost war, regained some of its lost prestige in the eyes of the right.

The victors, however, presented the bill. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June, left Germany a navy limited to six obsolete battleships, six light cruisers, twelve destroyers and twelve torpedo boats, with no submarines and 15,000 men. In return for the scuttling the Allies demanded additional ships, which were to have formed the core of the new German navy, and 400,000 tonnes of harbour equipment: docks, cranes, tugs and dredgers. Germany signed the relevant protocol on 10 January 1920, the day the treaty came into force. The German prisoners returned home at the end of January 1920.

For several years the wrecks lay on the bottom, considered not worth the cost of raising. From 1924 the English businessman Ernest Cox, who had bought them from the Admiralty, raised first the destroyers and then the largest ships, one after another. In 1930 he raised the Hindenburg, at the time the largest ship ever brought up from the seabed. The firm of Metal Industries continued the work until the outbreak of the Second World War. The steel from the German ships went to British steelworks. Three battleships – König, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Markgraf – and four light cruisers remained on the bottom. Today they are protected monuments and a destination for divers.

The long shadow of Scapa Flow

The scuttling at Scapa Flow became one of the founding myths of the interwar German navy. The officers who built first the Reichsmarine and, from 1935, the Kriegsmarine carried two experiences away from 1918–1919. The first was the shame of the Kiel mutiny, when the fleet had risen against its own officers. The second was Reuter’s deed, presented as proof that the navy knew how to die with honour. Raeder, who led the German navy from 1928 and was its commander-in-chief during the war, attached enormous importance to ensuring that the sailors would never again raise the red flag. In the training of recruits and officers Scapa Flow became a symbol of resistance to the victors’ dictate, as the stab-in-the-back legend was in the army. In August 1939, on the eve of war, Reuter was given the title of admiral.

The naval restrictions of Versailles were among the first that Adolf Hitler’s Germany cast off – with the consent of the British themselves. On 18 June 1935, almost exactly sixteen years after the scuttling, London signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, which allowed Germany to build a fleet of up to 35 per cent of British tonnage, and in submarines even up to parity. At the beginning of 1939 Hitler approved Plan Z, a programme to build a great fleet to fight Britain.

Scapa Flow returned to the pages of history six weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. On the night of 13–14 October 1939 the submarine U-47 under Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien slipped into the base and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak, which in 1919 had belonged to Fremantle’s squadron. More than 800 sailors were killed. In Germany there was no shortage of voices calling it revenge for the humiliation of 1919. The tradition of scuttling ships rather than surrendering them also revived during the war. In December 1939 Captain Hans Langsdorff scuttled the Admiral Graf Spee, cornered by the British, off Montevideo, and in May 1945, in the last days of the Reich, crews scuttled more than two hundred U-boats rather than hand them over to the Allies.