eleven is confirmed.’
In a patriotic gesture of defiance many of the German ships ran up the Imperial Navy ensign at their sterns. The prohibited white flags with their bold black cross and eagle had not been seen at Scapa Flow before. Others ran up the red flag, the letter ‘Z’ which in international code signalled: ‘Advance on the enemy.’
Noon. An artist, who had hitched a ride on one of the patrolling British Navy trawlers to sketch the assembled might of the interned German Fleet, noticed that small boats were being lowered down the side of some of the German ships, against British standing orders. Sixteen minutes later the first of the German ships to sink, the Freidrich der Grosse, turned turtle and went to the bottom.
The other ships in the Fleet also began to list as the water rushing into their hulls altered their buoyancy. For the last four days, Reuter’s trusted sailors had been fixing doors and hatches in the open position - to allow water to flood through the hull more easily. Seacocks were set on a hair turning and lubricated very thoroughly. Large hammers had been placed beside any valves that would allow water to flood in if knocked off. The sea valves were now opened and disconnected from the upper deck to prevent the British closing them if they boarded a ship before it went down. Sea water pipes were smashed and condensers opened. Bulkhead rivets were prised out. As soon as the valves and seacocks were open, their keys and handles were thrown overboard. They could never be closed again. Once the vessels had started to sink, they could not be saved other than by taking them in tow and beaching them.
Some of the great vessels rolled slowly on to their sides while others went down by the bow or stern first, forcing the other end of the vessel to rise high out of the water. Others sank on an even keel.
Some had been moored in shallower water and settled quickly into the cold waters coming to rest on the seabed with their upper superstructures and masts jutting above the surface of the water.
Blasts of steam, oil and air roared out of the ship’s vents and white clouds of vapour billowed up from the sides of the ships. Great anchor chains snapped with the strain and crashed into the sea or whiplashed against the decks and sides of the ship. The ships groaned and protested as they were subjected to stresses and strains for which they had never been designed.
As each vessel passed from sight a whirlpool was created. Debris swirled around in it, slowly being sucked inwards and eventually, remorselessly, being pulled under into the murky depths.
Gradually, oil escaping from the submerged ships spread upwards and outwards to cover the surface of the Flow with a dark film. Scattered across the wide expanse of the Flow were boats, hammocks, lifebelts, chests, matchwood and debris. Hundreds of German sailors abandoned ship into lifeboats.
The British guard force which had left the Flow that morning on exercise for the first time in the seven long months of internment, learned of the attempted scuttle and turned to charge back to Scapa Flow at full speed. The first ship however would only be able to get back at around 2pm. By 4pm when the last British ship had returned, only three German battleships, three light cruisers and a few destroyers were still afloat out of the total interned force of 74 warships. It was - and still is - the single greatest act of maritime suicide the world has ever seen
At first the Admiralty resolved to leave the scuttled ships to rust away in the dark depths of Scapa Flow. There was so much scrap metal about after the War that prices were low. By the 1920’s however the price of scrap metal had picked up and the attentions of entrepreneurial salvers started to turn to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of finest German scrap metal at the bottom of the Flow.
Over the course of the coming decades the majority of the warships were salvaged, and today, only eight of the original Fleet remain on the seabed waiting to be explored. They are the 26,000-ton battleships, König, Markgraf and Kronprinz Wilhelm, the 4-5,500-ton kleiner cruisers Dresden, Brummer, Cöln and Karlsruhe and the 900-ton destroyer V 83. Various large sections of other ships, left by the salvers also dot the seabed.
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