[Note: What follows is a work-up of a Facebook post from a week ago today, which is to say June 21, 2019.]
After the November 11, 1918, armistice, the German High Seas Fleet was interned in the Royal Navy’s northern fleet anchorage of Scapa Flow, off the northern coast of Scotland. It steamed through a double line of British battleships, all of which were at general quarters, with main batteries loaded and trained on the Germans (just in case they had not, in fact, off-loaded their own ammunition).
That evening, the commander of the Grand… Fleet ordered that the German ensign would be lowered at sunset, and would not be raised again except by permission.
in the late spring and early summer of 1919, as the peace conference in Paris dragged on, the mood aboard the German ships got ugly. The sailors were most not happy about having meekly surrendered themselves (the German Army, in contrast, had marched back home under arms), and they really weren’t pleased with the thought that their ships, which were after all their homes as well, were going to be passelled out among the victorious allies to become their playthings.
So on that June morning, 100 years ago today, after the British had left harbor for training exercises, the German admiral, Ludwig von Reuter, hoisted an innocent-looking flag signal. Whereupon the German ships all raised their ensigns (which is to say, without permission), opened their seacocks (they’d already thoroughly compromised their ships’ honeycombed watertight construction to ensure that once the flooding started it couldn’t be stopped), and headed for the lifeboats.
Ashore an American senior officer was sitting with a British counterpart. He looked out and saw an entire harbor of ships gently listing over and settling below the waves. “My God; they’re sinking!” he exclaimed. The Brit looked up briefly, observed, “Aren’t they now,” and returned to his paperwrooork.
A few of the ships got raised, but none in usable condition. Most got chopped up where they sank and sold for scrap over the years. A few are still there, in water too deep for salvage. You can dive them, with a permit.
One week later the Treaty of Versailles was signed, five years to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife got whacked in Sarajevo, starting the whole sorry mess.
By way of interesting sidebar: Those ships still on the bottom are among the very few sources of steel that is not contaminated by post-1945 nuclear fall-out. It’s used in the manufacture of highly sensitive radiation detection equipment, apparently.
By way of even further interesting sidebar: Those four remaining battleships are privately owned, and are for sale . . . on eBay. Seriously. I think the buy-it-now price is about £880,000 or something like that, I think. Be the first kid on your block to own your own battle squadron.
Wow! I didn’t know any of this specific history but it all follows the “of course they did” wisdom — except the relatively low “Buy It Now” price on the pre-’45 salvage. Off to scan Ebay. Thank you!