ON FRIDAY NIGHT, October 13, 1939, German submarine surfaced and scraped between U-47 the islands of Mainland and Lamb Holm at Scotland’s northern tip to penetrate the Royal Navy anchorage at Scapa Flow. Most of the British ships had sailed the evening before, but the HMS Royal Oak lay at anchor. U-47 skipper Günther Prien began his stalk. After several misses, his crew sank the 30,000-ton World War I dreadnought, killing 833 of the 1,234- man crew. Most of the men lost were not recovered, and since then the Royal Oak has lay inverted, superstructure stubbed into the seabed in 100 feet of water, maintained as an official war grave. I stayed at Scapa Flow slightly longer than Prien, with a very different mission: to explore traces of World War II.
Humans have farmed on and fished from the Orkney archipelago for more than 8,500 years; stone circles, tombs, and other Neolithic monuments abound. The rugged, gorgeous harbor, which opens onto the North Sea and the North Atlantic, got its name from Viking visitors. Scapa Flow means “a place with plenty of water where ships could be hauled,” and for centuries many a ship sailed here for work. During the Napoleonic Wars, Scapa Flow became the Royal Navy’s base.
When Germany emerged as Britain’s arch foe, the 120-square-mile harbor served as the United Kingdom’s main domestic naval stronghold, protected by gun batteries, minefields, and antisub booms. Many warships that fought the 1916 Battle of Jutland sailed from Scapa Flow. One, HMS Vanguard, blew up there in July 1917, killing all but two of its crew; the Admiralty declared the wreck a war grave. The armistice that ended the First World War ordered Germany’s 74-vessel High Seas Fleet interned at Scapa Flow. In June 1919, at their admiral’s orders, German crews scuttled 52 ships. Wreck salvors raised most of them, but some remain, more than 150 feet down.
As my base I chose the largest of the 70-some Orkney Islands. Its very name— Mainland—telegraphs the island chain’s remoteness. With the Scottish shore nearly nine miles away, the “mainland” is another isle. During World War II the British military deemed the Orkneys an overseas posting, a status Mainland personifies. Few trees dot its stretches of bog and heath, brightened by Scottish prim rose and other wildflowers. One byproduct of this landscape is golf courses, many with winning views of Scapa Flow and some quite close to wartime sites.
My June arrival afforded me more than 18 hours of light daily—the sun rose at 4 a.m., a schedule that applies much of the summer—and characteristic weather: cool, with rain intermittent but inevitable. I reached my first objective by ferry, a 30-minute trip south to the island Hoy, where the small town of Lyness hosts a visitor center. That facility, by the ferry dock, features the Arctic Convoy Memorial. Russian and British flags flutter alongside hefty stones aligned to represent a ship’s bow, honoring the men who made “the world’s worst journey” from temperate Scapa Flow to arctic Murmansk. The center, whose exhibits include the Royal Oak nameplate, occupies a retired fuel station that was the pumping heart of the Scapa Flow base until it closed in 1957.
From the center I hiked a two-mile trail linking World War II sites both operational—air-raid shelters, workshops, a poison gas decontamination station—and recreational—squash courts and auditoriums. This is no tidy theme park. Where 12,000 personnel once toiled, only seabirds squawk. The few visitors see structures as they were left. The most moving stop on my walkabout was Lyness Royal Naval Cemetery. Grouped by vessel, the fallen from two world wars lie in rows, mates in death as in life. One plot holds 26 men of the Royal Oak, whose fellow casualties remain aboard the sunken ship, off-limits except for Remembrance Sunday each November, when navy divers replace the Royal Oak’s flag. In contrast, wreck divers have made the scuttled German hulks across the harbor prime destinations.
During the decades between the wars the Scapa Flow base lost most of its defenses. In the late 1930s, only the eastern approaches were guarded by half-sub merged blockships, so the navy ordered a junker sunk between Mainland and Lamb Holm. That vessel arrived a week after the U-47. During the winter of 1939–1940 the islands boomed as construction workers swarmed. In March the navy deemed the harbor 80 percent secure and reinstated the fleet. By summer, 900 gunners were manning the “Scapa Barrage.”
Traveling Hoy’s east coast, I encountered vestiges of that ring of fire: 6- and 12-pounders at Scad Head, and at Skerry, more 12-pounders. At Skerry I ascended a farm path to concrete bunkers and an observation tower facing the isle of Graemsay. On Lyrawa Hill I walked a cliffside battery whose squat structures suggest very heavy-duty bus shelters. Besides keeping watch for E-boats and subs, Scapa Flow’s defenders had to scan the skies; German-held Norway was 300 miles northeast, within easy air range. The first British civilian to die from enemy bombs succumbed on Mainland in the rural district of Brig o’ Waithe.
Next day I set out in bitter rain on Mainland to see the antiaircraft defenses at Ness Battery near Stromness. Locked gates vexed me until by chance Andrew Hollinrake, author of the official guide to the site, appeared. He gave me a tour that included barracks in immaculate condition. The mess hall murals—rural scenes of cottages, pubs, wind mills, and the like by artist A. R. Woods—reminded diners what they were fighting for. Outside, the observation post and fire command facility stand sentinel. At the fore are two emplacements that housed six-inch guns able to throw a 100-pound round more than seven miles. Links Battery, named for the adjoining Stromness Golf Club, opens onto a misty horizon, granting me a defender’s-eye view. Behind us a golf ball occasionally thwacked. I expressed surprise at how little vandalism scarred the redoubts. “For the most part, the locals recognize that these concrete structures are now as much a part of their heritage as the stone circles and chambered tombs,” Andy said.
My final morning I stood at Holm on east Mainland—as usual, in solitude. Even before the base closed, the region had reverted to its historically small population and agricultural traditions. I gazed south at Kirk Sound, the narrows U-47 threaded that fateful Friday, now obstructed by causeways known as the Churchill Barriers—ordered by the leader whose name they bear to fend off U-boats and connect the islands. Italian POWs captured in North Africa did the stone and cement work in 1942–1944.
The captured craftsmen built more than barriers. Atop a hill on Lamb Holm perches the Italian Chapel, repurposed from two Nissen huts and scrap and boasting an ornate façade and colorful interior. Outside is that most British of images, St. George slaying the dragon, sculpted by a prisoner of the king.
From the Churchill Barriers it is easy to see the blockships U-47 skirted. Anywhere else these rusting wrecks, with their upended sterns, would be eyesores, but here they evoke the will to fight. The drive across the causeways brought me to South Ronaldsay. At that island’s western extremity, Hoxa Head, stand Orkney’s most impressive batteries, reached by footpath from nearby tearooms that offer parking. This bluff, with its bastions, implies violence but is also incongruous, towers and casements jutting among the wildflowers and wandering cattle of a working farm. I wished for binoculars; whales, dolphins, and porpoises often surface below Hoxa Head. The afternoon was calm. With barely a hull in sight Scapa Flow was smooth as a millpond, a memento mori, figurative and literal.
Originally published in the December 2014 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.