HMS Royal Oak (08): Sunk at Anchor in a Harbour Thought Impregnable

Built at Devonport for the Grand Fleet

HMS Royal Oak was laid down at Devonport Royal Dockyard in January 1914, launched in November 1915 and commissioned in May 1916, one of five Revenge-class battleships and the eighth Royal Navy ship to carry the name. She joined the fleet in time to take part in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, opening fire on the German cruiser Wiesbaden and later engaging the battlecruisers Derfflinger and Seydlitz, firing dozens of rounds from her main and secondary batteries before the German High Seas Fleet disengaged.

A Scandal That Reached the King

The interwar years brought Royal Oak an episode of a very different kind. In 1928, a bitter dispute aboard ship between Rear-Admiral Bernard Collard and his two senior officers escalated into formal complaints, controversially treated as subversive conduct, and both officers were court-martialled at Gibraltar. The affair drew worldwide press attention and reportedly concerned King George V himself, an embarrassing episode for a ship whose service had otherwise been solid and unremarkable. She also saw a brush with real danger during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, accidentally struck by a Republican anti-aircraft shell while on non-intervention patrol, injuring five men including her own captain.

Home to Scapa Flow

By 1938, the ageing battleship had returned to the Home Fleet as flagship of the Second Battle Squadron, and that November she carried out the poignant duty of returning the body of Queen Maud of Norway to Oslo for a state funeral. When war broke out in September 1939, Royal Oak was stationed at Scapa Flow in Orkney, the Royal Navy's great northern anchorage and a harbour widely regarded as effectively impregnable to attack.

A U-Boat Slips Into the Anchorage

That confidence proved fatally misplaced. On the night of 13 to 14 October 1939, the German submarine U-47, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Gunther Prien, navigated the narrow, partially blocked channel of Kirk Sound into Scapa Flow itself, a mission personally sanctioned by Admiral Karl Donitz partly for its symbolic value as the site where the German fleet had scuttled itself in 1918. An initial torpedo strike on Royal Oak's bow at 01:04 caused little visible damage, and many of her crew, assuming an internal accident, simply returned to their hammocks.

Thirteen Minutes to Sink

Prien brought U-47 back for a second attack, and at 01:16 three more torpedoes struck Royal Oak amidships in rapid succession. The explosions tore through the armoured deck, destroyed several crew messes and started a spreading cordite fire. The ship listed rapidly, first to fifteen degrees and then to forty-five, and sank at 01:29, just thirteen minutes after the fatal salvo struck.

A Devastating Loss of Life

Of Royal Oak's complement of 1,234 men and boys, 835 were killed that night or died of their wounds afterward, among them Rear-Admiral Henry Blagrove. A particularly heavy toll fell on the ship's youngest sailors, with 134 of the dead boy seamen under the age of eighteen, the largest such loss the Royal Navy has ever suffered in a single action. Many men who escaped into the water, dressed only in nightclothes, found themselves fighting through a thick layer of fuel oil that filled their lungs and hampered any attempt to swim. The tender Daisy 2, skippered by John Gatt and moored alongside, was cast loose and used to pull 386 survivors from the water over the course of several desperate hours, an act of courage recognised with the Distinguished Service Cross, the only military award made by Britain in connection with the disaster.

A Shock Felt Far Beyond Orkney

Winston Churchill called the raid a remarkable exploit of professional skill and daring, even while insisting the loss would not materially affect British naval strength, but the psychological blow was real: a supposedly impregnable home anchorage had been penetrated and a battleship sunk within it, barely six weeks into the war. Gunther Prien became an immediate hero in Germany, the first submarine officer awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, while an Admiralty inquiry condemned Scapa Flow's defences and led directly to the construction of the Churchill Barriers, the causeways that permanently sealed the anchorage's eastern approaches.

A War Grave, Watched Over Still

HMS Royal Oak remains a designated war grave, lying almost upside down in around a hundred feet of water, with unauthorised diving prohibited under the Protection of Military Remains Act. Every year the Royal Navy places a White Ensign underwater at her stern to mark the anniversary, and a memorial at St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, holding her recovered ship's bell and a book of remembrance, ensures that the men and boys lost that October night are not forgotten.