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.

Three of her four sisters have accounts here, and reading them together is instructive, because they show what she would very probably have become. HMS Revenge (06) spent 1940 carrying the Bank of England's gold to Canada and finished up as gearing in a radio telescope. HMS Resolution (09) was torpedoed by a Vichy submarine at Dakar and spent fourteen months being put back together. HMS Ramillies (07) survived a Japanese midget submarine attack at Diego Suarez and fired a thousand rounds over the Normandy beaches. All four of them, and Royal Sovereign, were worn out and unwanted by 1945 and went to the breakers. Royal Oak is the only one of the five that never got the chance to be worn out.

A Scandal That Reached the King

By the late 1920s Royal Oak was serving with the Mediterranean Fleet, based at Malta, when the interwar years brought her an episode of a very different kind.

In 1928, a bitter dispute aboard ship between Rear-Admiral Bernard Collard and his two senior officers, Captain Kenneth Dewar and Commander Henry Daniel, escalated into formal complaints, controversially treated as subversive conduct, and both officers were court-martialled aboard HMS Eagle at Gibraltar that April.

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. Both Dewar and Daniel were found guilty and severely reprimanded, prompting Daniel to resign his commission, but the real loser proved to be Collard himself, denounced in Parliament as "unfitted to hold further high command" and forced into retirement, a fittingly awkward outcome for an affair that nobody involved came out of well.

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.

The route had been chosen with real care rather than luck: German aerial reconnaissance on 26 September had mapped the anchorage's approaches, while a separate submarine spent a fortnight beforehand studying tides, lights and patrol patterns specifically around Kirk Sound. Donitz judged the gap between the blockships navigable, recording in his own war diary that it left "a gap, 170 metres wide, 7 metres in depth" and that "penetration at this point on the surface at the turn of the tide would be possible without further ceremony; the main difficulty concerns navigation."

Prien threaded U-47 on the surface between the blockships Seriano and Numidian, briefly running aground on a cable strung from Seriano before working the boat free, the whole approach lit by an unhelpfully bright aurora borealis that he later logged, with some feeling, as "disgustingly light".

Prien's first spread of torpedoes did little visible damage: one struck forward, and many of the crew, assuming an internal accident, simply returned to their hammocks, while the rest of that opening salvo went unnoticed entirely.

Thirteen Minutes to Sink

Believing the danger past, Prien brought U-47 about, fired an unsuccessful shot from his stern tube, reloaded his bow tubes and returned for a second attack. Three more torpedoes struck Royal Oak amidships in rapid succession, and this time there was no mistaking what was happening: 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, feted for a feat of navigation and nerve that was, in fairness, entirely genuine. His claim to have also torpedoed the battlecruiser Repulse was rather less so: Repulse had in fact left Scapa Flow earlier that day, and the phantom second victim, still debated by historians today, was almost certainly the elderly seaplane carrier Pegasus, which survived the war regardless of what German newspapers reported at the time.

What Became of the Man Who Sank Her

Prien did not have long. He was thirty-one in October 1939 and by the following spring he was the most famous submarine officer in the world, decorated by Hitler in person, sent round Germany to make speeches, his book ghostwritten and sold in enormous numbers. He went on sinking ships. On the night of 25 February 1941 he found the outbound convoy OB 290 in the Atlantic, attacked it, and then stayed on the surface shadowing it as a radio beacon so that Focke-Wulf Condors could be brought onto it from France, which is a piece of tactics as cold-blooded as anything in the war.

A fortnight later he was dead. U-47's last signal came in on the morning of 7 March 1941 from a position south of Iceland and nothing was ever heard from her again. All forty-five men aboard were lost. For decades the kill was credited to the destroyer HMS Wolverine, but the modern reading is that Wolverine had actually been attacking a different boat, Eckermann's UA, which limped away badly damaged, and one serious suggestion is that U-47 was destroyed by one of her own torpedoes running in a circle. Nobody knows.

The German authorities did not admit it for two months, because Prien had been made into something too useful to lose publicly. In the end he was one of three: Prien lost in March 1941, Joachim Schepke killed and Otto Kretschmer captured within a fortnight of him. The three most celebrated U-boat commanders in the fleet were gone in three weeks, and the first confident phase of the German submarine campaign went with them. The man who took a submarine into Scapa Flow and killed 835 people lies somewhere south of Iceland with his own crew, in a wreck nobody has found either.

An Admiralty board of 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. Its harshest judgement fell on Rear-Admiral Sir Wilfred French, the officer responsible for Orkney's defences, who was forced into retirement despite having warned the Admiralty the previous year that the anchorage needed far more protection than it had, and having personally offered to take a boat through the gap himself to prove the point.

The barriers have a story of their own that is worth telling, because of who built them. They are four causeways totalling about a mile and a half of rock and concrete blocks, thrown across the eastern sounds of Scapa Flow to close them permanently, and from 1942 a great deal of the labour was provided by around thirteen hundred Italian prisoners of war shipped up to Orkney from North Africa. The work was hard, the winters were appalling, and the men objected on the reasonable grounds that international law forbids making prisoners build fortifications. The problem was solved by reclassifying the barriers as causeways for civilian road traffic, which they also happen to be, and which they still are.

What those men left behind is the other thing. At Camp 60 on the little island of Lamb Holm they were given two Nissen huts, and under a prisoner called Domenico Chiocchetti they turned them into a chapel: a painted altar, a rood screen made from scrap metal, a facade of concrete, a Madonna and Child copied from a prayer card one of them carried. The Italian Chapel is still there and is one of the most visited buildings in Orkney. It exists because a submarine got through a gap in the blockships in October 1939, and it is very nearly the only good thing that came of it.

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.

There is also a problem down there that has not gone away. Royal Oak went to the bottom with something in the order of three thousand tonnes of heavy fuel oil in her tanks, and for sixty years it seeped out into one of the most environmentally sensitive stretches of water in Britain, in quantities that grew as the steel corroded. Since the early 2000s the Ministry of Defence has run a continuous programme to get it out, and more than sixteen hundred tonnes have been recovered, which has stopped any significant leakage.

Roughly six hundred and ninety-seven tonnes are still in her, and that is where it will stay for the time being. It sits deep inside the hull, and reaching it with the technology available would mean cutting large holes in a designated war grave with eight hundred and thirty-five men in it. So the wreck is monitored instead, continuously, eighty-odd years on: a battleship sunk in thirteen minutes in 1939 is still, in a small and manageable way, an active operation for the Royal Navy today.

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.

The ship's own association keeps that memory active still. In October 2024, veiled beneath White Ensigns recovered from the wreck itself, a new memorial was unveiled on Portsmouth's historic Hard, the city many of Royal Oak's 1939 crew called home, in a ceremony attended by serving sailors, cadets and veterans' groups. A wreath was laid by the German Naval Attache, Captain Volker Gelhausen, a small, quiet gesture of reconciliation across the eighty-five years and the two navies that the disaster once divided.