72 ships ........ what a waste !! Having surrendered at the end of the First World War, the Imperial German High Seas Fleet lay at anchor in Scapa Flow (Orkney) awaiting the outcome of armistice negotiations. Fearing that the fleet would be divided between their enemies as part of reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, the German commander ordered his fleet to be scuttled and 72 ships sank slowly to the bottom. Many of the hulks were subsequently salvaged for scrap, but 3 battleships and 4 light cruisers remain in the Flow and are popular with divers. http://www.gwpda.org/naval/sscuttle.htm
The Grand Scuttle by Dan van der Wat (ISBN 0 586 20091 6) is an informative and entertaining account of the end of the High Seas Fleet. An interesting point is that the hulls of the remaining ships remain a source of steel that isn't tainted by radioactivity - something that affects all steel manufactured after 1945. Some of the steel from the ships may have been used in NASA's space program! Gareth
Can you read it on line ... or do you have to subscribe Andy ?? In other words ... what did it say !!!!!!
Reasonably generalist but based around an artifact held by the AWM. I'll post more soon. I don't think you can read it online yet, Annie, sio subscribing would be the way to go.
I agree with Gareth - The Grand Scuttle is one of the best books I have read dealing with the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet. A few pictures to give an idea of before, during and after the event! 1. The German Fleet lying in Scapa Flow, just prior to the scuttling... 2. The battleship Derfflinger sinking and 3. Being later raised. 4. The battleship Bayern being raised - some years later during 1933... 5. The salvage of the destroyer SMS 102...
The High Seas Fleet would have been scrapped even if they had not been sunk, even if they were distributed among the victorious nations. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 was an agreement to limit the size of all Navies. The British and Americans agreed to have a maximum total tonnage of 525,000; the Japanese 315,000. To put it another way, the tonnage ratios for Britain:USA:Japan:France:Italy was to be 5:5:3:1.67:1.67 (I'm not sure if these figures were just for battleships and battlecruisers, or all vessels). For the Royal Navy, this entailed scrapping no less than 22 battleships and battlecruisers; basically all those completed before 1913. Even the historic Dreadnought was not spared. There was a similar cull of all older cruisers and destroyers. So was this a waste, as the title of this thread suggests? People really hoped that the Great War would be the war to end wars. However much I am interested in warfare and its weapons, a world without either must be the ideal. Sadly, the Washington Treaty like so many others (the SALT treaty for at start) was more about saving money while maintaining imperial power. The fact that the Japanese were forced to accept a smaller tonnage was one grievance that turned them against the West.
Adrian your last point about the Japanese was correct. In particular they turned against the British. As a former staunch ally they felt they had been badly let down at being forced to accept what they considered to be a a second-rank position. A humiliating loss of face.
