In the afternoon of 21st June 1919, approximately 400,000 tons of German warships; ten battleships, five battlecruisers, four cruisers and more than thirty destroyers; settled on the bottom of Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands; as German sailors carried out orders to scuttle the imprisoned High Seas fleet. Some of the ships sank in deep water disappearing entirely from view, while the upper works of others remained visible at low tide. Some ships were beached by British boarding parties before their skeleton crews could scuttle them. Some turned turtle as they foundered on the rocky shoreline. Nine German seamen were shot for their actions.
The official British reaction was succinctly expressed by Scapa Flow’s commanding officer, Vice-Admiral Sir Sydney Freemantle, who accused the German fleet commander of ‘violating common honour and honourable traditions of seamen of all nations’. The scuttling of the fleet, he declared, ‘added one more to the breaches of faith and honour of which Germany has been guilty of in this war.’
Privately, the British Admiralty was relieved that the problem of overseeing the interned German battleships and their disposal was so immediately solved. The British parliament was equally satisfied that such powerful modern weapons could no longer be given as reparations to rival powers such as France. And there were surely many a widow or bereaved parent in the land who rejoiced at the ignominious end to battlecruisers such as the Von der Tann and Derfflinger, whose excellent gunnery had helped kill hundreds of British sailors at the calamitous Battle of Jutland only three years earlier.
The sight of the upturned bow of the minelayer SMS Bremse, exposed like a tombstone at low-tide, may have engendered mixed emotions for those families who’d lost sons aboard HMS Strongbow and Mary Rose; two victims of her sister ship’s destructive gunnery in 1917; relief that both ships would sail no more, pain perhaps that a bloodier revenge could not have been enacted during wartime. The wreck of the Bremse remained half-submerged in Scapa’s chilly waters until 1929 when it was raised by enterprising salvage engineer Ernest Cox.[1] The wreck of her sister ship SMS Brummer still lies at the bottom of the Flow, half-forgotten like the controversial naval engagement the two ships had taken such a fateful part in on the morning of 17th October 1917; known somewhat prosaically today as The Action off Lerwick.
Lerwick is the main port of The Shetland Islands. Due to its extreme location to the north-east of Scotland, and relative proximity to the major Norwegian port of Bergen; a distance of about 180 miles; for most of the First World War, Lerwick was the chief stopping off point for merchant ships travelling between Scandinavia and British ports. Although called The Action off Lerwick, the battle actually took place some 60 miles southeast of the Shetland Isles, far out in the North Sea.
Nominally at least, the Scandinavian nations; Norway, Sweden and Denmark; remained neutral during World War One, a joint announcement to that effect being made by their reigning monarchs in Malmo in December 1914. However, neutrality was more complex than the term tends to imply.
Danish neutrality, for example, was compromised by its geographic proximity and military vulnerability to Imperial Germany. The Danish people still harboured grievances about the bloody conflict between the two countries in 1864 which had forced the nation to cede territory to Prussia. Moreover, Princess Alexandria, the British Queen-Consort, was of Danish origin and strongly anti-German. Nevertheless, the Danish government was forced to concede to German demands early in the war to lay mines in the Great Belt, one of three straits through which ships can pass from the Baltic to the North Sea, in order to deter British naval intrusions.
The Swedish monarchy, on the other hand, was broadly pro-German by virtue of the marriage of King Gustav to German Princess Viktoria of Baden, who was known to wield significant influence over her husband. Furthermore, the traditional enemy of Sweden had been the Russians, with whom the British were now suspiciously allied. On the other hand, the country had strong commercial ties with Britain and France, which it did wish to jeopardize.
Of the three nations, Norway was perhaps the least neutral, its royal family being linked to the British monarchy through the marriage of King Haaken VII to Princess Maud, daughter of King Edward VII. Public sympathies lay generally with Britain. Moreover, Norway’s large merchant fleet provided many of the ships that would help the island nation stave off economic collapse. For this reason, Norway has been referred to as ‘The Neutral Ally’. In all three Scandinavian nations, the overwhelming public desire was to avoid war.
Neutrality was also complicated by the blockade put in place by the British at the beginning of November 1914, who declared, in violation of international law, that the entire North Sea was then a ‘military area.’ The German government responded in kind in February of the following year by pronouncing the seas around the British Isles a ‘war zone’. Consequently, the transport of goods to Germany and Britain by Scandinavian merchantmen was regarded by both sides as a potentially belligerent act, and such traffic was targeted by German submarines and British naval patrols.
German U-boats invariably sank Scandinavian ships caught heading towards Britain, usually – at least in the early phases of the war – after allowing crew members time to evacuate into lifeboats. Meanwhile, those found by British boarding parties to be carrying to Germany what they considered to be ‘contraband’ would be dispatched to a British port where such goods would be confiscated, and the ships held for a time. However, the British controversially included foodstuffs in their lists of contraband. This attempted ‘Hunger Blockade’ not only infuriated Germany but also angered Scandinavian exporters, who viewed foodstuffs as legitimate trade.[2]
The British government also restricted its own exports to these countries in order to co-opt them in its blockade. This policy was particularly successful with Norway, which relied heavily on Britain for oil, coal and steel. After the British threatened to terminate coal exports in December 1916, the Norwegians had little choice but to comply with their demands to curtail fish exports to Germany, a policy that led to the increased targeting of Norwegian shipping by German U-boats.[3] A similar coal ultimatum made to the Swedish government, however, was less successful; the Swedes simply switched to importing slightly inferior coal from Germany.
Initially, the Swedish authorities aided the escape of British merchantmen trapped in the Baltic by the outbreak of war, even going so far as to set up an Anglo-Swedish shell company for the purpose. However, after about a third of the 90 ships had been repatriated, the Swedes mined the exit route and refused to provide pilots, bartering further assistance in return for the release of their own merchant ships that had been interned in British ports for carrying contraband (Halpern, 1995). The Swedish people suffered from food shortages for a time as a result of reduced British exports, which Whitehall feared would be sold on to Germany.
Sweden, meanwhile, supplied both Britain and Germany with the iron ore necessary for the manufacture of arms. Although not officially classified as contraband under the 1907 Hague Convention, iron ore was too valuable a commodity for either side to let through. Germany had the advantage of being able to transport most of this material through the Baltic, which it largely controlled access to.
However, in September 1915, in spite of the Danish mine-laying actions, a handful of British submarines did manage to pass into the Baltic undetected, and for a time operated successfully out of Tallinn, under Russian high command, against German ore-carriers. The most successful of these was E-19, which sank five ships. One of these attacks involved the steamer Germania, which after being chased by E-19, ran aground off the Swedish coast. The submarine crew put explosive charges in the stranded ship, although they failed to sink her (Akesson, 1998).[4]
This violation of Swedish sovereignty and similar incursions to their territorial waters by Russian naval forces angered their government. In November 1915, bowing to German pressure, it directed its navy to provide an armed escort for convoys of German ore-carriers through its waters in the Gulf of Bothnia to a southerly point from where German warships could escort them to its Baltic ports (Halpern, 1995). This did much to reduce German merchant casualties in the Baltic for the remainder of the war.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 