Environmental Impact - Sunken Wrecks
The Royal Oak

Scapa Flow is a sheltered bay nestled in the Orkney Islands. A buoy with a memorial plaque bobs in Scapa Flow. Eight hundred sailors from the English battleship Royal Oak are entombed below it. A German U-boat made its daring raid into the very middle of this sheltered anchorage and found the Royal Oak there on Friday the 13th, in October, 1939.

One torpedo from the first salvo hit the ship, and it did minimal damage. It wasn't clear to the crew what the muffled WHUMP! really meant. The Germans were given the twenty minutes they needed to reload a second salvo.

This time they scored three solid hits. In minutes the ship had capsized and sunk. It landed with its superstructure crushed on the bottom and the keel just thirty feet from the surface. Only a third of its crew, chilled and oil-soaked, got out alive.

It was frightening news. The pride of the British Fleet had been sunk in home waters. The Royal Oak was state-of-the-art naval weaponry when it was built in 1914. Its great 15-inch guns were then the largest ever put on a ship. By 1939 it bulged with protective siding to absorb torpedo impacts. But technology had moved too quickly, and that siding wasn't enough to absorb the new German torpedoes.

The sinking of the Royal Oak led to the building of the Churchill Barriers.