This Great Harbour - Scapa Flow (Paperback)

Massive defences - guns, searchlights, booms and minefields - were built up between 1914 and 1918, and then demolished, only to be built up again twenty-five years later when the harbour's security was again threatened. This time there was the additional danger from the sky, and an anti-aircraft 'umbrella' of over eighty guns was deployed to ward off the Luftwaffe bombers. In This Great Harbour - Scapa Flow, W.S Hewiosn tells how this was achieved as the anchorage - known by mariners since the time of the Vikings and perhaps even before them, with its key position athwart the northern sea routes - came into the ken of the Admiralty's strategic thinking. The Grand Fleet sailed from Scapa in 1916 to do battle at Jutland. Five days later, Lord Kitchener, went to his death from here in the cruiser Hampshire, sunk by mines off Orkney's west coast. There was tragedy again in 1939 when the German submarine U47 slipped through the incomplete defences to sink the battleship Royal Oak at her moorings with the loss of 800 men. And between the wars the world's greatest feat of salvage - the raising of the scuttled German fleet - was carried out in its waters. This book also tells about the impact of these wars on the native island community who found themselves swamped by an invasion of service men and women, and how they saw war at first hand through having in their midst this great harbour.