There are plenty of wrecks to dive at Scapa Flow, but although it lies inverted in just 30m of water, HMS Royal Oak isn't one of them. Eight hundred and thirty-three officers and men died when the battleship was torpedoed at anchor in 1939, and as a war grave it shelters under the Protection Of Military Remains Act (which post-dated a cynical attempt to salvage it by the Ministry of Defence in the 1950s).
Wreck-divers will still find this book interesting, however. Royal Oak, still leaking oil 70 years on, has a dubious distinction. It was not only the first British battleship or battle-cruiser to be sunk in WW2, but the only British warship in either world war to have been sunk within what had always been thought of as the impregnable confines of Scapa Flow.
The daring exploit carried out by the U-boat U47 made its captain Gunther Prien a hero in Nazi Germany, feted by the public and by Hitler himself. After the defeat of Germany in 1918, the scuttling of its High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow and the humiliation of disarmament under the Treaty of Versailles, the sinking was seen as the first significant act of retribution, and proof that the Royal Navy was not invulnerable.
It was the spark that fired Karl Donitz's aggressive Wolf Pack U-boat strategy, and shifted the war at sea into a new gear.
This book by wreck-diver and military historian Dilip Sarkar is a tribute to those aboard who died, and those who survived.
Along with accounts of the sinking of Royal Oak and what made it such a pivotal action, it has been personalised by including moving references to specific crewmen, in the form of their own letters and statements from relatives.
Sarkar makes little attempt to dramatise events but his understated text is compelling reading, and the pocket profiles are a window into a lost world, and a reminder to divers of the reality behind war graves. Recommended.
Steve Weinman
Amberley Publishing
ISBN: 9781848689442
Softback, 160pp, £16.99
