150mm Gun

First and foremost - HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to my lovely MrsCyclops - six years today and I'm very sorry we're apart.

Scapa Flow is famous as the home of the British Grand Fleet in the WW1 and North Atlantic Fleet in WWII. At the end of WW1, it was also used to inter 74 vessels of the German High Seas Fleet while the armistice was in place. Admiral von Reuter commanded the "Internmet Formation" (officially it was a detachment from the High Seas Fleet even though it contained most of the vessels) and as the Treaty of Versailles was negotiated.

Reuter believed that the fleet, the jewel in the crown of the German navy, was to be siezed, split up and distributed amongst the allies on the signing of the treaty. To prevent this, and preserve the honour of a fleet never defeated in battle, he ordered all the ships to be scuttled (sunk) on June 16th, 1919.

The majority were salvaged in the following years for their valuable metals, but a small number still remain and can be dived to this day. They are unusual in this respect, because most WW1 and WW2 wrecks are war graves and are quite rightly off-limits to divers. Since the ships in Scapa Flow were scuttled, nearly all of the crew escaped, so these are not grave sites.

The top picture in this image is the breech (back end where the shells are loaded) of a 150mm* gun on the Light Cruiser Dresden II. The cruisers are generally the shallower wrecks with a maximum depth of not much more than 30m so we used her as a warm-up diver this morning. We'll work up to the battleships later in the week.

The firing mechanisms from all the armaments on the internment formation were removed before they left Germany for the journey (first to the Firth of Forth then) to Scapa.

The lower image is a similar gun recovered from another light cruiser during salvage work, but abandoned as worthless by the salvors. It now sits outside the museum in Lyness (which we visited at lunchtime).

Even after nearly 100 years spent 30m underwater, the breech mechanism looks pretty much in tact, if a little overgrown with marine life.







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* We British seem to insist on calling it a 5.9" gun - but I believe the Germans were thoroughly metric by WW1.