Nightmare at Scapa Flow

A historian examines what really happened when the British World War II battleship was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Orkney.

Sinking the battleship HMS Royal Oak in the Royal Navy's home anchorage, with the loss of more than 800 of her crew, was Germany's first shattering blow against Britain during World War II. Within six weeks the Germans achieved their goal of breaching the defenses of Scapa Flow. Germany claimed the sinking for the submarine U-47, commanded by Lt. Gunther Prien. Prien and his crew instantly became folk heroes, exploited to extract the maximum glory from their deed. A few months later, Prien's autobiography, Mein Weg Nach Scapa Flow, was published and sold an astonishing 750,000 copies. However, there are Royal Oak survivors, who, while accepting that their ship was torpedoed, say Prien and his crew could never have seen the inside of Scapa Flow because Prien's story differs from the truth.


Much has been written on what is now one of the greatest submarine exploits of all time. Yet nobody has managed to sift fact from falsehood and reconcile the apparently irreconcilable German and British stories. Author H. J. Weaver has interviewed Royal Oak survivors, members of U-47's 1939 crew, Lt. Prien's widow and members of the firm that published his autobiography. Weaver's quest for the truth led through England, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Orkney, Norway, West Berlin, Cologne, Freiburg, and even distant Amman. Every point of controversy he has patiently investigated until he was able to set down the documented, definitive account of the Royal Oak naval disaster in this book.