RF wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 5:25 pm
If the RN or the British Government simply ''wanted rid of the ships'' it would have been far more lucrative to have them broken up in shipyards and the scrap steel sold off - countless thousands of tons of it!
The German ships salvaged from Scapa Flow did ultimately find their way to the scrapyard. There is a fascinating image of an inverted (i.e. bottom up) Von der Tann being towed under the Forth Bridge on her way to the ship-breakers.
As far as taking ex-German warships into RN service goes, I don’t think it would have been practical. All the design features and technology aboard these ships were German in origin and I very much doubt that British industry would have been able to economically support/maintain them - consider metric versus English measure issues alone. Another problem - all electrical systems in the German navy ran on AC power; British naval electrical systems all ran on DC power.
As well, when RN technical specialists went aboard Baden to inspect it, they discovered that, among other items, all the technically sensitive German fire control equipment had been entirely stripped out prior to its surrender.
There was, of course, a huge glut of scrap steel immediately after WW1 and it might well have been the cost of scrapping was more than the value.
As Byron pointed out, the ships were in extremely poor condition when they sailed to the UK, with maintenance having been non-existent for months as morale and discipline plummeted in the High Seas Fleet. Despite the terms of the Armistice which only required the armament to be non-operational, eg breech blocks removed, but the ships to be otherwise intact, the Germans had indeed removed or destroyed fire control equipment and other sensitive systems. The first transgression.
As is well known some German vessels did serve in other fleets after the war, but the diplomatic wrangles amongst the victors would have been even more intense over the divisions of a larger pot of the "spoils of war" . With the French and British already having established fleets the likelihood would have been other nations including the newly established Balkan states demanding ships which risked the danger of cutting off one Hydra's head and more springing up from its blood. Good point, Paul!
It is extremely unlikely there was a "blind eye" situation by the RN. Destroying the ships was a major transgression of the terms of the Armistice, and theoretically was an act of war in itself, and, as such, could have restarted the fighting. As was observed earlier, the war had not actually ended until the Peace Treaty was signed. The ships and their crews were still therefore theoretically combatants, not prisoners of war. Several unarmed German sailors were shot dead by infuriated British guards, which today might be regarded as a "war crime", but at the time it was considered the crews were perpetrating an act of war under orders from Berlin, by sinking their ships.
The Peacemakers by Margaret Macmillan says that both Lloyd George and Admiral Wemyss, after wrangles with the US Admiral Benson, did indeed want to see the ships sunk, to maintain the naval status quo, and preferably, with due ceremony in the middle of the Atlantic!
The salvage of the Scapa Flow warships is a fascinating subject in its own right, a project carried out on an unprecedented scale, by men inventing techniques as they went along, including hundred foot long pressurised access tubes from the surface, based on practice for installing bridge piers on river beds. Some recent TV documentaries have relished the irony in noting how the Nazi regime of the 1930s might have bought some of this scrap steel to incorporate in new weapons for their own new war of European aggression.
All the best
wadinga
"There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today!"
