Hitler's Secret Plan to Kill the Royal Navy: Sink Their (Docked) Battleships
Warfare History Network
Security,
Yes, this happenned during World War II.
Certainly the U-boat went down with all hands, including Prien and seven other members of the original Scapa Flow crew. Indeed, only 15 of the 44 submariners involved in the sinking of the Royal Oak were to survive the war, a testament to the appalling losses the U-boats suffered as a whole. The youngest member of the crew, torpedo mechanic Herbert Herrmann, eventually married a Scottish woman and settled in Dumfriesshire.
World War II had been in progress for six weeks when on the evening of October 12, 1939, the German submarine U-47 surfaced off the Orkney Islands at the northern tip of Scotland. While the officers standing in the conning tower observed the twinkling lights ashore to the west, only the captain, Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien, knew the purpose of their mission. Security surrounding it had been so tight that only now, with the climax approaching, would it be possible to tell his men the reason for so daring a foray into enemy waters.
Following a night of observation, U-47 submerged and withdrew eastward. As it settled on the bottom, the motors were cut and Prien ordered the crew to assemble in the forward mess. The time had come to reveal to these young men—average age of 20—that the following day, they would be entering Scapa Flow.
A Symbolic Mission
Scapa Flow had a special significance to the officers and men of Germany’s Kriegsmarine. It was at Scapa Flow that the pride of Germany during World War I, the High Seas Fleet, with which it had sought to challenge the Royal Navy for control of the seas, had been scuttled, laid to rest in a final defiant act following the defeat of its armies in northern France and Flanders. There, its ships lay as they still do, in 15 fathoms of water. The superb natural harbor provided ample protection for large numbers of British warships and a perfect position from which to intercept German vessels attempting to escape into the North Atlantic. Prien was proposing an extraordinary act.
Read full article