Scapa Flow - The Great Salvage Operation

The Great Salvage Operation

Although many of the larger ships turned turtle and came to rest upside down or on their sides in relatively deep water (25–45 m), some—including the battlecruiser Moltke—were left with parts of their superstructure or upturned bows still protruding from the water or just below the surface. They posed a severe hazard to navigation, and small boats moving around the Flow regularly became snagged on them. The Admiralty initially declared that there would be no attempt at salvage, that the sunken hulks would remain where they were; in the first few years after the war, there was abundant scrap metal as a result of the huge quantities of leftover tanks, artillery and ordnance. But by the early twenties, the situation had changed.

In 1922, the Admiralty finally invited tenders from interested parties for the salvage of the sunken ships, although at the time few believed that it would be possible to raise the deeper wrecks. The contract went to a wealthy scrap metal merchant, Ernest Cox, who created a new company, Cox & Danks Ltd, for the venture, and so began what is often called the greatest maritime salvage operation of all time.

During the next eight years, Cox and his workforce of divers, engineers, and labourers engaged in the complex task of sealing the multiple holes in the wrecks and welding huge steel tubes to the hulls to allow compressed air to be pumped into the ships to raise them. First the relatively small destroyers were brought to the surface and sold for scrap to help finance the operation, then the bigger battleships and battlecruisers. Cox endured bad luck and frequent fierce storms which often ruined his work, swamping and re-sinking ships which had just been raised. At one stage, during the General Strike of 1926, the salvage operation was about to grind to a halt due to a lack of coal to feed the boilers for the water pumps, until Cox ordered that the abundant fuel bunkers of the sunken battlecruiser Seydlitz be broken into to extract the coal with mechanical grabs, allowing work to continue.

Although he ultimately lost money on the contract, Cox kept going, employing new technology and methods as conditions dictated. Eventually by 1939, Cox and the company he later sold out to, Metal Industries Ltd, successfully raised 45 of the 52 scuttled ships. The last, the massive Derfflinger, was raised from a record depth of 45 metres just before work was suspended with the start of WW2, before being towed to Rosyth where it was finally broken up in 1946.

A Morse key recovered from the battleship Grosser Kurfürst during the salvage operation is now on public display at the Museum of Communication, 131 High Street, Burntisland, Fife, Scotland.