Scapa Flow Raid

It was news to the world that part of the British Home Fleet was at Scapa Flow last week, because First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had said it was not there. It was bigger news that a battle squadron of 14 or more Heinkel bombers from their base 600 miles away in Germany sighted the Orkney Islands just as the Saturday sun was setting. Nazi scouts had said the Fleet was there, but the airmen were amazed by its numbers when they got overhead. They picked out the biggest ones, started down, let go.

Major Fritz Doensch, 36, who led the raid, talked about it in Berlin next day. "I can guarantee that we registered direct hits on some of the biggest ships," said he. "We couldn't tell just which they were. . . . Besides the ones we hit we know that our bombs came close enough to several others for the explosions to lift them right up out of the water."

No one at 5,000 ft. or higher can "guarantee" what his bombs did. But the British Admiralty was quick to admit: 1) that the Fleet was back at Scapa (each ship girt with a "hula skirt" of cables to foil magnetic mines, `a la Queen Elizabeth); 2) that at least one ship was seriously hit; 3) that while some of the raiders targeted the fleet, others attacked Orkney airfields where Britain's pursuit ships sat, scoring hits on hangars, planes, civilians (one killed, seven wounded, in addition to seven Jack-tars admitted dead). The Germans said they bombed the airfields because they would not make the same mistake the British did in December "when they tried to attack us [at Helgoland] and had 34 planes shot down by our Messerschmitts."

In several respects the raid was a World War II first: numbers, timing, effect. It coincided perfectly with Adolf Hitler's visit to Benito Mussolini: as much as to say, if we can do this to you boys at Scapa, how about Gibraltar and Alexandria?

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