Salvaging a German fleet

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33514, 20 April 1974, Page 10

Salvaging a German fleet

Jutland to Junkyard. By S. C. George. Patrick Stephens. 158 pp. When the defeated German crews in defiance of surrender terms scuttled 70 ships of their High Seas Fleet at. Scapa in 1918 their action did not spell the end of their Ignominy or mortification. Within 20 years enterprising Britons had raised 35 ships as complete hulks, and towed them to Scotland where they were broken up in dock and sold profitably for valuable metal of all kinds. At the ruling rates a salvaged battleship seemed to be worth about $130,000. Aspects of this salvage have been published before in several authoritative documents and books. These must have been studied by Mr George, a service veteran of the two World Wars, and now a prolific novelist. Mr George’s book is mainly a survey in terms of technology and engineering of how the job was done by the main participants, They were, first E. F. G. Cox, whose company raised 26 destroyers, two battleships and one cruiser. He was followed by R. W. McCrone, whose company

acquired for its prodigious efforts the pickings from five great battleships and a battle cruiser. The details given will be comprehensible mainly to engineers but there is a measure of humanity in the book, and the assessment of the personality of the leading men, is interesting. The excellent range of more than 100 photographs and diagrams plus appendices on the statistics of the German ships, conveniently tell the story visually for those who are only curious about what went on. The magnitude of these salvage operations; the extent of their profitability, to say nothing of clearing up the mess on Scapa’s floor, will be in the mind when the local comparison is made of what appeared to be involved and ultimately accomplished in removing the Wahine from Wellington harbour. That ill-fated mass of scrap, one third the tonnage of a 1918 battleship, was retrieved only in untold numbers of separate pieces or chunks, not as a tidy salvaged hulk. Experts, however, will probably contend that the comparison is odious or at least invalid.