A little over one hundred years ago, the German High Seas Fleet committed suicide.
On June 21, 1919, the crews of seventy-four German warships attempted to scuttle their vessels in order to prevent the Allies from taking them. Over the course of a few hours, fifty-two modern warships sank. In the modern history of naval combat, there has never been an event as devastating as the self-destruction of the German fleet at Scapa Flow. The scuttling immediately became legendary, closing one chapter of German naval history and opening another.
Context
Shortly after the armistice that ended World War I, the Germans surrendered their fleet to the Allies. The British in particular very strongly believed that Germany should be deprived of her fleet at the earliest opportunity, in no small part because of the role of that fleet in Britain’s war calculations. In addition to concerns about militarist revanchism, the Allies also had to worry about communist revolution. The High Seas Fleet had