Day 6, Thursday, April 20, Orkney Islands

We had a tour today entitled “Orkney at War”. The islands were important in both World Wars, given the position in between the North Sea and the Atlantic. The Scarpa Flow is a huge saltwater port area, which has been used in both World Wars to host the British Fleet.

In World War I, it was very effective to bottling up the German Fleet and preventing incursions down to the south of the UK. At the end of the war, while the final Armistice was being negotiated, the German Fleet was captured and kept in the Flow. The Germans decided that they didn’t want their fleet used by the Allies and executed a planned scuttling of the fleet in place in the Scarpa Flow.

Our tour by splitting the group in half to allow for a smaller van to be used. We started by a walk through the town of Stromness. We walked down the street for a while and stopped in a few shops

We then moved to the small van and started by visiting a gun emplacement from World War II, the Ness Battery, which overlooked one of the entrances to the Scarpa Flow. It had places for 5 and 6 inch guns, but was actually never used to fight off an enemy. It would have housed several hundred men. The Quonset huts which had been used have since been blown down by the incredible winds. We went into the old mess hall and admired the mural painting.

We then returned to the bigger bus in Stromness and drove around the Flow and heard about all of the big WWII items. In the first months of the war, UK again had the Royal Navy in the Scarpa Flow. A very stealthy U-boat, taking advantage of unusually high tides, entered the Flow and sank the HMS Royal Oak, causing a large loss of life. The government then built the “Churchill” Barriers, designed to block future entry to the Flow from and undefended entry. These concrete barriers were built by Italian POWs. While they were here, they built the “Italian Chapel”, which is amazing. The inside walls are painted, even though they look like tiles. They also built a statue of Saint George and the Dragon, which when it was restored in recent years was found to have barbed wire holding it up. It also contained a list of the POWs. The POW who designed it and his wife came in the 1960’s and helped restore the chapel.