WINSTON VISITS LOCH EWE
W.S.Churchill, A History of the Second World War, 1948. Vol 1 pp 338-339
September 1939. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, visits Scapa Flow and Loch Ewe.
Kirk Sound: entrance to Scapa Flow with remains of a boom and a blockship.
I therefore obtained leave from our daily Cabinets, and started for Wick with a small personal staff on the night of September 14… I stayed with the Commander-in-Chief in his flagship, Nelson, and discussed not only Scapa but the whole naval problem with him and his principal officers. The rest of the Fleet was hiding in Loch Ewe, and on the 17th the Admiral took me to them in the Nelson. As we came through the gateway into the open sea, I was surprised to see no escort of destroyers for this great ship. 'I thought', I remarked, 'you never went to sea without at least two, even for a single battleship'. But the Admiral replied, 'Of course, that is what we should like; but we haven't got the destroyers to carry out any such rule. There are a lot of patrolling craft about, and we shall be into the Minches in a few hours.'
It was like the others a lovely day. All went well, and in the evening we anchored in Loch Ewe, where the four or five other great ships of the Home Fleet were assembled. The narrow entry into the loch was closed by several lines of indicator nets, and patrolling craft with Asdics and depth-charges, as well as picket-boats, were numerous and busy. On every side rose the purple hills of Scotland in all their splendour. My thoughts went back a quarter of a century to that other September when I had last visited Sir John Jellicoe and his captains in this very bay, and had found them with their long lines of battleships and cruisers drawn out at anchor, prey to the the same uncertainties as now afflicted us …
The responsible senior officers… were new figures and new faces. The perfect discipline, style and bearing, the ceremonial routine – all were unchanged. But an entirely new generation filled the uniforms and the posts. Only the ships had most of them been laid down in my tenure. None of them was new. It was a strange experience, like suddenly resuming a previous incarnation. It seemed that I was all that survived in the same position [First Lord of the Admiralty] I had held so long ago. But no; the dangers had survived too. Danger from beneath the waves, more serious with more powerful U-boats, danger from the air, not merely of being spotted in your hiding-place, but of heavy and perhaps destructive attack!
Having inspected two more ships on the morning of the eighteeenth, and formed during my visit a strong feeling of confidence in the Commander-in-Chief, I motored from Loch Ewe to Inverness, where our train awaited us. We had a picnic lunch on the way by a stream, sparkling in hot sunshine. I felt oddly oppressed with my memories… No one had ever been over the same terrible course twice with such an interval between… if we were in fact going over the same cycle a second time, should I have once again to endure the pangs of dismissal? Fisher, Wilson, Battenberg, Jellicoe, Beatty, Pakenham, Sturdee, all gone!
On 14 October 1939, HMS Royal Oak was torpedoed in Scapa Flow by the U47, entering through a defensive gap in Kirk Sound. Of her 1234 men and boys, 833 were killed that night or died later of their wounds.