Sinking of the British Battleship Royal Oak

On October 14th 1939, the German submarine U-47 penetrated the harbor defenses of the British main base for their home fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney islands. After searching in vain for some time for a suitable target, U-47 came upon the British battleship Royal Oak. U-47, commanded by Captain Gunther Prien, fired four torpedoes. This produced one hit, two misses and a malfunction. On board the Royal Oak, the crew was not clear what had happened and the first thoughts were that there had been an internal explosion. Many crew members simply went on with what they were doing at the time. U-47 fired another torpedo from her stern tubes which also missed. In the meantime the forward tubes were reloaded. This time a spread of three torpedoes produced three hits and Royal Oak capsized and sank. 833 of her crew of over 1,200 were killed.

The daring and spectacular nature of the attack was a substantial propaganda coup for the Germans. The substantial loss of life and the fact that many of the bodies could not be recovered from the ship have made the site of the sinking a memorial for the British people and the Royal Navy perhaps comparable to the USS Arizona memorial for Americans.

However, the military impact of the sinking beyond the immediate loss of life was very small. Royal Oak was one of the Revenge class of battleships built in 1913-1914. Despite refits and upgrades during the interwar years, in 1939 Royal Oak could manage a top speed of only 20 knots which was not enough to keep up with the rest of the fleet. This had been demonstrated earlier in the month when Royal Oak had participated in a search for the German battle cruiser Gneisenau which had entered the North Sea as a diversion and cover for the successful breakout of the commerce raiding German pocket battleships Deutschland and Graf Spee.

Royal Oak had returned to Scapa Flow with its shortcomings exposed and some minor but not inconsequential damage from its efforts to operate at top speed in rough seas. The reason U-47 had to search for targets was that the main units of the British fleet had been dispersed to other ports for fear of a German air attack. A decision had been made that Royal Oak could be risked so that its antiaircraft armament could be added to the Scapa Flow defenses. Royal Oak might have served usefully later in the war supporting amphibious landings with its heavy guns. However, for the immediate aftermath of its sinking, an objective and admittedly cold-hearted assessment is that the sinking had little impact on the military balance. Winston Churchill then First Lord of the Admiralty said as much when he announced the sinking on October 17th.

On the other hand, the loss of life which would have been tragic in any event had that tragedy compounded by the Royal Navy’s employment of boy seamen between the ages of 15 and 17. Over 100 of these boys under 18 were among those killed on board the Royal Oak. Although the navy publicly defended the practice, boys under 18 never again served aboard active warships except in exceptional circumstances. There are many informative internet sites on the sinking so I won’t link to one of them. I’ll just say that typing “royal oak sunk” into a good search engine will bring up a number of good choices for digging deeper into these events.

The Polish Campaign: Results and German Lessons Learned

Germany conquered its half of Poland in 36 days. It took almost 700,000 prisoners and inflicted over 100,000 casualties in killed, wounded and missing on the Poles. The vast quantity of captured military equipment and ammunition(e.g. over 3000 artillery pieces and 16,500 machine guns), while not suitable for use by the Wehrmacht, could be used to help equip Germany’s minor allies later in the war. By contrast German personnel losses were relatively light – a total of 40,000 including 8,000 dead. Among the 22.5 million Poles in the German occupied territory were 750,000 ethnic Germans and some ethnic minorities prepared to work against the Soviet Union e.g. Ukrainians. However, the overwhelming bulk of the population was hostile and would require an occupation force.

German equipment losses were serious and illustrated the enormous strain of building and maintaining the equipment necessary for mechanized warfare. The Germans lost over 200 tanks and over 400 aircraft. More extensive still were the deferred maintenance issues and outright mechanical breakdowns associated with the demands of combat, poor roads and maintenance and repair resources that lagged far behind the rapid advance of the mechanized ground forces and aircraft operating off of improvised airfields near the front. Many German units were virtually immobile by the end of the campaign.These issues would increase with longer campaigns and tougher opposition.

As was their custom, the Germans reviewed their operations for possible improvements with an intelligent and critical eye worthy of a better cause. They certainly had reason to be satisfied. Their armored forces had overcome earlier operational issues under combat conditions and restored the war of movement the Germans had always preferred to fight, removing the threat of world war I style trench deadlock. German artillery was highly effective. The Luftwaffe had gained air superiority and successfully attacked Polish strong points, troop movements and supply columns on a large scale.

On a more detailed level however the Germans found room for improvement. Tank and motorized units were employed conservatively and cautiously by later standards. Advocates of more aggressive armored tactics were able to build on lessons learned in Poland for later campaigns including France and Russia. The lighter German tanks were found to be useful only for reconnaissance if at all. In the future production of the heavier types would be emphasized even at the expense of the total number of tanks in a division. The mg 34 machine gun was found to be vulnerable to jamming under eastern European conditions. Research was accelerated resulting in the faster development of the more reliable and faster firing mg 42.

The Germans found that their light divisions were, well, too light for sustained combat operations. They were upgraded to Panzer divisions. On the other end of the spectrum, the motorized divisions were too hard to maneuver and control with three motorized infantry regiments. They were each reduced by one such regiment.

There were additional small improvements in battlefield communications and infantry equipment. The Germans also took note of the effective use by the Poles of night attacks and guerrilla activity in rear areas. They stressed night attacks and the combat capabilities of supply column personnel in improved training methods. One area where they learned little was camouflage discipline against air attack. That would come later as the Germans faced increasingly effective air opposition.

Much of the information from this essay is drawn from “The German Campaign in Poland (1939)” the book length Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 20-255 by Robert M. Kennedy which despite being published in 1956 remains a valuable source on the campaign and is packed with the kind of detail on numbers, organization, equipment and order of battle that gladdens a war game designer’s heart.

You can read it online here .

The Polish Army of 1939

With organized Polish resistance drawing to a close, let’s take a moment to reflect on an army that had just suffered a crushing defeat. Someone, I forget who, observed that defeated armies do not get the respect they deserve. The Union army at Chancellorsville or the Austrian army at Austerlitz are undeserving of the gratuitous contempt that is directed at them by partisans of a cause or those who vicariously identify with “winners”. So it is with the Polish army of 1939.

Poland was considered a serious regional power before the war. The active army was 280,000 men organized into 30 infantry divisions (two of them mountain infantry) 11 cavalry brigades and a mechanized cavalry brigade plus corps and army level troops mostly artillery, tank, engineer, antiaircraft and signals units. There were 1,500,000 trained reservists between the ages of 24-42 plus older reservists and national guardsmen for support duties.

A look behind that organization revealed many weaknesses. There were too many men in the reserves given the Polish geography which meant there would be little time and space in which to mobilize. Much of the heavy weaponry from machine guns to artillery pieces was in short supply and obsolescent. Most notably a Polish artillery regiment contained only three artillery battalions typically two of 75 mm guns and one of 100mm howitzers. Many divisions lacked one of those battalions or the battalions themselves had two batteries instead of three. Fire control equipment was obsolescent and all artillery was foreign made. A program to upgrade to 105mm and 155mm howitzers of Polish manufacture was just beginning. By comparison the German artillery regiment in a first line infantry division was composed of three battalions of 105mm howitzers and one of 150mm howitzers with modern fire control equipment which allowed for state of the art massing and switching of fires to support planned actions while being responsive to surprise developments, and improvisations to exploit opportunities.

Polish tanks were too few, too lightly armored and deployed in separate battalions for infantry support in the manner of World War I or with the mechanized cavalry for reconnaissance. There were just too few antitank and antiaircraft guns and the quantity and quality of mortars, machine guns and light artillery for direct support of the infantry fell well short of German levels. While images of Polish cavalry attacking German tanks with lances may have been the product of German propaganda films, the fact remained that cavalry had no business on a battlefield dominated by the tank, the airplane, rapid fire artillery and the machine gun and the Polish army had 11 brigades of it. As was also the case with many other countries, Polish military doctrine had not kept up with conceptual, material and technological developments since World War I.

The things the Polish army did not lack were bravery, patriotism and a stubborn spirit of resistance. The Polish army held out as long as it could, counterattacked where it could and when possible escaped to fight another day. As this blog continues to track developments it will become clear that Polish resistance in 1939 ranks among the best of the efforts to resist German attacks under desperate circumstances in the early years of the war. Another thing to watch will be how Polish forces, many composed in substantial part of troops who escaped in 1939 and after will appear in most of the campaigns against Germany. For example, less than a year after the defeat of 1939 a Polish brigade (and a Polish submarine) will be found defending Norway against German invasion.

This spirit of resistance helps explain how a country that had already survived three partitions by major European powers went on to survive a fourth at the hands of the Germans and Russians in 1939.