MORE than 800 men died. Britain suffered the worst loss of life in a naval disaster on home shores. But even to this day little notice has been paid in historical circles to the sinking of HMS Vanguard in 1917.
The Vanguard – the eighth Royal Navy vessel by that name – was an aging ship in need of repair or replacement and had been docked for seven months at the Northern Base on Scapa Flow's north shore. Launched in 1909, the battleship had seen service in the Battle of Jutland, perhaps the greatest sea skirmish of the First World War.
Morale was high on 9 July 1917, the day of the disaster. Investigators would later note that the ship's men were, at the time, "as happy as in any ship in the Grand Fleet."
Eyewitness accounts said a massive explosion at about 11.20pm was followed by a second blast that sent flames high into the sky and pieces of machinery onto shore. The scene was of great amounts of smoke, panic and confusion.
Of the 845 aboard only two survived the sinking of the Chatham-built dreadnought, the largest class of warships in the fleet. Orkney historian Brian Budge, who researches war memorials from his Flotta home, was the first to confirm the death toll.
"Death in battle was bad enough but these men had no chance and were just sitting there when they were killed," he notes. "They were mostly bored … and (for) a ship to suddenly blow up is a bad thing."
At first the Royal Navy would only divulge cursory details of the sinking. A full report followed after the war's end about 18 months later, and the investigation report systematically rejected many possible causes for the explosions.
The Vanguard, for example, was docked safely and away from shipping traffic. This ruled out a direct hit from German U-boats, according to Andrew Lambert, of the Naval History Unit at Kings College in London.
The Germans, Lambert says, tried and failed to enter Scapa Flow. They mined the area extensively - a mine would sink HMS Hampshire carrying Lord Kitchener on his way to Russia in 1916 - and Scapa was out of range of the Luftwaffe bombing campaign.
Lambert attributes the slow release of the Vanguard details as a necessity of war. Such news would have been seen as helping the German propaganda machine.
Claims of sabotage were officially ruled out by naval investigators. The panel said that any enemies on board would certainly have sought to act in the seven months previous, and the Vanguard was not a prime ship in the fleet.
Instead, investigators said the sinking followed a series of massive explosions caused by cordite, an ammunitions propellant. Cordite is basically the "gunpowder in the cartridge" which is very unstable and changes its properties when heated, says Ian MacKenzie, of the Naval Historical Branch of the Royal Naval Museum.
It had been questioned whether sabotage was involved in the wake of a similar explosion which sank HMS Natal off Cromarty in 1915 and thought to have been the work of the Germans. A cordite explosion threatened the Vanguard three years earlier, and another blew up HMS Glatton in Dover in 1918. Japanese, Italian and Russian ships also sank as a result of cordite. German ships, however, used a different propellant.
The report from investigators attributed to coincidence that the Vanguard, Natal and Bulwark, which sank in a similar magazine explosion in River Medway in 1914, were all Chatham ships.
It noted the position of coal sacks stowed in the Vanguard's patent fuel space - where the first of two explosions occurred – were found to have "produced conditions favourable to spontaneous combustion".
More importantly, the ship's crew would in this case have been unaware of any heat build-up as doors were often locked. Amid cordite's explosive tendencies, the compartment cannot be fully searched on every docking. The locked doors, though, were found to be unsecured and easy to open.
Beside a general media blackout during the war, why was so little notice given to this tragedy?
"The real action was in the submarine war," says Lambert. "The Vanguard was not one of the new capital ships, almost ten years old, second rank. (It was) just deteriorating cordite, not particularly well-made.
"For those involved – the families – it was a catastrophe, but at the time 700 men was a pretty average day on the Western front. If it happened in peace time or early in the war, it would have been very serious. But towards the end? No."
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