Under Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, German crews opened seacocks and sank 52 of the 74 interned High Seas Fleet vessels at Scapa Flow, Scotland, on June 21, 1919. Reuter believed armistice terms had expired and acted to prevent the ships' surrender to Britain, a defiant final act that scuttled Allied plans to divide the fleet among the victors.
The High Seas Fleet had been interned at Scapa Flow since November 1918, its 20,000 sailors living in limbo aboard rusting battleships while politicians in Paris argued over the Treaty of Versailles. Reuter, isolated from Berlin and misreading a delayed newspaper report, concluded the armistice had lapsed and that Britain intended to seize the ships outright.
At 10:30 that morning he signaled the order via flag and semaphore across the anchorage: scuttle. Within hours seacocks opened across the fleet, and battleships like the Bayern and Friedrich der Grosse began listing and sinking in the cold Orkney waters. British guard ships, caught off guard, opened fire on German lifeboats, killing nine sailors—the last casualties of the war.
Of 74 ships, 52 went to the bottom, denying the Allies their prize and, incidentally, creating one of the world's great shipwreck diving sites. Salvage operations over the following decades recovered most of the hulls for scrap, but a handful remain on the seabed, silent and enormous, visited now by divers rather than sailors.