WORLD WAR TWO WAS less than eight hours old when the Athenia, a Montreal-bound passenger liner out of Liverpool, was some 200 miles west of Scotland's Hebrides. Of the 1,500 souls on board, many were Canadian and American vacationers who had been racing the clock to get out of harm's way before the shooting started. Regular travellers and Jewish refugees rounded out the complement and there probably wasn't a uniform in sight except for that of the ship's captain.

As dusk descended, U-30, a German submarine, closed on the liner. Her commander, Fritz-Julius Lemp, sent two torpedoes into the unarmed ship, sending her to the ocean floor. Many of the 112 passengers who died were American and the sinking became a public relations disaster for Hitler, who denied that one of his submarines had been involved. His propaganda machine churned out the fiction that the British sank the Athenia to gain public support. Fritz Lemp became an embarrassment to Hitler and Admiral Karl Donitz, the head of the German submarine force, and was quickly assigned to a desk.

Two weeks after the sinking, the Nazis were fighting another public relations battle on the front pages of papers around the world when U-29 sank the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous in the Western Approaches. Although Donitz was thrilled with the victory over a British warship, he apparently considered freighters a prime target because they could provide the fundamental stuff of survival to Britain. But the sinking of a British carrier was a major propaganda victory and he soon planned a daring encore.

On October 1, Donitz called submarine commander Gunther Prien into his office and outlined mission impossible. The moon and tide would soon be right for an attack on enemy shipping in Scapa Flow, the prime establishment of the Royal Navy located in a strait among Scotland's Orkney Islands. Donitz admitted there might be some difficulty getting into these confined waters, and of squirming through submarine nets and evading patrols. Although he had given the commander two days to think it over, Prien said yes within a matter of hours.

His U-47 left port six days later. According to plan, the sub arrived at Scapa Flow when a new moon darkened the harbour and the tides were running in its favour. Nestling in some 90 meters of water east of the Orkneys, Prien called the crew together and told them where they were going.

watches-k The boat was rigged for its job and later surfaced. After several narrow escapes, the crew of U-47 finally invaded the harbour. Prien stood in the conning tower and must have whimpered: the harbour, key to Britain's naval power, was empty. Then Prien got an urgent message from home: two major ships--the Royal Oak and Repulse--were located in another sector of the harbour.

Prien searched the harbour and finally found the ships. His first torpedo hit the bow of the Royal Oak. Although most of the ship's crew heard the muffled explosion, it was after midnight and the officers on duty incredibly did not raise an alert. It was over an hour later before U-47 had rearmed torpedoes in the tubes and was in a position to deliver them. This time two torpedoes hit the battleship followed by a major explosion that sent the ship to the bottom 20 minutes later with a loss of 800 men.

Submariners soon became national heroes in Germany's war on the West. Although Donitz could only launch about a dozen U-boats, his skippers were sinking an average of three freighters a day. Early in 1940, Hitler solved a problem that had confronted Fritz Letup. He essentially declared that U-bo
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