ourpasthistory.com: Churchill Barriers , Orkney

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Churchill Barriers , Orkney

When in 1914 the Grand Fleet moved to Scapa Flow, there not a single gun in place to protect its anchorage. Coastal defence batteries and systems of boom defences were quickly put in place and a plan was conceived to block the eastern approaches to Scapa Flow. Initially a solid barrier was proposed but this was abandoned in favour of the quicker solution of the use of blockships.

When the Fleet returned to Scapa Flow in 1939, they found the anchorage only slightly better defended than in 1914.

The weakness of the defences was exploited by a German submarine U.47 which evaded the blockships off Kirk Sound on 14th October 1939, torpedoed and sank HMS Royal Oak with the loss of 833 lives before escaping by the same route.

Winston Churchill visited Scapa Flow within a month and ordered that the eastern approaches be permanently closed to protect the Fleet.

Balfour Beatty and Co Ltd were awarded the construction contract and on 10th May 1940 the S.S. Almanzora arrived carrying the men and equipment to enable work to start. Towards the end of the 1941 the labour situation had become acute , but thanks to the progress of the war in North Africa, there was soon a large number of Italian prisoners of war available. This meant however that work on the Barriers had to cease with work being concentrated on building two large camps for the prisoners. From early in 1942 groups of them began to arrive and were marched into the camps which were to be their homes for the next three years. From January 1942 until the Spring of 1945 Camp 60 onLamb Holm housed 600 men of the 6th Anti Aircraft Regiment of the Mantora Division and men from the Italian Tank Corps. A further 700 were housed on Burray in a further two camps. They were unhappy, stating this to be war work and therefore against the Geneva Convention, but were persuaded that anything that was to be a service to the community after the war could be taken to be outside that category. The prisoners worked in the concrete block casting yard, filling gabions with quarried rock and finally laying the asphalt roads across the causeways. The massive project of building the causeways brought together men from all over Britain, the Italian prisoners of war and a number of local folk.

The barriers consist of broken rock covered on the top and sides with concrete blocks and finished off with a roadway and link the islands of South Ronaldsay, Burray, Glimps Holm and Lamb Holm with the mainland. 40,000 cubic metres of quarried rock were used together with 300,000 tonnes of concrete facing blocks. Despite the technical and logistical engineering problems associated with these massive engineering works , the Barriers were completed in just over 4 years. They were officialy opened on 12th May 1945 by the First Lord of the Admiralty

14th October 1943 . This photograph taken from the Kirk Sound causeway at the instant of release of a 5 ton concrete block from the overhead cableway.