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The British guard force which had left the Flow that morning on exercise for the first time in the seven long months of internment, learned of the attempted scuttle and turned to charge back to Scapa Flow at full speed. The first ship however would only be able to get back at around 2pm. By 4pm when the last British ship had returned, only three German battleships, three light cruisers and a few destroyers were still afloat out of the total interned force of 74 warships. It was - and still is - the single greatest act of maritime suicide the world has ever seen

At first the Admiralty resolved to leave the scuttled ships to rust away in the dark depths of Scapa Flow. There was so much scrap metal about after the War that prices were low. By the 1920’s however the price of scrap metal had picked up and the attentions of entrepreneurial salvers started to turn to the seemingly inexhaustible supply of finest German scrap metal at the bottom of the Flow.

Over the course of the coming decades the majority of the warships were salvaged, and today, only eight of the original Fleet remain on the seabed waiting to be explored. They are the 26,000-ton battleships, König, Markgraf and Kronprinz Wilhelm, the 4-5,500-ton kleiner cruisers Dresden, Brummer, Cöln and Karlsruhe and the 900-ton destroyer V 83. Various large sections of other ships, left by the salvers also dot the seabed.