Writing Life

For decades, whenever Julie and I have visited the South Bay Area, we have driven past the eerie-looking “ghost fleet” that lies anchored in Suisun Bay, a shallow estuary between the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta area. The 52 ships afloat in the estuary include the USS Iowa, a battleship with a tumultuous history. For most of World War II, she served in the Atlantic Fleet as a presidential shuttle. It was the Iowa that took Franklin Roosevelt to and from the historic Tehran Conference in late 1943. The following year, with the German threat rapidly diminishing, she was transferred to the Pacific Ocean, where she was used to shell beachheads in the Marshall Islands in advance of Allied landings there. She gained notoriety in 1989 when, during a training exercise, an explosion in one of her gun turrets killed 47 of her crewmembers. She was decommissioned in 1990 and towed to her present home in Suisun Bay in 2001. Nowadays her biggest threats aren’t mines or missiles but rust and bird poop. She sits surrounded by dozens of other retired ships that served their country admirably in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and other conflicts. Julie, the daughter of a Navy NCO, has always been fascinated by the fleet. Every time we drive across the bridge that spans the Carquinez Strait she expresses a wish that the government would conduct guided tours of the ships in the ghost fleet. I always nod my head in agreement, but secretly I am creeped out by the sight of those ships and have never had any desire to set foot on one of them. Those ships served some good causes (the Allied effort in World War II) and some lost ones (the Vietnam War), but for me they are reminders of death and destruction and, if the Navy can’t use them any more, I’d just as soon see them dismantled and recycled for some peacetime purpose. And according to a story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, that is finally about to happen.

Known colloquially as “the mothball fleet,” the ships in Suisun Bay are part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet and are maintained by the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD), which also maintains reserve fleets in the Neches River, near Beaumont Texas, and at James River, Virginia. Environmentalists in the Bay Area have long been trying to get the fleet removed from the estuary. Over the several decades that the fleet has been anchored there, its ships have dropped more than twenty tons of toxic materials into the waters beneath them. Finally, a plan worked out by MARAD, various environmental groups, and the state’s water-quality regulators is set to gradually remove the fleet from Suisun Bay over the course of the next seven and a half years. The 25 most toxic polluters in the fleet are scheduled for removal by September 2012. The rest will be dispersed to their final destinations by September 2017. Julie was sad to read about the fleet’s coming demise. I, on the other hand, will not miss it.

Every time I see the mothball fleet I am reminded of Scapa Flow, a body of water in the North Sea near Scotland’s Orkney Islands where, at the end of World War I, the remainder of the German Navy’s battle fleet was interned while the Allied powers decided what to do with it. Under the terms of the Armistice, Germany’s so-called “High Seas Fleet” was ordered to sail to Scapa Flow and remain there until the Treaty of Versailles was finalized. By December 6, 1918, 74 German surface ships had been brought into Scapa Flow under the direction of German Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. Months passed while the Allies, at the Paris Peace Conference, argued about the distribution of the ships. During that time, von Reuter devised a plan for scuttling the fleet should the Allies try to seize them without a formal peace treaty signed by the German government. On June 21, 1919, perhaps because he believed the Armistice had expired without a resolution of the fleet’s fate, von Reuter used flag signals to order his officers to commence scuttling the entire fleet. Portholes, water-tight doors, seacocks, and flood valves were opened. Interior water pipes were smashed. Slowly the German ships began to take on water. By the end of the day, 52 of the 74 captive ships had been sunk. More than 400,000 tons of warships that were consigned to the sea bottom that day, constituting the greatest one-day loss of shipping in history. Most of those sunken ships were raised and salvaged in the 1920s and 1930s. Seven of the sunken ships (three battleships and four cruisers) remain at the bottom of Scapa Flow to this day.

At the time of the great scuttling, the British warships in the area were out at sea practicing anti-torpedo maneuvers, which meant that the German Fleet in Scapa Flow was virtually unguarded until it was too late to undo the damage. When the British ships came racing back to the scene of von Reuter’s crime, they opened fire on a few of the remaining German ships in order to prevent them from being scuttled too. Nine Germans were killed in the gunfire, and they are regarded, unofficially, as the last casualties of World War I (officially, the last casualty of World War I was American soldier Henry Gunther, killed by German troops one minute before the Armistice went into effect). Reactions to the scuttling were mixed. Many people back in Germany considered von Reuter a hero for having prevented the fleet from falling into foreign ownership. The French and Italian governments were angered because they had each hoped to obtain a quarter of the fleet. Publicly the British were outraged, but privately many British officials were glad to see the fleet scuttled rather than end up in the hands of the Italian and French navies. In fact, some people have surmised that the British intentionally left the fleet unguarded on June 21 in order to encourage von Reuter to scuttle it. In any case, whenever I see the ghost fleet at Suisun Bay, I cannot help thinking about von Reuter’s ghost fleet, those 52 ships that he sent to the bottom of Scapa Flow so that they would not fall into foreign clutches. The American ships have a much nobler history than von Reuter’s ships did. But that only makes the fate of the American ships seem sadder. The German fleet vanished in a matter of hours as the result of a single audacious act of one-upmanship that to this day is still heatedly debated by historians. The more noble American ships are vanishing one rust chip at a time as a result of years of neglect.

Lately I have been engaged in an effort to see if various facts from history, science, and other disciplines can be usefully employed as metaphors for larger human truths. For several weeks now I have been meditating on the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow to see if it can be used to symbolize something bigger than itself. Sometimes we humans will destroy something we love in order to save it from an even worse fate. Anyone who has ever owned a pet has probably experienced what it feels like to order the destruction of a beloved companion in order to save the creature from protracted suffering and misery. On the other hand, we humans will also occasionally destroy something that is worthless to us just to prevent anyone else from deriving any enjoyment from it. According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, the expression “dog in the manger” refers to “A mean-spirited person who will not use what is wanted by another, nor yet let the other have it to use.” The expression alludes to a fable in which a dog in a manger refuses to let an ox eat the hay in the feed rack even though the dog cannot eat it himself. In other words, a dog in the manger is a spoilsport. A horrific historical example of this behavior was Saddam Hussein’s decision to set Kuwait’s oil fields on fire when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to seize them for his own murderous regime.

So, which was Rear-Admiral von Reuter – a naval officer whose love for his fleet prevented him from turning it over to his conquerors, or a spoilsport who acted in petulance to prevent other countries from employing a fleet that Germany, under the Treaty of Versailles, would no longer be permitted to employ itself? Is there a third possibility? Could von Reuter be a symbol of the kind of derangement that inspires some men (and women) to murder their significant others rather than accept a breakup of the relationship? Occasionally we read in the newspapers a story about a gunman who goes to his estranged wife’s workplace and shoots her dead in order to keep her from leaving him. Were von Reuter’s actions at Scapa Flow, which resulted in the deaths of nine of his subordinates, a display of the same kind of homicidal fanaticism that fuels the rages of wife-murdering gunmen?

A popular poster of the 1970s featured a small mouse trapped in an open field as a ferocious hawk comes swooping in on him, talons first, for the kill. The mouse, with no place to run or hide, has opted not only to turn and face his doom but also to raise his middle finger to it. The caption read: THE LAST GREAT ACT OF DEFIANCE. Perhaps that was what von Reuter did at Scapa Flow, raised his middle finger to the devouring hawk of the Allied forces. Tom Robbins once said, “The man who jokes in the executioner’s face can be destroyed but never defeated.” Was von Reuter acting out some version of Robbins’ epigram when he destroyed his own fleet? Perhaps Scapa Flow, like the mouse’s middle finger, should be viewed as simply a straight-forward symbol of defiance in the face of certain vanquishment.

Lately, with home foreclosures on the rise, small acts of rebellion reminiscent of Scapa Flow are occurring all over the country. A small minority of homeowners, to express their anger at the banks that are attempting to foreclose on them, have taken to vandalizing their own homes prior to relinquishing them. These homeowners have removed wood flooring, windows, copper pipes, ceiling fans, and other fixtures from their homes in order to make it harder for the banks to recover their financial investments in these properties. If we associate the scuttlings at Scapa Flow with the vandalizing of these distressed homes, we make von Reuter’s actions a symbol not of noble defiance but of senseless violence born of powerlessness and a sense of futility.

A few weeks ago, Julie and I drove to Hillsborough, a little town south of San Francisco, and when we crossed the Carquinez Strait and saw the ghost fleet in Suisun Bay, I again found myself thinking about Rear-Admiral Ludwig von Reuter. All the way home I asked myself what it was that von Reuter’s scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow symbolized. Isak Dinesen once wrote: “Nothing is mysterious until it symbolizes something.” I feel fairly certain that von Reuter’s actions in the Scapa Flow can be profitably viewed as a symbol of some general truth about humankind. But just what exactly that truth may be is still a mystery to me. Perhaps I shouldn’t be focusing so exclusively on von Reuter. Perhaps I should look for symbols in the larger picture. Maybe it is the British navy and its actions that can be most profitably mined for symbolic truths. There is a philosophy that says: The best way to make your problems go away is to simply ignore them. Perhaps the actions of the Royal Navy at Scapa Flow in 1919 are a metaphor for this philosophy. Overseeing the fleet at Scapa Flow was a huge nuisance for the British. Many of the German sailors were malnourished and in need of medical attention that the British couldn’t afford to provide at the time. The American government originally wanted the German fleet to be sent to a neutral country, either Norway or Spain, but both of those countries refused to accommodate the German ships. The British, being the leading European power of the era, more or less got stuck with the Germans because they had the only navy large enough to oversee the internment. At the end of World War I, Britain had more naval ships than any other European country, but the British government knew that giving Italy and France a quarter of the German fleet would diminish Britain’s proportional advantage over those two countries’ navies. The British didn’t like babysitting the German navy but neither were they eager to disperse it among rival European countries. Perhaps that is why on the morning of June 21, 1919, Royal Navy Vice Admiral Sir Sydney Fremantle took the majority of his battle squadron out to sea for anti-torpedo exercises. Did he have some inkling that the Germans might scuttle their fleet if the British gave them an opportunity to do so? There is no evidence to suggest this. But not only was Fremantle never punished for his questionable judgment, his career seemed to soar afterwards. He was made a full admiral in 1922, Commander-in-Chief of the naval base at Portsmouth in 1923, and was knighted a few years after that. Perhaps his lack of judgment at Scapa Flow was in fact a calculated act of provocation, intended to goad Reuter into solving a problem that had become increasingly troublesome for Britain. In that case, maybe the mass scuttling at Scapa Flow should be viewed as a metaphor for intentional neglect as a positive force in the solution of thorny problems. Perhaps the next time you have a difficult problem to deal with you should do what Vice Admiral Fremantle did at Scapa Flow: turn your back on it for a short while and see if it doesn’t go away on its own. It might work, but I don’t recommend it. When I ignore my problems, they never scuttle themselves. If anything, they seem to call up other problems from the briny depths of my own personal Scapa Flow, ghost ships that rise from the dead to add to the fleet of difficulties already troubling the waters.