In Memoriam Royal Oak

Today is the 76th anniversary of the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow by U-Boat, killing 833 people, including a distant relative of mine (my grandmother's cousin).  It is strange to read it with some personal attachment in Geoffrey Regan's The Guinness Book of Naval Blunders, where the shocking failings to defend the home of the Grand Fleet is recounted.
The latter was out at sea when the German submarine, commanded by Captain Günther Prien, managed with not too much difficulty to waltz into the heart of the harbour on 14th October 1939, with the war not much more than a month and half old.  Due to failings with magnetic torpedoes that affected the entire U-Boat fleet for a considerable time, all of Prien's torpedoes failed to explode, let alone hit the target and the crew took the risky decision to reload the torpedo bays in what should have been perilous surroundings.  With this, they sunk the World War One vintage ship with such a terrible death toll.  In the context of World War Two, especially on the Eastern Front and in the camps, it may not seem much, but 833 lives snuffed out, never to go on to innumerable scenarios, it would be inconceivable today.
Prien himself was only 31 at the time, a seemingly ridiculous young age to command a submarine and at the equivalent age that I am now, he would have been dead some weeks already and, though it is not certain, probably through attacking a convoy rather than the cracking of the Enigma code.  Prien and his crew are hardly figures of sympathy, given the number of people killed, ships sunk and the regime he served but it was war at root and he was doing his duty, like British submariners.  The true scandal was the Treasury being skinflints until almost the last moment and though Scapa Flow had been viewed as vulnerable in 1914, cost-cutting inter-war measures left it similarly exposed in 1939.  With a parsimonious Treasury and a country led by men 'broken' by WWI, Prien's attack was an inevitability when with proper arrangements it should have been an impossibility.