Hospital ship

A hospital ship serves solely to rescue and treat the wounded, the sick and the shipwrecked, and the laws of war protect it from attack and capture. In the First World War this role was filled above all by converted passenger liners, which carried the wounded away from the fronts, during the Gallipoli campaign to Egypt, Malta and England among other places. By the end of the war the Royal Navy alone had 77 of them.

The Hague rules

At sea their status was set by the Tenth Hague Convention of 1907, which adapted the principles of the Geneva Convention to naval warfare. A military hospital ship whose name had been communicated to the belligerents had to be respected and could not be captured.

In return it had to help the wounded, sick and shipwrecked of all sides, could not serve military purposes or hamper enemy warships, and the belligerents had the right to control and search it. It lost its protection if used to harm the enemy.

The convention also laid down how the ships should look. Military hospital ships were painted white with a horizontal green band, those of relief societies with a red band, and a white flag with a red cross was flown beside the national flag. In wartime large red crosses were added on the sides, brightly lit at night. The largest hospital ship, Britannic, sister ship of the Titanic, had more than 3,300 beds and took on the sick and wounded mainly at the bay of Mudros.

Mines and torpedoes

Many hospital ships went down on mines, which could not tell a red cross from a troopship. On 17 November 1915 Anglia, carrying wounded from France, struck a mine laid by UC-5 off Folkestone. Between about 130 and more than 160 people died. On 21 November 1916 Britannic, on her way to collect the wounded, struck a mine from a field laid by U-73 in the Aegean and sank in 55 minutes. Thirty people died, but she was the largest ship lost in the whole war.

Submarines also attacked them with torpedoes. In March 1916 U-33 sank the Russian Portugal in the Black Sea. Russia accused Germany of breaking the Hague Conventions, while the German side claimed that the ship bore no visible Red Cross markings.

The dispute over misuse

On 29 January 1917 Germany informed London and Paris that the Allies were using hospital ships to carry troops and munitions, and that it would no longer tolerate them in the North Sea and the English Channel. In March submarines torpedoed the lit-up Asturias and Gloucester Castle. On 14 April British and French aircraft bombed Freiburg im Breisgau in reprisal. The Admiralty concluded, however, that the markings no longer protected, and began carrying the wounded across the Channel in unmarked ships under escort. Such were Lanfranc and Donegal, torpedoed on 17 April.

Attacks also took place far outside the announced zone. Llandovery Castle, a Canadian hospital ship returning from Halifax without patients, was torpedoed by U-86 in the Atlantic on 27 June 1918. Her commander suspected that American airmen were on board. None were found, and the submarine then fired on the lifeboats. 234 people died, among them 14 nurses. A few months earlier the torpedoed Glenart Castle had sunk in the Bristol Channel, taking 153 people with her.

The trials

After the war the Allies wanted the guilty punished. In 1921 the Reich Court in Leipzig acquitted the commander of the submarine that had torpedoed Dover Castle, finding that he believed he was carrying out a lawful order of reprisal. For Llandovery Castle, however, the court sentenced two officers of U-86 to four years in prison. Both soon escaped, and abroad the sentences were seen as glaringly lenient.