Hospital ship Braemar Castle damaged

On 23 November 1916, two days after the sinking of the Britannic, a mine exploded in the Aegean Sea under another British hospital ship. The Braemar Castle was sailing from Salonika to Malta with sick and wounded from the Macedonian front. In the strait between the islands of Tinos and Mykonos in the Cyclades the explosion tore open her port side. The ship did not sink, because the crew managed to run her aground in shallow water. Four people were killed. The British chronology of the war cautiously recorded that the ship was damaged and beached, “probably by a mine”.

The Braemar Castle was a passenger steamer of about 6,300 gross register tons, built in 1898 by Barclay, Curle and Company in Glasgow for the Castle Line, which soon merged with the Union Line to form the Union-Castle Line. She sailed to South Africa, carried troops during the Boer War, and from 1909 served the government as a transport. In August 1914 she carried some of the first units of the British Expeditionary Force to France, and in 1915 she carried troops to the Aegean during the fighting for the Dardanelles. In the autumn of 1915 she was converted into a hospital ship.

According to the account of one of the nurses, published soon afterwards in the London Daily Express (the paper still wrote of the ship being torpedoed), the explosion came as the doctors were beginning their rounds. One of the wards suffered worst: the blast tore away the stairs, and several men were killed outright. Doctors and orderlies carried the cot cases out on their backs. Within a quarter of an hour some five hundred people were in the boats. Only the captain, the engineers and the stokers remained on board. The captain, although the explosion had thrown him against the compass on the bridge and badly injured him, stayed at his post, and the engines started again. The ship, settling by the bow, was successfully beached. The survivors in the boats were picked up by a French gunboat and a British sloop. According to some descriptions the explosion took place off the coast of Tinos near Cape Agios Ioannis.

The mine is attributed to the German submarine minelayer U-73 of Kapitänleutnant Gustav Sieß, which in October and November 1916 laid mines on the routes around Greece and on one of whose mines the Britannic had sunk two days earlier. There is no certainty about this, because the boat’s movements are known mainly from intercepted signals rather than from its own records. Hence the caution of the British chronology.

The ship was temporarily patched up and taken to Malta. The dockyard there, however, was so busy repairing warships that the Braemar Castle waited her turn for three months, until she was finally taken to La Spezia in Italy, where she was repaired. She returned to service and in 1918 sailed as a hospital ship to Murmansk, supporting the Allied intervention in northern Russia.