Hospital ship Goorkha damaged

On 17 October 1917 the British hospital ship Goorkha struck a mine off Malta. According to lists of British hospital ships there were 362 people on board, including seventeen military nurses. Some works give the figure of 372. The evacuation went smoothly: within about 35 minutes everyone had left the ship and no one was killed.

Goorkha was an old liner of the Union-Castle company, which ran a regular service between Great Britain and South Africa. She was built in 1897 by Harland & Wolff in Belfast. She measured about 6,300 gross register tons. During the Boer War she carried troops to Africa, and in August 1914 she sailed in the convoy that took the British garrison and their families from Cape Town to Britain. On 20 October 1914 she was taken up as a hospital ship with 408 beds. From then on she carried the sick and wounded, largely in the Mediterranean, where Malta with its hospitals received soldiers first from Gallipoli and then from the Salonika front.

The ship did not sink. She was towed into harbour at Malta. The very next day, 18 October, she was removed from the list of hospital ships and returned to her owners for repair. Sources describe her later fate differently. According to some, after repair she again carried wounded, among others from Salonika to Malta in the autumn of 1918; according to others, she returned to ordinary service. She was broken up in 1928.

In lists of German submarine successes the damage to Goorkha is attributed to mines laid by the submarine minelayer UC-25 of the flotilla at Pola, then commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Walter Lippold. The British chronology of the war and some British lists of hospital ships, however, give the date as 10 October. In February 1918 command of UC-25 was taken over by Karl Dönitz, in the Second World War the commander of the German U-boat arm.

Mines did not distinguish hospital ships from other vessels, so the damage to Goorkha cannot be put on a par with deliberate attacks on ships carrying wounded, such as the sinking of the Dover Castle in May 1917. It did, however, show how dangerous the waters around Malta had become. German submarine minelayers from Pola and Cattaro regularly mined the approaches to the island, through which passed most Allied shipping between Gibraltar and Egypt and Salonika. Hospital ships sailed that way constantly, because Malta was the main hospital base for the troops in the eastern Mediterranean.