Loss of the hospital ship Galeka

On the morning of 28 October 1916 the British hospital ship Galeka struck a mine on the approach to Le Havre, the main port through which the British army in France received its supplies and sent its wounded home. There were no wounded on board, but the explosion killed 19 orderlies of the Royal Army Medical Corps. The others took to the boats, and the damaged ship drifted until she went aground. Although many sources speak of her sinking, it would be more accurate to speak of a wreck, as Galeka did not go down in the open sea but became a wreck in shallow water. The British chronology of the war recorded that the ship was “totally wrecked by mine”.

Galeka was a passenger steamer of about 6,770 gross register tons, built in 1899 by Harland and Wolff in Belfast for the Union Line, which the following year merged with the Castle Line to form the Union-Castle Line. Before the war she sailed to South Africa. After the outbreak of war she was used to carry troops, among them Australian and New Zealand soldiers. On 25 April 1915 she brought men of the Australian 6th and 7th Battalions to the Gallipoli peninsula. During the landing the boats lowered from her sides headed straight for a Turkish post at Fisherman’s Hut. According to the British official history, of about 140 men in the first four boats more than a hundred were killed or wounded before they reached the shore. The ship was later converted into a floating hospital for 366 wounded. Among other things she carried them to the great hospital ships such as Britannic.

On 28 October Galeka arrived from Southampton with medical personnel; according to the caption of a photograph in the collection of the Australian War Memorial, with 61 men of the medical corps and 56 crew. Entry into the port was postponed, so the ship was drifting off Le Havre. At about 6.15 a.m., some six miles from the harbour entrance, she struck a mine. The ship settled by the bow. The survivors took to the boats, and Galeka drifted until she went ashore north of Cap de la Hève, just beyond Le Havre. She could no longer be saved. She was the first Union-Castle Line ship lost in this war. The dead are commemorated in Ste Marie Cemetery in Le Havre.

The mine had been laid by the German submarine minelayer UC-26, commanded by Matthias Graf von Schmettow. According to the lists of the uboat.net website, in October and November 1916 this one boat sank or damaged more than 20 ships and vessels. In lists of losses the place of Galeka’s loss was sometimes given as “Cap de la Hague”, but the coordinates given there point to the waters off Le Havre and Cap de la Hève, not to the Cotentin peninsula more than a hundred kilometres away. A year earlier a mine laid by another submarine minelayer, UC-5, had sunk the hospital ship Anglia off Folkestone. This time there were no casualties among the wounded, but it was yet another loss of a hospital ship in waters crossed every day by transports between England and France.