Sinking of the Carpathia

At about 9.15 a.m. on 17 July 1918 the German submarine U-55 torpedoed the British liner Carpathia of the Cunard Line in the Atlantic, south-west of Ireland. The ship was sailing in convoy from Liverpool to Boston. She was hit by three torpedoes and sank in under two hours. Of the 223 people on board, five crew members died, killed in the engine room by the second torpedo. The rest were picked up from the boats by a British sloop. The ship that went to the bottom had become famous throughout the world six years earlier, when she was the first to come to the rescue of the survivors of the Titanic.

The ship that saved the Titanic’s survivors

Carpathia was built by the Swan Hunter yard at Wallsend on the Tyne. She was of about 13,600 GRT and in May 1903 set out on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Boston. She was neither fast nor particularly luxurious, but was considered comfortable and steady in a seaway. From 1904 she sailed mainly from New York to Mediterranean ports, including Trieste and Fiume, from where she carried thousands of emigrants from Hungary and other lands of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy across the ocean.

On the night of 14/15 April 1912 Carpathia was sailing from New York to Fiume when her wireless operator picked up a distress signal from the Titanic. Captain Arthur Rostron turned the ship round and drove her through the night across an ice field at the highest speed she could manage. He even cut off the heating in the cabins so that all the steam went to the engines. Carpathia reached the scene at about four in the morning, some two hours after the Titanic had sunk, and took more than 700 survivors from the boats. Rostron and his crew became heroes, and Carpathia one of the best-known ships in the world.

At war

In the first weeks of the war, in August 1914, Carpathia also carried home from Europe Americans whom the outbreak of war had caught on the Continent. Among them, according to her biographers, was a Georgia teacher, Moina Michael, who towards the end of the war came up with the idea of making the red corn poppy the symbol of remembrance of the fallen. Rostron left the ship in 1915. From 1916 Carpathia was commanded by Captain William Prothero. The ship carried Canadian and, from 1917, American soldiers across the Atlantic, often in convoys (PL) from New York via Halifax to Liverpool and Glasgow. Painted grey and later in striped dazzle camouflage, she escaped submarines several times.

In mid-July 1918 Carpathia left Liverpool on another voyage to Boston, on 15 July according to some sources and 16 July according to others. She was sailing in ballast, without cargo, with 57 passengers and 166 crew on board. The convoy, designated OL 24 according to the uboat.net listing, was zigzagging under the escort of warships. Early on the morning of 17 July the escort left and the convoy split up. Carpathia, as the largest ship, led the six remaining vessels westward, acting as the commodore’s ship.

Three torpedoes

After about three and a half hours lookouts spotted the wake of a torpedo approaching from the port side. Prothero ordered the helm put over and full astern, but it was too late. The torpedo struck the port side. The second pierced the side of the engine room, killed three firemen and two trimmers and stopped the engines. The explosions destroyed the electrical system, including the wireless station, and two lifeboats. Prothero therefore signalled with flags to the other ships to call for help by radio, and had rockets fired to attract the attention of patrol vessels. The rest of the convoy, as ordered, steamed away at full speed.

The ship was settling by the bow and listing to port. Prothero ordered her abandoned. Passengers and crew calmly took their places in eleven boats. The captain, his first officer, two officers and the gunners stayed on board until they had thrown the secret documents and signal books overboard. Then they too went down to the boats. At that point the submarine fired a third torpedo, which sealed the ship’s fate. Carpathia sank at about 11 a.m. According to the position recorded by the British sloop that came to help, this was about 120 miles south-west of the Fastnet Rock off the Irish coast; according to the uboat.net listing, about 170 miles west of Bishop Rock in the Scilly Isles.

U-55 surfaced and began to approach the boats. She was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm Werner, the same man who in January had sunk the hospital ship Rewa. The British also accused him of having left the crew of a sunken steamer to certain death in 1917. Before anything could happen, however, the British sloop Snowdrop arrived, the same ship that three weeks earlier had searched for survivors of the Llandovery Castle. She drove the submarine off with gunfire and at about 1 p.m. began picking up the survivors. On the evening of 18 July she brought 218 survivors into Liverpool.

Echoes of the sinking

News of the sinking of Carpathia moved public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, precisely because of the Titanic. According to the American press of the time, Cunard had lost five ships in a few weeks, and of its large pre-war fleet only a few vessels were still sailing. The sinking also showed how dangerous the hours after the escort’s departure were, when the ships of a convoy leaving the British Isles dispersed across the ocean.

After the war Werner was placed on the list of German war criminals whose extradition the Allies demanded, but he never stood trial. The wreck of Carpathia was found only in 2000, by a team from the NUMA organisation of the American writer Clive Cussler, a year after another expedition had announced a discovery that turned out to be a mistake.