Sinking of the hospital ship Britannic

On the morning of 21 November 1916 the British hospital ship Britannic was steaming at full speed through the strait between Cape Sounion and the island of Kea in the Aegean Sea. At 8.12 a.m. a mine exploded under her bow. Less than an hour later the largest ship ever built in Ireland lay on the bottom. There were 1,066 people on board, but the ship was not yet carrying any wounded soldiers, as she was only on her way to collect them. Thirty people died, and the Britannic became the largest ship lost in the whole war.

The Titanic’s sister

The Britannic was the third and last liner of the Olympic class, ordered by the White Star Line from the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast. Her older sisters were the Olympic and the Titanic. After the Titanic disaster of 1912 the design was improved: the ship was given a double hull in the area of the boiler and engine rooms, higher watertight bulkheads and huge davits capable of lowering many boats into the water. She measured about 48,000 gross register tons. She was launched in February 1914, but the outbreak of war interrupted her fitting-out. In November 1915 the Admiralty requisitioned her as a hospital ship. Painted white, with a green band and red crosses on her sides, she had more than 3,300 beds and operating theatres in the former first-class saloons. From December 1915 she carried sick and wounded men to England, taken on board mainly at Mudros Bay on the island of Lemnos, first from Gallipoli and, after the evacuation of the peninsula, from other fronts in the Middle East and Macedonia. In the summer of 1916 work had already begun on converting her back into a liner, but at the end of August the Admiralty requisitioned her again.

On 12 November 1916 the Britannic sailed from Southampton on her sixth voyage to the Mediterranean. After a stop at Naples, where she was held up by a storm, she set course for Mudros. On board were 673 crew, 315 men of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 77 nurses and the captain, Charles Bartlett.

Fifty-five minutes

The explosion occurred on the starboard side, in the forward part of the ship. Water began to flood the forward compartments and the boiler rooms. Damaged watertight doors between the boiler rooms did not close completely, and the Britannic, unlike the Titanic, had no time. Against orders, the nurses had opened the portholes on the lower decks that morning to air the wards. When the ship listed to starboard and settled by the bow, water poured through them into further compartments. The explosion had also torn down the wireless aerials, so the Britannic could send distress calls but could not hear any reply.

Bartlett turned the ship towards Kea, intending to beach her. The rudder was not working, so she was steered by the propellers alone. Some of the crew, fearing that the list would make it impossible to lower the boats, launched two lifeboats without orders. The current drew them under the turning propellers, which were already out of the water and smashed both boats together with the people in them. Most of the victims died there. Bartlett stopped the engines and the rest of the evacuation proceeded in good order: 35 boats were lowered. The captain left the bridge only when the water was flooding it. At 9.07 a.m. the Britannic rolled over onto her starboard side and sank. Her bow struck the bottom before the stern disappeared beneath the water, because the ship was longer than the sea at that spot was deep.

Among the survivors was the stewardess Violet Jessop, who in 1911 had been on board the Olympic during her collision with the cruiser Hawke, and in 1912 had survived the Titanic disaster. She left a vivid description of the last moments of the ship, whose stern rose high into the air before she vanished into the depths.

Rescue

The water was warm and help was close at hand. The first to arrive were fishermen from Kea, then the destroyer Scourge and the armed steamer Heroic, which between them picked up more than 800 survivors. About 150 people reached the harbour of Livadi (today Korissia) on Kea in boats, where the ship’s doctors and nurses tended the injured. The rest were taken off by the destroyer Foxhound and the cruiser Foresight. The survivors were taken to Piraeus. Of the 1,066 people, 1,036 were saved, and several dozen were injured. Most of the dead were never found.

A mine from U-73

At first it was not certain whether the ship had been hit by a torpedo or a mine. Today it is known that it was a mine from a field laid in this strait in the second half of October 1916 by the German submarine minelayer U-73 of Kapitänleutnant Gustav Sieß. The same boat had laid mines off Malta in April, on which the battleship Russell sank. The Kea Channel was a busy route from the west to Piraeus, Salonika and Mudros, and U-73 laid its mines on just such routes around Greece. As with the hospital ship Anglia a year earlier, the mine could not tell a red cross from a troopship. Although the casualties were relatively few, the loss of the Britannic shocked public opinion in the Entente countries: in less than an hour a ship that, after the lesson of the Titanic, was supposed to be exceptionally safe had gone to the bottom.

The wreck lies on her starboard side at a depth of about 120 metres. It was found in 1975 by the French ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau. It is the largest wreck of a passenger ship lying on the seabed.