Sinking of the hospital ship Dover Castle

At about 11 a.m. on 26 May 1917 a German submarine torpedoed the British hospital ship Dover Castle without warning. The ship was sailing from Malta to Gibraltar, and from there was to go on to Britain. According to the Admiralty statement she was carrying 632 sick and wounded, including 29 officers. She was hit about 50 miles north of Bône, today’s Annaba, in French Algeria. It was yet another attack on a hospital ship in this war, but this time there was no great tragedy.

The Dover Castle was a Union-Castle liner, built in 1904 by Barclay Curle in Glasgow, of about 8,300 gross register tons. During the war she was requisitioned and converted into a hospital ship, and in 1916–1917 she sailed in the Mediterranean. In October 1916 she rescued more than 300 men from the transport Franconia, torpedoed east of Malta.

The first torpedo killed seven stokers. According to British sources the explosion also destroyed three lifeboats. The ship did not sink at once, however. The crew and medical staff transferred all the wounded to the boats and to the British destroyer Cameleon, while the captain and a small group of seamen stayed on board in the hope of saving the ship. After about an hour the submarine fired a second torpedo. The Dover Castle went to the bottom in three minutes. All the patients survived. R. P. P. Rowe’s British chronicle of the war, published in 1919, gives 6 dead; more recent lists give 7.

The attacker was UC-67, a minelaying submarine of the German flotilla at Pola, commanded by Karl Neumann (PL). Neumann had earlier commanded UB-40, the same boat that in April, by then under another commander, sank the ship carrying wounded, Lanfranc, in the English Channel. Since January the Germans had been claiming that the British were carrying troops and ammunition in hospital ships, and had announced that they would not tolerate them in the waters between England and France. According to an order later cited in court, from 19 March 1917 German submarines could also attack hospital ships in other waters if they did not meet the conditions laid down by Germany.

After the war the Allies put Neumann on the list of German war criminals. He was tried in 1921 before the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. He admitted torpedoing the ship but argued that he had been carrying out the orders of the German naval command. The court found that Neumann had believed the order to be a permissible reprisal for Allied violations of the Hague Conventions, and on 4 June 1921 acquitted him. In the next trial, that same summer, the court did, however, convict two officers of the submarine that in 1918 had sunk the hospital ship Llandovery Castle and fired on her lifeboats.