Sinking of the hospital ship Glenart Castle

On 26 February 1918, shortly before four in the morning, a German submarine torpedoed the British hospital ship Glenart Castle in the Bristol Channel, about 10 nautical miles west of Lundy island. The ship had left Newport in South Wales the previous day and was sailing to Brest to pick up wounded and sick men from France. She therefore had no patients on board, only her crew and medical staff. Fishermen who passed her in the night later testified that she was fully lit: she had green lights around the saloon and the red light of the Red Cross.

It was the same ship that less than a year earlier had struck a mine in the English Channel, but on that occasion no one was killed and the damaged hull was towed into port. After repairs Glenart Castle, a former Union-Castle Line liner, returned to service in November 1917. This time the torpedo struck No. 3 hold. The explosion destroyed most of the lifeboats, and the list made it difficult to lower the rest. The ship sank in seven or eight minutes. According to accounts, Captain Bernard Burt gave the order “every man for himself” and was last seen returning to the chart room.

The night was cold and the sea rough. Only one lifeboat survived, with 22 people who bailed it out without a break for several hours before they were picked up by a French ship at about 10.30 a.m. In the afternoon the American destroyer Parker recovered nine more survivors from rafts, two of whom died. According to the most probable findings there were 182 people on board, of whom 29 survived. 153 died, including the captain, 95 of the 120 crew members, both chaplains, 48 of the 52 orderlies of the army medical service and all eight nurses, together with the matron, Kate Beaufoy, a veteran of the Boer War and Gallipoli. Among them was the Australian Edith Blake, the only nurse from Australia killed by enemy action during this war.

The ship was torpedoed by UC-56, a submarine minelayer of the Flanders Flotilla commanded by Kapitänleutnant der Reserve Wilhelm Kiesewetter. It was the only ship that this boat sank during the whole war. Soon afterwards reports appeared in the British press that the submarine had fired on survivors to cover its tracks. Near the site of the sinking the body of a junior officer was recovered wearing a lifejacket and bearing two gunshot wounds. Official documents did not, however, confirm this version. It was the second torpedoing of a hospital ship in the Bristol Channel in less than two months, after the sinking of the Rewa in January, and once again a breach of the Hague Convention that protected hospital ships.

Kiesewetter did not stay at sea until the end of the war. In May 1918 UC-56 put into the Spanish port of Santander because of a breakdown and was interned there. After the war, as Kiesewetter was returning to Germany, the British detained him and held him in the Tower, but soon had to release him, because during the armistice they had no right to hold him as a prisoner. Britain demanded that the sinking of Glenart Castle, Rewa and other hospital ships be tried in the war crimes trials before the German Reichsgericht in Leipzig, but of the hospital ship cases only two eventually came before the court in Leipzig: the sinking of Dover Castle, which ended in acquittal, and the sinking of Llandovery Castle in June 1918. In 2002, on the 84th anniversary of the sinking, a memorial stone to the victims was unveiled near Hartland Point in Devon.