Sinking of the hospital ship Portugal

On 30 March 1916 (17 March by the Julian calendar, then in use in Russia) the German submarine U-33 torpedoed the Russian hospital ship Portugal in the Black Sea, off the Anatolian coast near Rize. The ship broke in two and sank within one or two minutes. There were no wounded on board, but there were Red Cross doctors, nursing sisters and orderlies, as well as a Franco-Russian crew. The number of victims varies in the sources: the Russian commission of inquiry counted 85 dead, while the New York press of April 1916 and French sources give 115 dead out of 273 people on board.

A French liner in Russian service

Portugal was an old French passenger ship. She had been built in 1886 at the shipyard in La Ciotat for the Messageries Maritimes shipping company, which used her on routes to South America, and later to Alexandria and the Black Sea. In the autumn of 1914 the closure of the Black Sea straits cut her off from France. On 29 October she was lying in the port of Odessa when the Ottoman fleet attacked the Russian ports, and was damaged. She was then placed at the disposal of the Russian government, which fitted her out as a hospital of the Russian Red Cross. The French officers and sailors remained on board, with Russians serving alongside them. According to a British pamphlet of 1917, based on the report of the Russian commission of inquiry chaired by Senator Alexei Krivtsov, the Russian government notified Turkey and Bulgaria of the ship’s new status and obtained its recognition.

From the end of February 1916 Portugal took off wounded from the Lazistan coast, where the Russians were advancing along the sea towards Trabzon. At the beginning of March they took Rize, and their patrols reached the vicinity of the small town of Of. The coast there had no harbours, so the wounded were brought to the ship in boats. By the end of March Portugal had made five such voyages.

The attack

On the morning of 30 March Portugal was sailing from Batumi towards Of, towing several flat-bottomed boats for carrying the wounded. Near Rize she stopped because one of the boats was taking in water. The weather was good, and the ship was painted white, with a red band along her sides, red crosses on her funnels and the Red Cross flag at the masthead. According to witnesses questioned by the Russian commission, at about eight o’clock someone spotted a periscope. The captain and officers reassured people that a hospital ship was protected by international law. The submarine fired one torpedo, which missed, circled the ship and fired a second from close range. It struck the engine room. After the explosion the hull split, and a moment later the boilers blew up. The commander of the naval detachment at Batumi, to which Portugal belonged, later wrote that neither the submarine nor a periscope had been seen from the deck, only the wake of the approaching torpedo, when it was already too late to evade it.

The survivors were rescued by a motor launch and a trawler, and according to some accounts also by the Russian destroyer Zharkiy. According to the Russian commission, 45 Red Cross staff died, including 21 nursing sisters, as well as 21 Russian and 19 French sailors. U-33 was commanded by Kapitänleutnant Konrad Gansser. At that time the boat had moved from the Mediterranean to the flotilla at Constantinople and was operating in the eastern part of the Black Sea.

Outrage

The Russian government accused Germany of breaking the Hague Conventions, which protected hospital ships, and called the sinking a crime. The press in Russia and the Entente countries wrote of piracy. The Moscow city duma resolved to erect a monument to the victims, but it was never built. Portugal was not the last hospital ship sunk in the Black Sea. In July 1916 another Russian hospital ship, Vpered, went down in the same waters.