Sinking of the hospital ship Rewa

Late in the evening of 4 January 1918, according to some sources at a quarter past eleven, a German submarine torpedoed the British hospital ship Rewa. The ship was almost at its destination. It was bound for Avonmouth, the port of Bristol, and was in the Bristol Channel, about 19 nautical miles west of Hartland Point in Devon. It was returning from the Mediterranean with sick and wounded. The torpedo killed four men of the engine-room staff; everyone else survived.

Rewa was a liner of the British India Steam Navigation Company, built in 1906 at the Denny yard in Dumbarton, of about 7,300 gross register tons. She sailed on the London–Calcutta route and had been designed so that she could carry troops if necessary. In August 1914 she was requisitioned and converted into a hospital ship. In January 1918 she was returning from Mudros, via Malta and Gibraltar. According to various sources she had 279 sick and wounded on board, and 566 people in all including the medical staff and crew. Some accounts state that at Gibraltar Spanish inspectors came on board who, as representatives of a neutral state, checked that she was carrying no troops or weapons. Rewa was sailing fully lit and marked as a hospital ship.

The attacker was U-55, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Wilhelm Werner, one of the most successful German submarine commanders. The torpedo struck the engine room. Four Indian seamen, stokers and trimmers, were killed. R. P. P. Rowe’s British chronicle of the war of 1919 gives three victims, more recent lists four. The ship sank slowly, according to various accounts over two or even almost three hours. Thanks to this all the patients, including the stretcher cases, were transferred to the lifeboats and all were saved. Survivors recalled the calm and discipline on board as the ship slowly went down.

The news of the sinking, announced a few days later, caused outrage in Britain. The Germans denied that their submarine had sunk the ship and suggested that she had struck a mine. According to later findings, Werner entered in his log that he had sunk a cargo ship. Since the declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare the Germans had claimed that the British were carrying soldiers and ammunition in hospital ships, and had announced that they would not spare them in the waters around the British Isles. The attack on Rewa nevertheless violated the Hague Convention, which protected hospital ships. German submarines had already attacked many ships carrying wounded, including the Dover Castle in May 1917, but this time it happened off the very coast of England.

After the war the Allies placed Werner on the list of German war criminals whose extradition they demanded. It was not only the sinking of Rewa that weighed against him. According to British findings, in April 1917, after sinking the steamer Torrington, he took her crew aboard the submarine, then dived and left the men to certain death. Werner escaped trial because he left Germany, according to some sources for Brazil.