Sinking of the hospital ship Salta

Late in the morning of 10 April 1917 the British hospital ship Salta struck a mine at the entrance to the port of Le Havre and sank within a few minutes. She was on her way to collect wounded, so there were no patients on board, only the crew and medical staff. Depending on the source, between 86 and about 130 people were killed, among them nine nurses. She was the second hospital ship lost to mines off Le Havre within half a year, after the Galeka in October 1916.

Salta was French by origin. She was built in 1911 at the shipyard in La Seyne-sur-Mer near Toulon for the Marseille shipping company Société Générale de Transports Maritimes, which used her on its South American route. She took her name from the Argentine province and city. She measured about 7,300 gross register tons. In February 1915 she was chartered by the British Admiralty and converted into a hospital ship, painted white with a green band and red crosses. She was managed by the British Union-Castle Line. She belonged to the fleet of ships that ran between French ports and England, carrying wounded from the Western Front.

Explosion at the harbour entrance

Salta left the Cowes roads on the Isle of Wight at 4 a.m., escorted by a destroyer. A strong wind was blowing and the sea was rising. She arrived off Le Havre at about 11 a.m. According to the French wreck researchers’ association GRIEME, a French patrol boat had sighted drifting mines in the roads that morning, and the harbour entrance had been closed for a time. According to the account of one of the surviving officers, Salta’s master, Captain Eastaway, did not want to enter harbour without a pilot in such bad weather and let other ships go ahead. The ship turned north, despite warnings from the British drifter guarding the entrance, and, carried by the wind, entered the area where mines had been seen. At 11.43 a.m., about a mile north of the entrance through the barrier protecting the port, an explosion tore open the hull aft, by the engine room. Salta heeled over to starboard and sank in less than ten minutes.

In the rough sea only a few lifeboats could be lowered, and they were swamped at once. People jumped into the water and clung to wreckage. Steward Frederick Richardson, who could not swim, kept himself afloat on a spar for an hour and a half before a trawler picked him up. In his report he wrote that the captain had gone down with the ship and that he had been unable to save a stewardess who was drifting beside him. Several of those picked up died on board the trawler from cold and exhaustion. The British patrol boat P.26 also hurried to help, struck a mine herself and sank. Nineteen of her sailors were killed. According to Richardson, of the survivors from Salta whom she had managed to take aboard, only one survived.

The victims

On 14 April the Admiralty announced that 5 doctors, 9 nurses and 37 soldiers of the Royal Army Medical Corps had been killed in the disaster. The statement gave no figures for losses among the ship’s crew. The total number of dead varies between compilations. Uboat.net gives 86 victims, while many other studies, including GRIEME, speak of about 130 killed out of 205 people on board, among them 79 members of the crew. Only a dozen or so bodies were found. On 16 April thirteen sailors from Salta were buried at Le Havre with military honours. The sea was still washing the bodies of some of the nurses ashore two months later.

The mines had been laid by the German submarine minelayer UC-26 under the command of Matthias Graf von Schmettow, the same boat whose mine had earlier wrecked the Galeka. Le Havre was the main supply port for the British forces in France, so small submarines from Flanders regularly left mines on its approaches. Unlike the recent attacks on the Asturias and the Gloucester Castle, this was not a torpedo attack but the result of a minefield. The wreck lies at a depth of about 20 metres, a few miles from the port. A week later German submarines sank two more ships carrying wounded from Le Havre in the English Channel, among them the Lanfranc, which according to GRIEME had been approaching Le Havre together with Salta.