Sinking of the Lanfranc and Donegal

On the evening of 17 April 1917 two ships carrying wounded from the Western Front, the Lanfranc and the Donegal, sailed from Le Havre for Southampton. Both had escorts, and both were torpedoed without warning by German submarines. In all some 75–80 people died, most of them wounded soldiers. Among the victims were also Germans: on board the Lanfranc were 167 wounded German prisoners. The British chronology of the war calls both ships ambulance transports, not hospital ships. In April 1917 this distinction mattered a great deal.

Ships without red crosses

Since the end of January Germany had been claiming that the British were using hospital ships to carry troops and ammunition, and announced that it would not tolerate them in the waters between England and France. In March German submarines torpedoed the illuminated hospital ships Asturias and Gloucester Castle. On 14 April British and French aircraft bombed Freiburg im Breisgau in reprisal. The Admiralty, however, concluded that markings in accordance with the Hague Convention had ceased to offer protection, and that illuminated red crosses merely made a ship an easier target. It was therefore decided to carry the wounded in ships without markings or lights, like ordinary merchant vessels, escorted by warships. Some ships were struck off the official list of hospital ships handed to the Germans. According to the Admiralty, one of the two ships sunk on 17 April no longer bore any marks of a hospital ship.

Lanfranc

The Lanfranc was a liner of the Booth Line of Liverpool, built in 1907 in Dundee, of about 6,300 gross register tons. Before the war she sailed to Brazil, as far as Manaus on the Amazon. In 1914 she was requisitioned and converted into a hospital ship with about 400 beds. On 17 April she was carrying 234 wounded British officers and men, 167 wounded German prisoners, 52 medical staff and 123 crew. More than 300 of the wounded were stretcher cases, many with fractured thighs or amputations. At about 7.30 p.m., roughly 42 nautical miles north of Le Havre, she was hit by a torpedo from UB-40, commanded by Hans Howaldt.

The ship sank quickly, but the crew and staff managed to move most of the wounded into the boats and onto the vessels that came to help, including a French one. According to the Admiralty, 2 wounded British officers and 11 wounded British soldiers, 1 member of the medical staff, and 2 German officers and 13 German soldiers were missing. Together with five crew members that makes 34 victims, which is also the figure given by uboat.net. The British history of the medical services speaks of 22 British and 18 Germans killed. British patrol vessels rescued 152 wounded Germans. The British press relished describing how wounded Britons helped their enemies into the boats while some of the German prisoners rushed the boats in panic. These, however, were accounts written for propaganda purposes.

Donegal

The Donegal was a much smaller ship, a Midland Railway ferry from the Heysham–Belfast route, of about 1,900 gross register tons. From 1914 she carried wounded across the Channel. On 17 April she was sailing with lightly wounded Britons. About 19 nautical miles south of the Dean lightship, not far from the Isle of Wight, she was torpedoed by UC-21 under Reinhold Saltzwedel, one of the most successful submarine commanders of the Flanders Flotilla. The ship sank, and according to the Admiralty 29 wounded soldiers and 12 crew members died. Among the dead was Archie Jewell, who had survived the Titanic disaster as a lookout and the sinking of the Britannic. Another member of the Donegal’s crew, the fireman Arthur Priest, had survived both those disasters and survived this one too.

The Admiralty’s response

A few days later the Admiralty announced the sinking of both ships and explained its new policy. It pointed out that in the recent fighting on the Western Front, where the Battle of Arras had been under way since 9 April, a very large number of wounded German prisoners had fallen into British hands. They had to be carried to England in the same ships as the British wounded, so almost every such transport would also carry Germans, exposed to the same danger from submarines. The Admiralty added that it remained to be seen whether the Germans would change their conduct, knowing that they might be killing their own wounded. The attacks on vessels carrying wounded did not stop. At the end of May the hospital ship Dover Castle was torpedoed and sunk in the Mediterranean.