Sinking of the *Warilda*

On the night of 2–3 August 1918 the ambulance transport Warilda, under escort, was sailing from Le Havre to Southampton with wounded from the Western Front. At about 1.35 a.m., roughly halfway across the English Channel, she was hit by a torpedo from the German minelaying submarine UC-49, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Hans Kükenthal. According to uboat.net the ship sank about 32 nautical miles south-south-west of the Owers lightship. There were 801 people on board, including more than six hundred wounded. 123 people died. These are the figures given by the Australian War Memorial and uboat.net, though some studies give slightly different ones.

A ship from Australia

The Warilda, a steamer of 7,713 gross register tons, was built in 1912 by Beardmore in Glasgow for the Adelaide Steamship Company. She was intended to sail along the southern coast of Australia. After the outbreak of war she was requisitioned as a troopship. As HMAT A69 she carried thousands of Australian soldiers to Egypt and England in 1915 and 1916. She was then converted into a hospital ship and finally into an ambulance transport on the Le Havre–Southampton run.

The distinction mattered. From the spring of 1917, after the Germans announced that they would not tolerate hospital ships in the waters between England and France, the Admiralty carried the wounded across the Channel in ships without the protection of the Hague Convention. Just as with the Lanfranc and the Donegal, the British chronology of the war calls the Warilda an ambulance transport, not a hospital ship. According to uboat.net she was an armed ambulance transport. Other sources describe her as a camouflaged ship with a gun on the stern, but some accounts, including Australian ones, claim that she still bore Red Cross markings. The sources disagree here.

Night in the Channel

The torpedo struck the stern. The explosion destroyed the starboard propeller and jammed the rudder, and the flooded engine room made it impossible to stop the port engine. For about two hours the ship therefore circled in the Channel at a speed of a dozen or more knots, which made lowering the boats very difficult. Most of the victims were on the lowest deck, in the ward for the walking wounded, where according to the Australian War Memorial 101 men died. The whole engine-room staff were also killed, as were people from several capsized boats. An escort vessel tried to take the Warilda in tow but had to give up. The ship sank at about 4.10 a.m.

Among the dead was Violet Long, a deputy administrator of the Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps, the British Army’s women’s auxiliary corps. According to survivors’ accounts she was the last of the women to leave the ship, once she had made sure her subordinates were safe. The Warilda’s master, Captain James Sim, survived and was later praised for his conduct. Most of the wounded, medical staff and crew were taken to Southampton.

The sinking of the Warilda was one of the last great attacks on ships carrying wounded in this war, a few weeks after the sinking of the Canadian Llandovery Castle. UC-49 did not survive long. It used to be thought that she was sunk by British warships with depth charges on 8 August. According to more recent findings she survived that attack and was lost with all hands on 14 August, when she struck a mine off the Flanders coast on her way home.