Torpedoing of the hospital ship Asturias

On the night of 20–21 March 1917 a German submarine torpedoed the British hospital ship Asturias without warning, a few miles from Start Point on the Devon coast. The ship was clearly marked and was sailing with all her lights on, and the red crosses on her sides were brightly illuminated. The British chronology of the war gives the date as 21 March, some lists as 20 March: the torpedo struck late in the evening of 20 March, and the struggle to save the ship lasted until the morning of 21 March. In British lists the Asturias appears as the first British hospital ship torpedoed during the war. Earlier losses, such as the Anglia or, a few weeks earlier, the Glenart Castle, had been caused by mines.

The Asturias was one of the largest hospital ships in the fleet. This liner of about 12,000 gross register tons had been built in Belfast in 1907 for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which used her on the route from Southampton to Buenos Aires. From the first days of the war she carried wounded from France, and later from Gallipoli, Salonika and Egypt. In November 1916 Second Lieutenant J.R.R. Tolkien, ill with trench fever, returned from France aboard her. As early as 1 February 1915 a German submarine had fired a torpedo at her off Le Havre. According to the crew it passed just astern; according to other accounts it hit but did not explode.

The night attack

On 20 March the Asturias landed about a thousand wounded and sick at Avonmouth, near Bristol, and then sailed without patients for her base at Southampton. On board were the crew and the medical staff, including several dozen nurses. The attacker was UC-66, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Herbert Pustkuchen, the same man who a year earlier had torpedoed the ferry Sussex. The torpedo (two, according to some accounts) struck the starboard side aft. It destroyed the propeller and rudder, and the engine room quickly flooded. It was impossible to reach it to stop the engines, so the sinking ship kept moving, and at about 12.10 a.m. her lights went out.

The captain decided to bring her to the shore. Meanwhile some of the people tried to escape in the boats. Lowered from a ship that was still under way, the boats capsized. A Cardiff doctor, William Dobson, later described how his boat, with about 26 people in it, tilted, crushing three men against the ship’s side, and then overturned. He survived because he was a good swimmer, and after more than an hour in the cold water he was picked up by the boat of a small warship. The Asturias grounded on rocks and sand beneath the cliffs near Salcombe. The other survivors reached land in the boats, where local people gave them blankets and clothes.

Victims and reprisal

According to the Admiralty’s first communiqué, 11 military members of the medical staff and 20 members of the crew were killed, and 11 more people, including a nurse and a stewardess, were listed as missing. Present-day lists usually give 35 dead, others more than 40. The Admiralty announced the news only on 28 March. In the House of Commons it was later explained that they had waited until it was certain whether the ship had struck a mine or been torpedoed. The navy’s view was confirmed by a German communiqué broadcast by wireless from Berlin. The Germans considered that after their announcement at the end of January hospital ships in the waters between England and France were no longer protected.

The British government had earlier warned that it would answer attacks on hospital ships with reprisals. On 14 April British and French aircraft bombed Freiburg im Breisgau in broad daylight, and the Admiralty announced that this was a reprisal for the sinking of hospital ships. The wreck of the Asturias was refloated after about a month and towed into port, but the damage was so severe that until the end of the war she served only as an ammunition hulk. After the war she was rebuilt as the cruise ship Arcadian.