HM Hospital Ship Llandovery Castle | |
History | |
---|---|
United Kingdom | |
Name | RMS Llandovery Castle |
Namesake | Llandovery Castle |
Operator | Union-Castle Line |
Builder | Barclay Curle, Glasgow |
Yard number | 504 |
Launched | 3 September 1913 |
Completed | January 1914 |
Fate | Requisitioned, 1916 |
Canada | |
Name | Llandovery Castle |
Commissioned | 26 July 1916 |
Fate | Sunk by SM U-86, 27 June 1918 |
General characteristics | |
Type | Ocean liner / Hospital ship |
Tonnage | 10,639 GRT |
Length | 500 ft 1 in (152.43 m) |
Beam | 63 ft 3 in (19.28 m) |
Propulsion |
|
Speed | 15 knots (28 km/h; 17 mph) |
Capacity |
|
Complement | 258 |
HMHS Llandovery Castle, built in 1914 in Glasgow as RMS Llandovery Castle for the Union-Castle Line, was one of five Canadian hospital ships that served in the First World War. On a voyage from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Liverpool, England, the ship was torpedoed off southern Ireland on 27 June 1918. The sinking was the deadliest Canadian naval disaster of the war. 234 doctors, nurses, members of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, soldiers and seamen died in the sinking and subsequent machine-gunning of lifeboats. Twenty five people are known to have survived. 24 were the occupants on a single life-raft. The incident became infamous internationally and was considered, after the Armenian genocide, as one of the war's worst atrocities. After the war, the case of Llandovery Castle was one of six alleged German war crimes prosecuted at the Leipzig trials.
Llandovery Castle was one of a pair of ships (her sister ship was SS Llanstephan Castle) built for the Union Castle Line, following the company's acquisition by the Royal Mail Line in 1912. The ship was built by Barclay, Curle & Co. in Glasgow, launched on 3 September 1913, and completed in January 1914. [1] Initially sailing between London and East Africa, from August 1914 she sailed on routes between London and West Africa. [2] She was commissioned as a hospital ship on 26 July 1916, and assigned to the Canadian Forces, equipped with 622 beds and a medical staff of 102. [1] Her first voyage as a Canadian hospital ship was in March 1918.
Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Howard MacDonald of Nova Scotia, HMHS Llandovery Castle was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine SM U-86 on 27 June 1918. [3] Firing at a hospital ship was against international law and standing orders of the Imperial German Navy. The captain of U-86, Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, sought to destroy the evidence of torpedoing the ship. When the crew, including nurses, took to the lifeboats, U-86 surfaced, ran down all but one of the lifeboats and machine-gunned many of the survivors.
The destroyer HMS Lysander rescued 24 people in one lifeboat, 36 hours after the bombing. Among those lost were fourteen nursing sisters from Canada, including Rena McLean [4] and the Matron Margaret Marjory (Pearl) Fraser, formerly of Nova Scotia (daughter of Duncan Cameron Fraser who served as Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, 1906-1910 ). [5] [6]
Sergeant Arthur Knight was on board lifeboat #5 with the nurses. He reported:
Our boat was quickly loaded and lowered to the surface of the water. Then the crew of eight men and myself faced the difficulty of getting free from the ropes holding us to the ship's side. I broke two axes trying to cut ourselves away, but was unsuccessful.
With the forward motion and choppy sea the boat all the time was pounding against the ship's side. To save the boat we tried to keep ourselves away by using the oars, and soon every one of the latter were broken.
Finally the ropes became loose at the top and we commenced to drift away. We were carried towards the stern of the ship, when suddenly the poop-deck seemed to break away and sink. The suction drew us quickly into the vacuum, the boat tipped over sideways, and every occupant went under.
I estimate we were together in the boat about eight minutes. In that whole time I did not hear a complaint or murmur from one of the sisters. There was not a cry for help or any outward evidence of fear. In the entire time I overheard only one remark when the matron, Nursing Sister M.M. Fraser, turned to me as we drifted helplessly towards the stern of the ship and asked: "Sergeant, do you think there is any hope for us?"
I replied, "No," seeing myself our helplessness without oars and the sinking condition of the stern of the ship.
A few seconds later we were drawn into the whirlpool of the submerged afterdeck, and the last I saw of the nursing sisters was as they were thrown over the side of the boat. All were wearing lifebelts, and of the fourteen two were in their nightdress, the others in uniform.
It was doubtful if any of them came to the surface again, although I myself sank and came up three times, finally clinging to a piece of wreckage and being eventually picked up by the captain's boat. [7]
Afterward, HMS Morea steamed through the wreckage. Captain Kenneth Cummins, then an 18-yr old midshipman on his first voyage out, recalled the horror of coming across the nurses' floating corpses:
We were in the Bristol Channel, quite well out to sea, and suddenly we began going through corpses. The Germans had sunk a British hospital ship, the Llandovery Castle, and we were sailing through floating bodies. We were not allowed to stop - we just had to go straight through. It was quite horrific, and my reaction was to vomit over the edge. It was something we could never have imagined ... particularly the nurses: seeing these bodies of women and nurses, floating in the ocean, having been there some time. Huge aprons and skirts in billows, which looked almost like sails because they dried in the hot sun. [8]
After the war, three officers from U-86, Kapitänleutnant Helmut Brümmer-Patzig, and Oberleutnants Ludwig Dithmar and John Boldt, were charged with committing a war crime on the high seas. On 21 July 1921, Dithmar and Boldt were found guilty in one of the Leipzig War Crimes Trials and were both sentenced to four years in prison. The sentences of Dithmar and Boldt were later overturned on the grounds that they were only following orders and that their commanding officer alone was responsible. Patzig, however, had fled to Danzig, then an independent city, and thus was never prosecuted as a result. [9] Outside of Germany, the trials were seen as a travesty of justice because of the small number of cases tried and the perceived leniency of the court. [10] According to American historian Alfred de Zayas, however, "generally speaking, the German population took exception to these trials, especially because the Allies were not similarly bringing their own soldiers to justice." [11] (See Victor's justice.)
The Canadian reaction was typified by Brigadier George Tuxford, former homesteader from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and commanding officer of the 3rd Infantry Brigade, 1st Canadian Division: "Amongst those murdered were two Moose Jaw nurses, Sister Fraser and Sister Gallagher. I gave instructions to the Brigade that the battle cry on the 8th of August should be "Llandovery Castle," and that that cry should be the last to ring in the ears of the Hun as the bayonet was driven home." [12]
There is a memorial plaque to Matron Margaret Fraser and the 13 other Canadian nurses sponsored by Lady Dufferin was placed at the Nurses House of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital in London, England. [13]
There are also memorial plaques to the ship at the Stadacona Hospital, CFB Halifax, Nova Scotia, Montreal General Hospital and the Children's Hospital in Halifax, the latter two monuments unveiled by Margaret C. MacDonald. [14]
An opera based on the sinking of the ship premiered in Toronto on the 100th anniversary of the sinking in June 2018. [15] The opera is composed by Stephanie Martin with a libretto by Paul Ciufo, [16] and according to one reviewer "breaks the story down into nine scenes set on the ship and, at the end, in the lifeboats, before the chorus steps out of time to reflect on what we have seen and heard." [17]
Violet Constance Jessop was an Irish-Argentine ocean liner stewardess and Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the early 20th century. Jessop is best known for having survived the sinking of both RMS Titanic in 1912 and her sister ship HMHS Britannic in 1916, as well as having been aboard the eldest of the three sister ships, RMS Olympic, when it collided with the British warship HMS Hawke in 1911.
Queen Alexandra's Royal Army Nursing Corps was the nursing branch of the British Army Medical Services.
Duncan Cameron Fraser was a Canadian lawyer, politician, judge, and the ninth Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia.
Queen Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service (QARNNS) is the nursing branch of the British Royal Navy. The Service unit works alongside the Royal Navy Medical Branch.
HMHS Newfoundland was a British Royal Mail Ship that was requisitioned as a hospital ship in the World War II. She was sunk in 1943 in a Luftwaffe attack off southern Italy. At that point she was one of three ships brightly illuminated, bearing standard Red Cross markings as hospital ships, which was her function, so due protection under the Geneva Convention.
SM U-86 was a Type U 81 submarine manufactured in the Germaniawerft, Kiel shipyard for the German Empire during World War I.
HMHS Glenart Castle was a steamship originally built as Galician in 1900 for the Union-Castle Line. She was renamed Glenart Castle in 1914, but was requisitioned for use as a British hospital ship during the First World War. On 26 February 1918, she was hit and sunk by a torpedo fired from the German U-boat UC-56.
The Leipzig war crimes trials were held in 1921 to try alleged German war criminals of the First World War before the German Reichsgericht in Leipzig, as part of the penalties imposed on the German government under the Treaty of Versailles. Twelve people were tried, and the proceedings were widely regarded at the time as a failure. In the longer term, they were seen by some as a significant step toward the introduction of a comprehensive system for the prosecution of international law violations.
Helmut Patzig, also known as Helmut Brümmer-Patzig was a German U-boat commander in the Kaiserliche Marine in World War I, and the Kriegsmarine in World War II. He was captain of U-86, the vessel that sank a Canadian hospital ship, HMHS Llandovery Castle, in 1918. Patzig evaded prosecution at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials in 1921 after fleeing German jurisdiction. During the Second World War he returned to naval service, serving as commander of the 26th U-boat Flotilla, a U-boat training group, from 1943 into 1945.
Canadian women in the world wars became indispensable because the world wars were total wars that required the maximum effort of the civilian population. While Canadians were deeply divided on the issue of conscription for men, there was wide agreement that women had important new roles to play in the home, in civic life, in industry, in nursing, and even in military uniforms. Historians debate whether there was much long-term impact on the postwar roles of women.
SS Marquette was a British troopship of 7,057 tons which was torpedoed and sunk in the Aegean Sea 36 nautical miles (67 km) south of Salonica, Greece on 23 October 1915 by SM U-35, with the loss of 167 lives.
Major Margaret Clothilde MacDonald, was a Canadian military nurse, serving in the Second Boer War and the First World War. MacDonald held the title of Matron-in-Chief of the Canadian Army Medical Corps Nursing Service, the first woman promoted to the rank of major in the British Empire and was awarded the Royal Red Cross (1916) and the Florence Nightingale Medal (1918).
Margaret Graham, RRC was a nurse at the centre of a dispute dubbed the "Adelaide Hospital Row" at the Adelaide Hospital in 1894. She overcame this dubious distinction to become the highly regarded matron of the hospital, then one of the first Australian nursing matrons to serve at the front during the First World War.
Alice Elizabeth Barrett Kitchin was an Australian nurse who served in the First World War with the Australian Army Nursing Service.
Margaret Brooke, served as a nursing sister during the Second World War rising to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN). Following the war, she earned a bachelor's degree and then a PhD in paleontology, serving as an instructor and researcher at the University of Saskatchewan's Department of Geological Sciences.
Rena Maude McLean was a Canadian nurse who volunteered during World War I. She helped set up the first hospital in France staffed exclusively by Canadians, and also served in the UK and Greece. She died when the Canadian hospital ship HMHS Llandovery Castle was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland.
Cora Beattie Roberton, was a decorated New Zealand nurse who ran several Allied hospitals in the United Kingdom during the First World War. In time, she was appointed matron to every major hospital for injured New Zealand soldiers in England.
MacDonald went overseas January, 1915, unattached, with the rank of Major. He was first attached to the Canadian Convalescent Hospital at Bearwood Park. From there he went to Bath, thence to Moore Barracks Hospital, and was later appointed Medical Examiner of the Pension Board, London. He went to France as Medical Officer of a Labor Battalion. He was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and received the appointment of Commanding Officer of the medical personnel of the Hospital Ship Landovery Castle. Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonald was drowned.