The Record
The third Olympic-class liner, converted to a hospital ship. Struck a German mine off the Greek island of Kea. Sank in 55 minutes (Titanic took 160) because she was built with the lessons learned. The largest passenger ship lost in WWI. Survived by Violet Jessop, who had also survived the Titanic and an earlier Olympic collision.
The Vessel
HMHS Britannic was the third and largest of the White Star Line's three Olympic-class ocean liners, laid down at Harland and Wolff in Belfast in November 1911 as the sister of the Olympic and the Titanic. The loss of her sister Titanic in April 1912 halted her construction for most of a year while the design was reviewed. She was completed with substantial modifications: an additional double hull along her engine room, five additional watertight bulkheads extended a full deck higher, and a set of giant new gantry davits capable of serving all her lifeboats from the same side at heel angles up to 45 degrees.
She was the largest of the three sisters, 48,158 gross tons and 269 metres long, intended to enter transatlantic service in the summer of 1914 as the replacement for Titanic on the Southampton-New York run. The First World War changed this. She was requisitioned by the Admiralty in November 1915 before she had carried a single fare-paying passenger; her first class saloons were stripped, her public rooms were converted to operating theatres and ward spaces, and she was repainted white with three large red crosses on her hull. She was commissioned into Royal Navy service as His Majesty's Hospital Ship (HMHS) Britannic on 23 December 1915.
She carried 3,309 beds, a complement of 675 medical personnel (more than her civilian crew complement), and could transport 3,000 walking-wounded cases in addition to stretcher cases. She was flagged as a protected vessel under the Hague Convention and was the largest hospital ship afloat. She made five successful round trips between the Mediterranean theatre and Southampton between December 1915 and November 1916, carrying home the casualties of Gallipoli, Salonica, and the Isonzo.
The Voyage
She left Southampton on 12 November 1916 on her sixth eastward voyage, sailing under the command of Captain Charles Bartlett, her master since her requisition. Her specific mission was to load 3,000 casualties at Mudros on the Greek island of Lemnos, the principal Allied casualty-clearing station for the Salonica front. She called at Naples on 15 November, refuelled, and resumed her voyage south and east through the Aegean on the morning of 19 November.
The weather in the Aegean that week was clear and calm. Britannic was running at her service speed of 20 knots, zigzagging through U-boat-patrolled water under her Red Cross flag. She passed south of Kea at 08:00 on 21 November 1916, making for the Kea Channel between Kea and Cape Sounion.
At 08:12 on 21 November she struck, or was struck by, a mine laid four days earlier by the German submarine U-73 (commanding: Gustav Siess) in the Kea Channel approaches. The mine detonated under her starboard bow between frames 2 and 4. The explosion was conventional for a naval mine. The damage inflicted on Britannic, designed specifically against the Titanic's failure mode, should have been survivable: four watertight compartments flooded. Her design specification stated she would remain afloat with any six flooded.
The Disaster
What had not been built into her design was the behaviour of her crew at the moment of the strike. Her watertight doors, open as they normally were in peacetime hospital operation for stretcher traffic, were only partially closed through a chain of command that took seven minutes to propagate. Her lower portholes, opened by nurses for ventilation in the warm Aegean morning, admitted water on her starboard side as her list developed. Within ten minutes the flooding had reached her watertight bulkheads above the waterline limit, the same failure mode her sister had suffered in 1912, and she began to settle by the bow.
Captain Bartlett ordered the ship run aground on Kea and continued at 10 knots toward the island. The forward motion into the bow-down list accelerated the flooding. At 08:35 he ordered the engines stopped and the boats away; two port lifeboats were launched against orders as she was still under way and were caught by the turning propellers, killing 30 people. This was her entire death toll.
She sank in 55 minutes, stern last, rolling onto her starboard side as she went. Her total casualty count was 30, against her sister Titanic's 1,517; the difference was time, weather, latitude, and 1,066 lifeboat seats. 1,035 of her 1,066 aboard survived. Among the survivors was Violet Jessop, a stewardess who had also survived the Titanic in 1912 and the Olympic's collision with HMS Hawke in 1911, and who would die in her bed in 1971 at age 83.
The Legacy
The Britannic Inquiry, held in Malta in December 1916, concluded that she had been mined, that her loss had been inevitable once the mine struck, and that her casualty count was among the lowest of any large ship lost in the war. The Inquiry faulted the crew for opening portholes but did not fault Bartlett. She was the largest passenger ship ever lost in the First World War; she was also the most successful large-ship evacuation of the entire war.
Her wreck lies at 122 metres in the Kea Channel, on her starboard side, her bow almost intact. Jacques-Yves Cousteau located her in December 1975 in the first deep-ocean search ever conducted with side-scan sonar for a known commercial wreck. Cousteau's 1976 documentary film The Britannic, Mystery of the Deep broadcast her condition to a global audience; the film's footage of the intact starboard promenade, still fitted with her deck chairs, became the most-viewed submarine footage of the 1970s after his own earlier Titanic work.
She has been the subject of further surveys by Dr Robert Ballard (1995 and 1998), by Simon Mills (1996, 2003, 2009), and by an annual dive of the Hellenic Navy's technical divers. She lies in Greek national waters and is a protected site under Greek antiquities law. Simon Mills, the English historian who purchased the wreck from the British government in 1996 for £15,000, remains her private owner; he has refused repeated requests for commercial salvage.
She was the counterfactual Titanic: the sister ship that did everything the lessons of 1912 had been designed to teach, that was struck in essentially the same way, that behaved essentially as the new design predicted, and that was lost with 30 dead instead of 1,517. The inherited name for the ship she might have been, if the Titanic had not been first: the Gigantic. The White Star Line quietly renamed her Britannic after the disaster.