HMHS Llandovery Castle

The Vessel

HMHS Llandovery Castle was a British hospital ship, formerly a Union-Castle Line mail steamer operating between Southampton and the Cape of Good Hope. She was 152 metres long, 11,423 tons, built in 1914 at Barclay Curle on the Clyde. At the outbreak of the First World War she had been requisitioned by the British Admiralty; in December 1916 she was transferred to the Canadian Naval Service and converted at Halifax to a hospital ship in Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps service.

Her hospital ship conversion included the conventional Hague Convention markings of white hull paint, prominent red crosses on her sides and top, a green line along her hull at the waterline, and specific identification floodlights that were to be illuminated at night. She carried a Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps ship's surgeon, approximately 80 nurses and medical orderlies, and approximately 40 ship's crew. Her patient capacity was 622 beds distributed across the former passenger decks.

Her service between December 1916 and June 1918 was the standard Western Front casualty-clearing run: she loaded wounded Canadian and British soldiers at Le Havre or Portsmouth and carried them to Halifax for onward transport to hospitals in Canada. She made 11 successful round trips between January 1917 and June 1918 without incident.

The Voyage

Her final voyage began on 17 June 1918 at Halifax, where she was returning eastward to Europe with a crew of 164 Canadian Army Medical Corps personnel and 94 Merchant Navy ship's crew. She was not carrying wounded soldiers on this leg; she was making an empty eastbound passage to pick up a new casualty load at Le Havre. She was, according to her manifest, carrying no combat personnel, no combat-related cargo, and no deviation from her hospital ship status. She was operating strictly under Hague Convention hospital-ship protections.

Under the Hague Convention X of 1907, to which Germany was a signatory, hospital ships displaying the prescribed markings were not lawful targets for submarine or surface-ship attack. The convention specifically required that submarines attacking any vessel be satisfied that the vessel was not a hospital ship. In June 1918, however, the German naval staff had begun attacking hospital ships on the rationale that British merchant ships were frequently found to be carrying combat personnel or munitions despite their protected markings. The actual policy of the Kriegsmarine was to attack hospital ships when encountered and to rely on post-hoc justification.

At 21:30 on 27 June 1918, Llandovery Castle was approximately 190 kilometres west of the Fastnet Rock, running eastward at her service speed of 14 knots. Her identification lights were burning. The German submarine U-86, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Helmut Patzig, 28 years old, had sighted her from submerged periscope depth at 21:00. Patzig had personally inspected her markings through his periscope and had confirmed her hospital-ship identity. He ordered a torpedo attack regardless. At 21:30 he fired a single G6 torpedo from 600 metres range.

The Disaster

The torpedo struck Llandovery Castle on her port side. She sank in ten minutes, at 21:40 on 27 June 1918. In the ten minutes between the first strike and the sinking, the ship's crew and the medical personnel succeeded in launching six lifeboats with approximately 164 people aboard, out of the 258 total aboard the ship. The remaining 94 people either died in the initial strike or were unable to reach the boats.

What followed was the single most documented war crime committed by a German submarine in the First World War. Patzig surfaced U-86 at 21:50 and approached the lifeboats at close range. He demanded to know whether Canadian Army flying officers, whom he apparently believed had been aboard, had been in the lifeboats. The medical officer Major Thomas Lyon replied that the ship had carried only Canadian Army Medical Corps personnel and Merchant Navy crew. Patzig did not accept the reply.

U-86 then rammed and sank five of the six lifeboats in succession, firing her deck gun at the occupants of the lifeboats who had been thrown into the water. The attack continued for approximately 30 minutes, during which the U-boat's crew fired 75 machine-gun rounds at the survivors in the water. One lifeboat, the first one into the water, had already cleared the attack area and its 24 occupants survived. The five other lifeboats were destroyed with all 140 of their occupants.

234 of the 258 aboard Llandovery Castle died on the night of 27-28 June 1918. Of the 164 Canadian Army Medical Corps personnel aboard, 146 died; of the 14 nurses aboard, all 14 died. The 24 survivors who reached the only intact lifeboat drifted for 36 hours before being rescued by the British destroyer HMS Lysander.

The Legacy

The accounts of the 24 survivors were taken by the British Admiralty on their arrival at Queenstown on 29 June 1918. The sworn affidavits of the survivors became the evidentiary basis of the subsequent war crimes prosecution. The case was pursued through the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, the Leipzig War Crimes Trials of 1921-1922, and the German Constitutional Court review of 1931.

The Leipzig War Crimes Trials were the first international war crimes prosecution in modern history; they were conducted, under the terms of Article 228 of the Versailles Treaty, by the German Supreme Court at Leipzig sitting as a war crimes tribunal, with German judges and German prosecutors applying German law to defendants charged with acts committed during the war. Two of Patzig's subordinate officers on U-86, Lieutenant Ludwig Dithmar and Lieutenant John Boldt, were tried at Leipzig in July 1921 for the machine-gunning of the Llandovery Castle lifeboats.

Both Dithmar and Boldt were convicted and sentenced to four years' imprisonment for manslaughter. They escaped from the Leipzig prison during transport in November 1921 under circumstances that strongly suggested deliberate German prosecutorial collusion. The German court subsequently vacated their convictions in 1928 on the grounds that the two officers had been acting under superior orders. Helmut Patzig himself had escaped to the Free City of Danzig in 1920 and had evaded every attempt at extradition.

The Llandovery Castle case is cited in every modern international criminal law textbook as the event that established three contested principles that would become foundational in the post-1945 Nuremberg jurisprudence: that the attack on a marked hospital ship is a war crime; that the machine-gunning of shipwrecked survivors is a war crime; and that "superior orders" is not, by itself, a complete defence against charges of war crimes. The Llandovery Castle was cited in the Nuremberg indictments as a precedent; the defenders of Nazi atrocities of 1939-1945 cited the Llandovery Castle verdict's vacation in 1928 as a counter-precedent. The case was, and remains, the hinge on which the modern international law of war crimes turns.

The wreck of Llandovery Castle lies at approximately 1,500 metres in the Western Approaches. Her precise position has not been located. The 234 dead are commemorated on the Halifax Memorial in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Canadian Army Medical Corps memorial at the National War Memorial in Ottawa, and at the annual memorial service held at the Halifax Public Gardens on 27 June. Her name has been given to three subsequent Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Navy auxiliary vessels; the current HMS Llandovery Castle in Reserve Fleet service is the fourth.