“In the 1940s, Allied prosecutors preparing for a new round of war crimes trials revisited the Llandovery Castle decision.”
By Nate Hendley
ON THE EVENING of June 27, 1918, the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle was heading from Halifax to Liverpool.
Weighing 11,423-tons, the former passenger liner had been turned over to Great Britain’s military in 1916, serving first as a troop transport then as a hospital ship. In early 1918, it was chartered by the Government of Canada to ferry Canadian soldiers wounded on the Western front back home for a long convalescence.
As the Llandovery Castle neared the Irish Coast, it was spotted by the German U-boat U-86. Despite the fact that the vessel was clearly marked with illuminated red cross insignia, the 27-year-old commander of the submarine, Helmut Patzig, ordered his crew to attack.
At least one of U-86’s torpedoes struck home. The Llandovery Castle contained over 600 beds and cots for patients, but these were empty — the ship was steaming to England to pick up another transport of wounded servicemen. Still, more than 250 people were on board: a British crew and personnel from the Canadian Army Medical Corps, including 14 nurses.
As the Llandovery Castle went down, those on board scrambled into lifeboats. Witnesses would later report that the U-86 surfaced. Survivors were ordered off lifeboats and onto the sub deck for questioning. After concluding the interrogations, Patzig’s crew fired on the lifeboats with a 10.5 cm deck cannon. Only one lifeboat containing 24 men escaped. They were the only survivors of the Llandovery Castle ambush.
The Llandovery Castle should not have been a target. According to the Hague Conventions—pre-war treaties that tried to regulate combat—hospital ships could be stopped and boarded but not attacked. Germany was a signatory of these conventions, along with other nations currently at war. As per Hague strictures, the Llandovery Castle was painted white with prominent red crosses along its sides and was brightly lit at night. Most importantly, it wasn’t carrying war supplies or armed soldiers—two other treaty rules for hospital ships.
The attack wasn’t the result of mistaken identity; the crew of U-86 later testified they knew the Llandovery Castle was a hospital ship by its lights. Patzig still felt it was a legitimate target.
He wasn’t the only naval officer to think this way. The Imperial German Navy was convinced the Allies were abusing Hague privileges by using hospital ships to convey guns and reinforcements.
In 1917, the German Navy recommenced unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant vessels and authorized its U-boats to attack hospital ships. The latter decree only applied to the Mediterranean Sea and a “maritime zone” from the English Channel to the North Sea. The Llandovery Castle was nowhere near these kill sites, but Patzig sank it anyway, for his own misguided reasons.
What follows is an excerpt from my book about the sinking: Atrocity on the Atlantic: Attack on a Hospital Ship During the Great War:
People screamed and struggled in the water. Major Thomas Lyon and Captain Edward Sylvester shone their flashlights on the scene, and the occupants of Lifeboat No. 4 began plucking people from the frigid ocean. They soon rescued nearly a dozen men, but their efforts were abruptly halted when U-boat 86 motored beside the lifeboat. A German sailor shone a light on the lifeboat.
“Come alongside,” barked someone on the sub, speaking in English.
“We are picking up men from the water,” responded an indignant occupant of Lifeboat No. 4.
“Come alongside at once,” repeated the English-speaker.
To emphasize the point, a sailor on the U-boat fired a pistol in the air twice. A threat was issued in English, either from the same speaker or from Commander Patzig himself (witness accounts differ).
The men in the lifeboat, now numbering two-dozen in total, were warned that the sub would fire its “big gun” next if they didn’t comply. The big gun was a 10.5 cm deck cannon, used to blast holes in the sides of ships. The guns were aimed to hit the ships below the waterline. With holes in their hulls below the waterline, the ships would fill with water and sink, sparing the need for a torpedo. On June 21, Patzig had sunk a 339 ton Norwegian merchant ship called the Eglantine with 56 cannon shots.
The torpedo was the submarine’s most powerful weapon, but U-86 carried only 12 of them, which meant Patzig had to be selective in their use. Roughly 20-feet long, torpedoes were large, bulky, and expensive. Once in attack position, the U-boat’s torpedoes could be readied in tubes that were situated in the bow or stern of the vessel. Eyeing a ship through a periscope, Commander Patzig would have to make complicated calculations involving distance, speed, water conditions, wind, and potential impact. Even if everything went to plan, the failure rate for torpedoes ran high. Torpedoes frequently went off-course, failed to detonate, or simply sank to the bottom. U-86 had actually fired two torpedoes at the Llandovery Castle, for example — the first of them missed the ship.
Captain Sylvester decided it was best to heed the sub’s command. The men in Lifeboat No. 4 used their oars to pull up next to U-86. The Germans wanted to speak with the highest-ranking ship officer in the lifeboat. Captain Sylvester left the lifeboat and stepped onto the submarine deck near the conning tower. An English-speaking U-boat sailor told him to identify his vessel.
“The hospital ship Llandovery Castle,” said Captain Sylvester.
“Oh yes, but you were carrying eight American flight officers,” stated the interrogator.
Taken aback, Captain Sylvester said, “I beg your pardon; we are not. We have seven Canadian medical officers on board and the ship is chartered by the Canadian government to carry sick and wounded men from England to Halifax.”
The interrogator refused to budge: “You have been carrying American flight officers.”
“I have been running to Canada for six months with wounded and give you my word of honour that we have carried none except patients, medical staff, crew and [nurses],” insisted the captain, referencing a pair of trips made before Ottawa chartered the ship in March 1918.
The interrogation lasted about five to 10 minutes, then Sylvester was sent back to the lifeboat. The Germans said they wanted to talk to a Canadian medical officer.
Major Lyon was the senior CAMC officer present, so he jumped from the lifeboat onto the sub. As he landed, a German sailor grabbed his arm, causing him to fall. Lyon hit the deck hard, breaking his right foot. Wincing in pain, the major did his best to answer questions.
“You are an American flight officer,” said the English-speaking interrogator.
“No. We never carried anything but patients,” replied Lyon.
The Germans, the major later told reporters, “seemed obsessed with the idea that American aviators were aboard, and it took us some time to convince them otherwise.”
The sailors were “coolly polite” as they flung accusations at him, Lyon recalled. He would later muse about the possibility that spies had fed the Germans stories about American pilots being transported on Canadian hospital ships.
Finally, Major Lyon was told to get back to the lifeboat. As he tried to limp away, a German officer took him aside and whispered a warning in English.
“Clear off at once,” said the officer.
Major Lyon relayed this warning to his fellow passengers in Lifeboat No. 4. Captain Sylvester said he had been given the same advice. The lifeboat contained a sail, and this was hoisted. The occupants of the lifeboat also plunged oars into the water and rowed frantically.
As Lifeboat No. 4 fled the area, Patzig issued commands. Most of the U-boat crew who were topside went below decks. Only Patzig, a pair of lieutenants named Ludwig Dithmar and John Boldt, and a fourth man named Meissner remained on top. Meissner was the sub’s gunner and he set up the 10.5 cm stern cannon on the deck.
Lifeboat No. 4 was roughly half-a-mile from the U-boat when the shelling started.
“I can recall at least twelve shots, presumably in the area where the [other] lifeboats and survivors were supposed to be. One shell came very close to our own boat,” stated Lyon.
If not motivated by sheer sadism, the only reason for the Germans to shell the lifeboats was to eliminate witnesses. After getting the same answers from all the people he interviewed, Patzig must have realized his mistake. The Llandovery Castle didn’t contain any American flyers or munitions. It was an unarmed hospital ship, and U-86 was in violation of Hague rules. German Admiralty directives allowed the hunting of hospital ships in designated areas, but the seas off the coast of Ireland were not included. So, Patzig was doing his best to kill all possible witnesses to his war crime.
After two days at sea, the men huddled in Lifeboat No. 4 were rescued by a British destroyer. The 24 survivors were fed, warmed, and clothed, then taken to England where several were treated in hospital for exposure. Searches at sea were conducted, but no other survivors from the Llandovery Castle were found.
The Llandovery Castle ambush became front-page news around the world. During a brutal war which had taken countless lives and involved horrors such as poison gas, aerial bombardment of civilians in cities, and flamethrowers, some events still had the power to shock. The notion of a submarine shelling lifeboats and female nurses drowning caused fury and outrage.
“[T] here is something peculiarly infamous in a stealthy attack on a hospital ship. The vessel is not armed. It carried no fighting men. It is helpless … The inhuman monster who commanded the submarine knew exactly what he was doing,” editorialized the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Germany’s awful debt to the world continues to grow. Another hospital ship has been torpedoed,” noted an official statement from the British Admiralty.
Speaking at an event in London, U.K., future Canadian prime minister Arthur Meighen dramatically stated, “It is better that the world should perish than that those murderers should live.”
The attack became one of a handful of cases adjudicated at the Leipzig War Crimes Trials (the little-known attempt to bring German war criminals to justice after the Great War). Commander Patzig was not in the dock, however. Following Germany’s surrender, Patzig moved to his hometown of Danzig, now an independent “free city” administered by the League Nations under the complicated postwar order. Patzig was out of jurisdictional reach and couldn’t be arrested by German or Allied authorities.
As a compromise, German officials charged lieutenants Boldt and Dithmar with attempted murder for assisting Patzig with the shelling of the lifeboats. When their trial opened July 12, 1921 before the German Supreme Court at Leipzig, both lieutenants were defiant.
“I obeyed my commander,” testified Boldt, his words translated into English by a court translator. “His orders were law. I am not guilty,”
Unmoved, the German justices convicted Boldt and Dithmar on July 16. In its ruling, the German Supreme Court set two epochal precedents: War crimes should be judged by international standards and following orders is not a defense for committing illegal acts in wartime.
“The firing on the boats was an offence against the law of nations. In war on land, the killing of unarmed enemies is not allowed … similarly in war at sea, the killing of shipwrecked people who have taken refuge in lifeboats is forbidden,” stated the Supreme Court.
While Patzig directed the shelling, “[his] order does not free the accused from guilt … a subordinate obeying [an] order is liable to punishment if it was known to him that the order of the superior involved the infringement of civil or military law … it was perfectly clear to the accused that killing defenseless people in lifeboats could be nothing else but a breach of the law,” added the justices.
Boldt and Dithmar were each sentenced to four years in prison, but quickly escaped with the help of supporters. Due in part to this dismal outcome, the Leipzig trials were dismissed as a failure and faded from memory, as did the Llandovery Castle.
In the 1940s, Allied prosecutors preparing for a new round of war crimes trials revisited the Llandovery Castle decision. Accused war criminals from Nazi Germany typically fell back on two defenses: they were just following orders and international standards didn’t apply in the Third Reich. Thanks to the Leipzig verdict, prosecutors now possessed a powerful rebuttal to both points.
The Llandovery Castle ruling was cited by Soviet, British, and American prosecutors at the Kharkov Trial in late 1943, the Peleus Trial in late 1945, and the Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1947, respectively. In all three cases, the presiding military judges also took note of the Leipzig precedent before convicting the German defendants.
The principle that obedience to orders does not confer immunity was included in the charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT). The tribunal was set up to prosecute the top Nazi leadership following the end of World War Two. Its charter specifically rejected the superior orders defense except as mitigation in sentencing.
The International Criminal Court (ICC), launched in 2002 to prosecute war criminals around the world, takes a similar stance. The court views war crimes as violations of international standards and disavows the superior orders defense (except again as mitigation in sentencing).
These legal provisions echo the ruling made by the German Supreme Court in 1921, a fitting tribute to the brave men and women who were on board the Llandovery Castle the night it was torpedoed.
Nate Hendley’s new book Atrocity on the Atlantic: Attack on a Hospital Ship During the Great War, recounts the full story of the Llandovery Castle tragedy. He is a Toronto-based journalist, speaker, and author. Please visit Nate’s website https://natehendley.ca/ for more details about his books and background.
Atrocity on the Atlantic is available at:
