Donegal (ship, 1904)
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The Donegal was a 1904 posed in service passenger ship of the British railway company Midland Railway (MIDR) used as passenger and mail ferry in the Irish Sea was used. During the First World War it served as HMHS Donegal (Military Hospital Ship No. 14) as a hospital ship from 1915 until it was sunk in the English Channel on April 17, 1917 with the loss of 41 lives by a German submarine .
ferry
The 1,885 gross registered tons (GRT) steamship Donegal was built at the Caird & Company shipyard in Greenock, Scotland , and was launched on April 30, 1904. The 100.9 meter long and 12.8 meter wide, steel- built ship was propelled by two three-cylinder triple expansion steam engines that acted on two propellers and enabled a speed of 13 knots.
The Donegal was built for the Midland Railway (MidR) founded in 1844 , which expanded its service around the turn of the century and, in addition to its rail network, also put steamships into service. In 1903 it bought the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway in Northern Ireland and built a passenger terminal in the port town of Heysham on the Lancashire coast so that it could operate a regular service between Heysham and Belfast. For this purpose, the MidR bought two older steamers and also ordered three new sister ships from various shipyards .
These were the Donegal at Caird & Company, the Antrim (2,100 GRT) launched in March 1904 at John Brown & Company in Clydebank , and the Londonderry (2,083 GRT) launched in April 1904 at William Denny and Brothers in Dumbarton . They were specially built for passenger and mail traffic on this route and remained in this role until the outbreak of the First World War . The Antrim and Londonderry survived the war and were sold after the Midland Railway disbanded in 1923.
Hospital ship
Like many other passenger ships, ferries and other merchant ships , the Donegal was taken over by the British government at the beginning of the war and converted into an ambulance ship to bring wounded soldiers from France back to Great Britain across the English Channel . According to the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, ambulance ships were classified as hospital ships . They were marked accordingly and illuminated at night so that they could be identified beyond doubt.
Nevertheless, numerous hospital ships were torpedoed and sunk by German submarines during the First World War. Above all in the spring of 1917, ship sinkings (with or without warning) increased drastically after the German Reich had declared the "unrestricted submarine war " (see also sea war ) with effect from February 1, 1917 . In February 1917 301 ships with a total of 506,057 tons were sunk or damaged, in March 1917 379 ships with 582,066 tons and in April 1917 474 ships with 886,891 tons. It was the most successful phase for German submarines in the First World War.
On Tuesday, April 17, 1917, the Donegal was with 610 wounded and 70 crew on board on a crossing from Le Havre to Southampton . 19 nautical miles (35 km) south of the lightship of Dean 's ship was the German submarine UC 21 (Lieutenant Reinhold Saltzwedel sighted) and torpedoed. 29 wounded soldiers and 12 crew members were killed in the sinking.
Among the crew of the Donegal on this voyage were two former crew members of the Titanic , Archibald Jewell and John Priest. Both men had also survived the sinking of the HMHS Britannic , the sister ship of the Titanic , in the Aegean Sea in November 1916 and Priest had been on board the Olympic when it collided with the warship HMS Hawke in September 1911 . Priest also survived the sinking of the Donegal while Jewell drowned.
On the same day, another hospital ship, the HMHS Lanfranc (1907, 6,287 GRT), was sunk by UB 40 in the English Channel , killing 40 people. The sinking of the two steamers clearly marked as hospital ships without warning caused a great outcry in the Allied press.
The wreck of Donegal is still relatively intact and lies at a depth of 45 to 50 meters on its port side.
literature
- Tad Fitch and Michael Poirier. Into the Danger Zone. Sea Crossings of the First World War . The History Press (Gloucestershire), 2014