Hospital ships and the rules

In the Great War the Australian government requisitioned many of the coastal steamers to act as troopships or as hospital ships. Sadly, there was a great demand for the latter.

In a way we were lucky to have the ships available for both roles. This is, after all, an island. There were no airline routes linking our capitals. The road and rail systems were primitive and so we had a substantial fleet of coastal steamships. Those devoted to passenger traffic were easily converted to become troopships or hospital ships. The government simply requisitioned them.

We could not imagine how many hospital ships we were to need.

Probably the first ship requisitioned as a hospital ship – under wartime powers the government could simply requisition ships for military service – was the SS Grantala. Fortunately the Royal Navy thought there was a need for a hospital ship to serve the Far East fleet.

Equipment was sent to Australia to fit out the Grantala and on 30 August 1914 she sailed from Sydney to join the fleet going to capture New Britain generally and Rabaul in particular from the Germans. The Grantala then took the sick and wounded from that short, sharp conflict to Suva, for some reason.

At the end of the year the hospital equipment was removed and she was returned to her owners, the Adelaide Steamship Company. She did not go back into the coastal passenger trade immediately because the government chartered her to go to Antarctica to look for the vanished Shackleton and his Endeavour.

In theory, hospital ships were not to be attacked. They were painted white, with a broad green stripe down each side of the hull, broken only be a large red cross on each side. They had a yellow funnel and travelled with all their lights on at night. The red cross on each side was fully floodlit at night.

That did not always save them.

Nor did Australia always follow the rules.

The SS Kyarra was commandeered by the British and sailed from Brisbane, bound for England as a hospital ship, on December 4 1914. She carried the personnel of the First and

Second Australian General Hospitals and First and Second Australian Stationary Hospitals, but she had no medical equipment aboard and no patients, so she should probably not have travelled as a hospital ship at that point.

When such ships sailed, at least early in the war, the enemy was notified and the ship was, in theory, grated a safe passage by the other side. In this case the rule-breaking continued on the return voyage. She did not go on to England but returned to Australia with a load of soldiers who were not considered fit for military service, and not just for medical reasons.

When she got back to Australia she left again for England. At Tilbury she was repainted in camouflage colours, fitted with a deck gun and became a troopship, and in that role she had a number of adventures, including shelling a surfaced submarine. On May 26, 1918. On her first voyage in ‘warship’ colours, she was torpedoed just off the Isle of Wight and sank very quickly,

The Adelaide Steamship Company lost the SS Wandilla to the war effort. She served as an “HMAT”, His Majesty’s Armed Transport, from May 1915 to August 1916, when she was converted in Liverpool to serve as a hospital ship. She had a long and busy war, travelling to Australia, South Africa, all over the Mediterranean and East Africa. She survived unscathed

The SS Wandilla (again, ex-Adelaide Steamship Company) twice stopped to pick up survivors from torpedoed ships though it was considered very risky to stop when there was a submarine around. In 1918 it was stopped by a German submarine, which put crew aboard to search it. The Germans found that it was genuinely a hospital ship and so let it go on its way. There were decent men on both sides.

Wandilla was a sister ship to the SS Warilda but unluckier. She was running a shuttle service with wounded, between France and the UK. On August 2, 1918, having survived several mishaps, she was bringing 660 wounded men home to England when she was torpedoed. One engine was running and could not be stopped and the other was destroyed, so the Wandilla, slowly settling into the water, went round and round in circles at sufficient speed to make it almost impossible to launch the lifeboats.

Most of the wounded had been brought on deck before the ship sank, but not all. The destroyer escort picked up many survivors but 123 people drowned. The sinking was dramatic and traumatic because for a time it seemed that more men be got out of her. She settled stern first but the water so shallow that mush of her bow end stayed above the water. Before any further recues could be attempted, she rolled onto her side and was gone.

The steamship Karoola was taken over as Armed Transport A63 and took reinforcements to Suez before continuing to Southampton, where she was properly converted into a hospital ship. The conversion was partly funded by public donations through the New South Wales Red Cross.

She spent three years as a hospital ship. On her first voyage in that role she sailed to Alexandria to pick up Australian casualties and brought them back home, She then turned around and went back for another load. It was that sort of war. She spent three years treating the wounded and the sick, and bringing them home.

The SS Kanowna (Australian United Steamships) was well-known for a reason that would not have pleased too many people. She was part of the convoy which sailed to take Rabaul from the Germans in 1914 but she suffered a mutiny among the engine-room crew and had to turn back, with the soldier passengers running the engine-room and shovelling her coal.

She was handed back to her owners but almost immediately requisitioned, in June 1915, as a troopship, becoming troopship A61. She took troops and food supplies to Britain and was there converted into a hospital ship, with its own operating theatre and capable of carrying 450 casualties. She sailed for Alexandria light’ and then was filled with Australian sick and wounded going home.

The Kanowna survived the war and went back to commercial work, having done a wonderful job for Australia and having lived down the embarrassment of being returned from her fist mission as a ‘mutiny ship’.

I’ll come back to the Kanowna and that attack of Rabaul in a month or so, there is far more to that story than I had realised.