Nurse killed in U-boat horror is finally honoured ...100 years on
Daisy’s name added to WWI memorial
A NURSE killed in a wartime U-boat atrocity has finally been commemorated – after being ignored for 100 years because she was a woman.
Margaret “Daisy” Fortescue was one of 234 people lost when a hospital ship was illegally torpedoed by a German sub in June 1918.
But her name was never included on a memorial to the First World War dead in her home town because it was the custom at the time to list only male victims.
Now, a century on, she has at last been recognised by the addition of a plaque. A spokesman for the team behind the commemoration in Dawlish, Devon, said: “We have an opportunity to say that the sacrifice of women was equal to the men’s.” Brave Daisy, who was 39, had served on the Western Front at the height of the war’s worst fighting.
But her own health suffered and she was transferred to a Canadian hospital ship, the HMHS Llandovery Castle.
Against international law and even the German Navy’s own orders, the ship was attacked off Ireland by the U-86.
After sinking the 10,600-ton vessel the sub surfaced to ram and machinegun its lifeboats.
Daisy and 13 other nursing sisters died along with scores of doctors, soldiers and seamen. Only 24 people survived.
The case was one of the first to be tried as a war crime but the sub’s captain Helmut Brummer-Patzig escaped to a neutral country and evaded justice.