IRISH SEA CRIME (1918)

Description

Date: 18 October 1918

Transcript:

IRISH SEA CRIME.
MAIL BOAT LEINSTER SUNK BY SUBMARINE.
587 LIVES LOST.

The sinking of the Mail Boat Leinster in the Irish Sea is the biggest German U-boat crime since the torpedoing of the Lusitania. The boat was twice struck, and sank in a few minutes with a loss of 587 lives.

Announced at the same time, though it occurred some days earlier, was the torpedoing of the Japanese liner Hirano Maru, also of the Irish coast. In this case 291 lives were lost.

The Leinster was on the way from Kingstown to Holyhead. She had on board 780 persons, and of these only 193 have been rescued.

The steamer was struck right forward by the first torpedo. The crew at once set to work lowering the lifeboats, but barely three minutes after the first explosion another torpedo struck the vessel near the engine-room. The vessel's two funnels were blown into the air, and immediately she began to sink by the head. Within a few minutes she had disappeared.

There were many women and children among the passengers. The few boats it was possible to launch were overcrowded; some were so packed that they quickly filled with water and overturned. A number of survivors were rescued clinging to the upturned boats; others were saved by rafts thrown overboard.

A wireless message had been sent out when the vessel was struck, and all the ships in Kingstown, about fifty of all descriptions, set out to the rescue.

The first of the rescuing vessels to arrive at Kingstown carried 109 survivors. Five other vessels, bringing both living, and dead, arrived within the next two and a half hours.

One of the officers said all would have been saved but for the second torpedo, which smashed the Leinster into matchwood. When the funnels were blown out many persons were injured by splinters of wood. Only four boats had been got clear when the second torpedo struck the vessel, and, rafts had been thrown out as well.

Another survivor, who was in one of the boats when the second torpedo hit the vessel, said the ship was nearly down to the gunwale at the fore part, and the stern, was high in the air, showing the propellers clean out of the water. The second torpedo struck her direct in the engines, and a terrific explosion followed.

Boats and rafts in the water were lifted up and smashed into matchwood. The passenger narrated one terrible incident. Still attached to the davits overhanging the side of the ship just about where the second torpedo struck, was a large lifeboat with about seventy people in it on the point of being lowered. The boat and the people in it were blown to fragments.

RESCUE SCENES

The difficulties of rescue were complicated by the angry sea, in which scores of were lost. Immediately some of the boats were launched they were upset, and numbers clambered on, to the rafts with which the waters were quickly covered.

Destroyers, patrol, boats, and trawlers were busily engaged in the work of rescue. Many of those picked up were semi-clothed, and most of the rescued seamen were barefooted.

Three little infants were among the survivors landed at Kingstown. A large number of women who were brought ashore in a fainting condition were carried to the rest room at the wharf. Blankets and clothing of various descriptions were requisitioned from Kingstown, every attention being given the stricken ones.

Lady Phillis Hamilton, daughter of the Dowager Duchess of Abercorn, and sister of Lady Wicklow, was a passenger on board the Leinster, and is among those missing.

JAPANESE LINER SUNK.

The Hirano Maru, a liner of 7,700 tons, was torpedoed off the Irish coast on Saturday night, and sank in five minutes. Of about 320 persons on board—200 passengers and 120 crew—only 29 were saved. So quickly did the vessel sink that there was no time to launch the boats, and any that were attempted to be launched smashed to pieces.

Foul weather prevailed at the time, and once the liner was hit under such a heavy sea the position of those on board was hopeless. When an American destroyer went to the assistance of those who had been in the water some time, the submarine, which had been lurking about watching the victims, fired at the destroyer as she was picking up the survivors. Captain Frazer, the commander of the liner, perished with all his officers.

MR. BALFOUR'S CONDEMNATION.

Speaking at a luncheon to American editors on Friday, Mr. Balfour referred to the sinking of the Leinster. He said we had to make a right peace, and he did not think a right peace was of itself a very easy thing to make. Our enemies were attempting to change their constitution, but appeared to have no notion that what we called a change is not so much a change of a formal purpose of Government, as a change of the hearts by which that Government was to be directed and animated.

And if we were to judge of a man's heart by what he did, he would ask whether those who had made mankind pale with horror over the early barbarities and brutal excesses in Belgium, had shown the least sign, after of after four years of war, of any material improvement in their disposition. Brutes they were when they began the war; brutes they remained at the present moment.

Perhaps with a warmth of indignation befitting a Foreign Secretary, but with the news of this outrage in the Irish Channel, he confessed that he found it difficult to measure his epithets, for this Irish packet boat, crammed as it always was with men, women and children, in broad daylight was deliberately torpedoed by a German submarine. It was carrying no military stores, it was serving no military end.

It was pure barbarism, pure frightfulness deliberately carried out, and one would have thought that those who, after all, brought in America to their own undoing by crimes of this sort, would have shrunk a little from repeating them at a moment when their fate was to be decided by America, perhaps even more than by any other of the co-belligerents.

He could not measure the wicked folly of the proceedings of which they had been guilty, and yet let us not forget that this was only one, and not the most destructive, the most cowardly, or the most brutal of the things which, at the moment when they were asking for peace, they were perpetrating upon helpless civilians, and still more upon helpless prisoners of war.

He wished he could think that these atrocious crimes were the crimes of a small dominant military caste. He agreed that the direction of national policy might be in the hands of a caste, but it was incredible that crimes like this, perpetrated in the light of day, known to all mankind, condemned from one end of the civilised world to the other, should go on being repeated month after month through four years embittered warfare, if it did not commend itself to the population which committed them.

Source:
'Irish Sea Crime.' Abergavenny Chronicle and Monmouthshire Advertiser. 18 Oct. 1918. 7.

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