Atrocity On The Atlantic by Nate Hendley

Nursing Sister Margaret Fraser… looked at Knight and asked, “Sergeant, do you think there is any hope for us?”
“No,” he replied.

It was the greatest Canadian naval disaster of the First World War. Unarmed, brilliantly lit up and clearly marked as a hospital ship, HMHS Llandovery Castle with 258 souls on board – including nurses, doctors, and orderlies of the Canadian Army Medical Corps — was torpedoed and sank off the coast of Ireland on 28 June 1918. Only 24 survived. All 14 Canadian nurses on board died as their lifeboat was sucked into the whirlpool of the sinking ship; other survivors were machine-gunned by Germans trying to cover their crime. At the post-war trials, the verdict on the German’s conduct set historic legal precedents in war crimes that would influence the Nuremberg trials of WWII. But the Llandovery Castle and her doomed occupants would slip from history’s memory. Few Canadians now would recognize the name. Nate Hendley has set out to remedy this with his new book, Atrocity on the Atlantic.

Engaging and illuminating, Hendley’s book brings this forgotten loss to life, detailing the people at the heart of it, their lives leading up to the fateful voyage — one that saw the successful repatriation of hundreds of wounded Canadian soldiers to Halifax, NS before heading back across the sea — and for a tiny minority who survived, their lives after. The public’s reaction was monstrous outrage, as, of course, hospital ships were non-combatants and protected by the Hague Convention, but as Hendley explains, the Germans had other thoughts. The post-war trial of the captain (in absentia) and his crew brought near equal if opposite outrage in Germany. Captain Patzig would never see a courtroom, in fact was heralded as a decorated hero and would serve with the German navy in WWII. His crew, convicted not of torpedoing the Llandovery Castle but of firing on survivors after, would see their convictions quashed soon after. Hendley explains why the sinking faded so quickly in the aftermath of the war and finishes with the stories of the descendants of survivors and victims rediscovering the story of the Llandovery Castle and her occupants.

Engaging and illuminating, Hendley’s book brings this forgotten loss to life … A must-read for anyone interested in Canadian history

Meticulously researched, this book pulls together the details from innumerable first-hand accounts, letters, military records, court documents, and newspaper articles of the time — a huge amount of work that has paid off in an authoritative telling of the Llandovery Castle’s fate and the aftermath that resounded for decades before fading from popular memory. Hendley’s writing is sympathetic, moving, but never maudlin. He crisply tells this story, takes the reader right onto the deck of the doomed ship and into the ice-cold waters of the Atlantic. Scattered through the pages, the faces of those who were killed and those who survived peep out across the more than 100 years since the Llandovery Castle sank. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Canadian history, particularly of both the wars the country found itself in.

Nate Hendley is a journalist and author of several books, primarily on crime-related subjects. His book, The Beatle Bandit (about a murderous 1964 bank heist) won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Non-Fiction 2022. He lives in Toronto.

Publisher: Dundurn Press (February 13, 2024)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 232 pages
ISBN: 9781459751347

Heather McBriarty

Heather McBriarty is an author, lecturer and Medical Radiation Technologist based in Saint John, NB. Her love of reading and books began early in life, as did her love of writing, but it was the discovery of old family correspondence that led to her first non-fiction book, Somewhere in Flanders: Letters from the Front,and a passion for the First World War. She has delivered lectures to the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, NB Genealogy Society, and Western Front Association (Central Ontario Branch), among others, on the war. Heather’s first novel of the “Great War”, Amid the Splintered Trees, was launched in November 2021.