After the tragic sinking of HMS Otranto in October 1918, the bodies of young Americans washed ashore on the Isle of Islay, Scotland, and deep grief crossed the Atlantic to families in Bulloch and Screven counties and throughout Georgia.
It happened in the last two months of the First World War. Most of the 701 American men on the ship were soldiers newly trained for war, but what happened to the Otranto was not a direct result of the battle. Brent Tharp, Ph.D., director of the Georgia Southern Museum, brought the sense of loss to the year 2023 at the Bulloch County Historical Society’s final meeting on Sept. 25, basing his presentation on the research of another active member of the society , Rodney Harville.
“On October 6, 1918, the British troopship HMS Otranto was struck by another troopship, HMS Kashmir, in the midst of a hurricane storm,” Tharp said. “When the Otranto finally foundered on the reefs and shores of the Scottish island of Islay, 470 men had died, including 358 American soldiers, over 130 of whom were Georgians traveling from Fort Screven.”
One of Tharp’s first slides showed photos of four young men who lived in Bulloch County well over a century ago. Disturbingly, he placed them not in 1918, but nine years earlier, in 1909, the year in which the SS Otranto, a passenger steamer serving the Orient Line route between England and Australia, was launched from a British shipyard .
Four farm boys
“In 1909, four young men in Bulloch County were farm workers, working cotton fields and melon fields,” Tharp said. “The adventures of war and the sea were probably something they never imagined.”
The eldest, Carswell Deal, 18, lived in Briar Patch and was one of 10 children of Allison and Julia Deal of Arcola. John M. Sheffield, 17, lived in the Bay Area with his parents, James and Mary Ann Sheffield, and his five brothers and sisters. James Warren Williams, 16, was born in Sylvania but was living in Brooklet in 1909 with his parents Alex and Margaret Williams and his sister. Brooks Beasley, the youngest of the four, was 13 years old and lived in Lockhart. He worked the farm with his five younger brothers and sisters, Joe and Ida Beasley’s family, Tharp said.
Soon afterwards, the SS Otranto was of no interest to the four young men and was given the task of also carrying the mail. She became the royal mail ship, RMS Otranto.
After the Great War, which later generations referred to as World War I, began in Europe in 1914, its ripples were slow to reach Bulloch County, Tharp said.
When Britain declared war on Germany in August, the Otranto was requisitioned by the British Admiralty as an armed merchant cruiser, His Majesty’s Ship Otranto.
“Their elegant woodwork was completely removed, the lounges were removed and their colors were painted over gray to hide them in the sea,” Tharp said.
The ship was equipped with eight 4.7-inch guns and a rangefinder, and half-inch steel armor was fitted wherever it would fit. After escaping significant damage in some major battles in the South Atlantic, the Otranto was overhauled in February 1915 and upgraded with 6-inch guns.
Brent Tharp, Ph.D., speaks with other Bulloch County Historical Society members and guests about the October 1918 sinking of HMS Otranto, pictured on the screen behind him. The disaster, which involved a collision with another troop ship in the middle of the storm, killed 470 men, including 358 American soldiers, 140 of whom were from Georgia.
– Photo by AL HACKLE/Staff
Troop transport
When the United States finally entered the war in 1917, HMS Otranto was used as a troop transport. It carried American soldiers on three trips between New York and England, Tharp said.
“When the United States officially declared war on April 6, 1817, over 26,500 Georgia men volunteered for military service,” he said. “Another 68,820 were soon drafted, and 238 Georgia women volunteered for the Army Nurse Corps. The development of military bases in Georgia during World War I made it a training center for the entire United States.”
One of these bases was Fort Screven on Tybee Island. Active from 1897 to 1945, several of its buildings are preserved today as a historic district near the Tybee Lighthouse.
During World War I, Fort Screven was “a major coastal artillery station and training facility, and it was there that our four young men from Bulloch County landed in the summer of 1918 as part of the Automatic Replacement Draft Units, Numbers 1 and 2,” Tharp said.
As they departed the port at Otranto, the men wrote postcards saying “Arrived Safely” which were kept until the patrol reached England and then sent by post to their families. The patrol convoy set out on September 25th with the Otranto as the lead ship.
Submarines and flu
The biggest fears of the soldiers and sailors on board, Tharp said, were German submarines and the flu when the great “flu” pandemic was raging at the time.
At 9:30 p.m. on October 1, “soldiers felt a sudden jolt on HMS Otranto as the ship rose briefly and then fell forward,” he said. “They were sure that a German submarine they feared had found its target.”
But while sailing without lights in the foggy night, the Otranto accidentally rammed a French fishing schooner, the Croisine. The Otranto stopped and rescued 30 French sailors, but the fishing boat was too damaged to recover and so it was sunk by the Otranto’s guns.
Meanwhile, seasickness and influenza plagued the people living in the cramped quarters of the Otranto and its accompanying troop ship, the HMS Kashmir.
“The Otranto turned their dining hall into a hospital with over 100 serious cases, and the HMS Kashmir … had over 200,” he said.
The first man to die of influenza aboard the Otranto was a soldier from Quitman, Georgia, on October 2nd. The second was a Screven County trooper on Oct. 5.
On the night of October 5, the patrol sailed near the British Isles in a storm with winds of 80 to 90 miles per hour. When land was sighted shortly after 8 a.m. on Sunday, October 6, Kashmir officials correctly suspected that they were looking at the west coast of Scotland, but those in charge at Otranto incorrectly assumed that the land was the north coast of Ireland.
The misfortune
With the Kashmir heading south and the Otranto heading north, the ships were put on a collision course. At around 8:45 a.m. two successive waves lifted the Kashmir and pushed it into the middle part of the Otranto twice. The Kashmir’s bow protruded 20 feet into the Otranto’s boiler room, leaving a huge, triangular crack, Tharp said.
Fortunately for some, the destroyer HMS Mounsey arrived and signaled on the orders of its commander, Lt. Francis Craven that he would dock alongside the Otranto and begin rescuing men. Otranto’s captain Ernest Davidson tried to warn the Mounsey, as he was sure the other ship would be sunk in the process.
“But Captain Craven of HMS Mounsey replied: ‘I’m coming alongside.’ “If we go down, we will go down together,” Tharp said.
As the ships rose and sank, men tried to jump from the Otranto’s deck to the Munsey’s.
“Many survivors were haunted by visions of the two ships falling between them or falling into the water to drown or be crushed between the two ships as they rolled back and forth together,” he said. “Other men who were clinging to the sides were washed off the deck by the heavy seas.”
But the Mounsey welcomed 597 men, including at least 300 U.S. soldiers, from the crippled Otranto. After the war, Craven was awarded both the United States Navy Cross and the United Kingdom’s Distinguished Service Order for his actions that day, and members of his crew were also decorated.
The consequences
Unfortunately, the Mounsey, which was full to capacity, had to leave at 11 a.m., leaving 489 men on board the Otranto, which had neither propulsion power nor the ability to steer. More than three hours after the collision, the ship crashed onto Old Women’s Reef and broke up on the rocky coast of Islay. Only 21 of the last 489 made it to shore alive.
Before the first funeral took place, the people of Islay spent five days recovering bodies that continually washed up on the shore. The bodies were buried in mass graves, some but not all identified by dog tags or other evidence.
As the rest of the convoy arrived in port, cards reading “He Arrived Safely” were sent to all ships, bringing tragic misinformation to soldiers’ families across Georgia. But “the news reports and telegrams that came in gave them understanding and the truth about what had happened,” Tharp said.
The U.S. government offered to cover the cost of recovering the bodies from the mass graves and, at the families’ option, either send them home or rebury them at the U.S. cemetery in Surrey, England.
Carswell Deal’s body was returned and buried at Allison Deal Cemetery in Brooklet. James Warren Williams’ body was returned and interred in Corinth Leefield Cemetery, and Brooks Beasley’s body was recovered and interred in Beasley Cemetery. John M. Sheffield was transported from Islay and buried at Brookwood American Cemetery in England.
Tharp showed photos of their gravestones.
“Almost every district in the state lost someone in the Otranto disaster,” he had said. “Berrien County lost the most with 28 men. However, the county of Screven was not far behind with 21, and the county of Bulloch lost four young soldiers in the tragedy.”
Nashville, Georgia, seat of Berrien County, commemorated the county’s great loss by commissioning a pressed copper statue of a World War I soldier, the first in the “Spirit of the American Doughboy” series created by artist EM Viquesney. Hundreds of these statues have been preserved throughout the United States, and the iconic image has been reproduced in other formats, Tharp noted.
Rediscovery
The Bulloch County Historical Society’s interest in the disaster began when Harville, who led the organization’s work to identify and maintain historic cemeteries, saw an unusual word written on a tall stone monument in Deal Cemetery.
“This started with the Bulloch County Historical Society registering cemeteries – the last one we registered was Deal Cemetery, and while we were recording it it said ‘Otranto’ and I said, ‘What the hell is Otranto?’ So I came home and looked,” Harville recalls.
