SINKING OF HOSPITAL SHIPS.
COPING WITH THE CONDITIONS. Washington, April 20. Measures to cope with the combined destruction of hospital ships by German submarines will be among the first questions taken up by the British and French commissioners (states a message from Washington, dated 20th April, to New York Evening Post). The only means open to France and Great Britain is to decrease the number of hospital ships, and thus minimise the risk. In order to do that, it will be necessary to establish greater facilities for the caring for greater quantities of Allied wounded in France instead of transporting them across the Channel.
Great numbers of American surgeons and nurses will have to be added to the hospital units now in France, as well as larger quantities of hospital material. Plans for accomplishing this will be taken up at once. Vigorous protest has been made to the German Government by the International Committee of the Red Cross against its order of January, 1017, directing that all hospital ships marked with the Red Cross insignia be considered as warships and attacked and sunk in a zone prescribed by the order, including the English Channel and the North -Sea.
The protest was received at the State Department to-day from Minister Stovall at Berne, and cites several instances where an hospital ship has been destroyed "without an examination either of its character or of its destintaion." The German order alleges that Great Britain uses hospital ships to transport troops and munitions. "In torpedoing hospital ships," says the protest, "combatants are not attacked, but defenceless persons, wounded, who had been mutilated and paralysed by shell-fire, women who have been devoting themselves to works of mercy and charity, men whose only weapons'are such as do not take the enemy's life, but help to preserve it and to alleviate his sufferings in some measure. .
"The belligerents, if they have just reason to believe that a hospital ship is being partly used for military purposes, have by virtue of The Hague Convention the right of investigation and inspection; they can oblige it to take a fixed direction and can place a commissioner on board; they can even detain the ship if the seriousness of the circumstances demands it. In no case have they the right to sink hospital ships, and to put in jeopardy the hospital personnel and the wounded transported on such ships. "Even if the correctness of the facts on which Germany "bases the justification of its order is admitted, the International Committee is of opinion that nothing excuses the torpedoing of a hospital ship.
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Taranaki Daily News, 5 June 1917, Page 6
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431SINKING OF HOSPITAL SHIPS. Taranaki Daily News, 5 June 1917, Page 6
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