Hastane Gemilerinin Birinci Dünya Savaşı'nda Savaşan Taraflar Arasında Soruna Dönüşmesi
Hospitals Ships’ Becoming A Problem Between The States In The Fırst World War

Summary/Abstract: In addition to supporting armies in supply and logistics during the war, an important issue is the transfer of wounded and sick soldiers to safe areas. Due to the developing technology of the weapons, the fact that the number of casualties was high during the wars and the nature of these wounds led to the creation of new methods such as Carriers and Mobile Hospitals in transferring the combatants‘ wounds to the hospital. One of the mobile hospitals that were put into practice in the transport of the wounded is the hospital ship formed by designing a ship as a hospital. The main duty of hospital ships was to provide health care in war, natural disasters and similar situations, especially to transport the sick and wounded in waters close to war zones and to treat them. The Hague (1907) contract was designed to allow hospital ship to safely travel during combat, along with the modes of operation, the principles they would take care of in injured and ill transport, their color, and the signs they would carry on them. These ships, which were used extensively in World War I, caused diplomatic problems in terms of modes of operations and modes of use. At the beginning of the war, the German hospital ship Ophelia was seized by the British Royal Navy, claiming to be a "spy ship". Ophelia caused a major crush between Germany and Britain. The German Government declared that during the war British hospital ship violated the Hague Convention and that it closed a certain maritime area in the southern part of the northern sea and the British channel to the hospital ships so that the ships seen in that area would be treated as war ships and attacked. The ship's problem gradually turned into an international problem that would be reflected on the two states' allies. On the other hand, the Ottoman State became one of the most interlocutors of the use of hospital ships during the war due to its geopolitical position and the fronts on its territory. Besides the use of its own ships and the position of the state to the seas, Allied and competing states' demands for hospital ship use forced Ottoman State to deal with an intense ship diplomacy. In this study, the military and diplomatic problems caused by the hospital ships in the First World War among the states will be focused in light of Ministry of Foreign Relations documents of Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive.

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