Military History | The American Monument, Mull of Oa — Stone Tower on a Rocky Headland

The last row of a four-page table in "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe", published by the American Battle Monuments Commission in 1938, is the only one that leaves the Western Front. Every other entry stands in France, apart from one in Belgium. This one reads: "Those who lost their lives as a result of the sinking of S. S. Tuscania during Feb. 5, 1918"; location, "Near Islay, Scotland"; character, "Stone tower on a rocky headland"; date erected, 1920; and in the remarks column, "Constructed by the American Red Cross not long after the war." No other row in the table credits a relief organisation rather than a state, a unit or a subscription.

The tower commemorates two ships. Its plaque, set in a moulded stone surround beneath a cast eagle holding a wreath, reads: "SACRED TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF THOSE AMERICAN SOLDIERS AND SAILORS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WRECKS OF THE TRANSPORTS 'TUSCANIA' AND 'OTRANTO'", with a date cut under each — February 5th 1918 and October 6th 1918. Published casualty figures for the two ships differ widely; the accounts agree that the Otranto, lost off the west coast of the island in October, was the heavier loss.

The Otranto is not in the commission's volume. Its name appears nowhere in the table, in the chapters, or in the index, where Tuscania has an entry and the second ship has none.

Robert Walker designed the tower and the American National Red Cross paid for it; Historic Environment Scotland listed it category A in 2018. It stands on the cliff at the Mull of Oa, reached by a marked path from the car park at the road's end. Its plaque says the victims of the disasters sleep near this spot in everlasting peace. Fifty-eight pages earlier the same volume records that the American dead were gathered after the Armistice from England, Scotland and Ireland and taken to Brookwood, where the chapel wall carries the names of those whose grave is the sea.

📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 524, the plate captioned "Memorial Near Islay, Scotland, to Those Who Lost Their Lives on the S. S. Tuscania", cropped to the plate and its caption — the tower photographed while the ground at its base was still raw stone; a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive. Second image: the monument on the cliff of the Mull of Oa, photograph by MSeses, 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.