Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

When fully loaded with crew, passengers, luggage, stores, and cargo, the ship weighed, or displaced, over 44,000 tons and could sustain a top speed of more than 25 knots, about 30 miles an hour. With many passenger ships withdrawn from service or converted to military use, this made the Lusitania the fastest civilian vessel afloat. Only destroyers, and Britain’s latest oil-fueled Queen Elizabeth–class battleships, could move faster.

The ship burned coal at all times. Even when docked it consumed 140 tons a day to keep furnaces hot and boilers primed and to provide electricity from the ship’s dynamo to power lights, elevators, and, very important, the Marconi transmitter, whose antenna stretched between its two masts. When the Lusitania was under way, its appetite for coal was enormous. Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines.

Enraged, Mrs. Caillaux bought a gun, practiced with it at the gunsmith’s shop, then went to the editor’s office and fired six times. In her testimony, offering an unintended metaphor for what was soon to befall Europe, she said, “These pistols are terrible things. They go off by themselves.” She was acquitted, after persuading the court that the murder was a crime of passion.

Later, a week after his wife’s funeral, struggling against his personal grief to address the larger trauma of the world, Wilson told the nation, “We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.”

Wilson, a past president of Princeton University, “felt deeply the destruction of Louvain,” according to his friend Colonel House; the president feared “the war would throw the world back three or four centuries.”

In the midst of this darkness, Wilson still managed to see America as the world’s last great hope. “We are at peace with all the world,” he said in December 1914 in his annual address to Congress.

“Common sense,” Captain Sirius says, “should have told her that her enemy will play the game that suits them best—that they will not inquire what they may do, but they will do it first and talk about it afterwards.” Doyle’s forecast was dismissed as too fantastic to contemplate.

“The essence of war is violence,” he wrote, “and moderation in war is imbecility.”

Churchill rejected Fisher’s vision. The use of submarines to attack unarmed merchant ships without warning, he wrote, would be “abhorrent to the immemorial law and practice of the sea.”

The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.

What Germany never acknowledged was that Britain merely confiscated cargoes, whereas U-boats sank ships and killed men.

“Does it really make any difference, purely from the humane point of view, whether those thousands of men who drown wear naval uniforms or belong to a merchant ship bringing food and munitions to the enemy, thus prolonging the war and augmenting the number of women and children who suffer during the war?”

The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now held the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war.

U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.

“I want to stress that the submarine is only a one-eyed vessel,” said a U-boat commander, Baron Edgar von Spiegel von und zu Peckelsheim, who knew Schwieger well. “That means, only the one who is at the periscope with one eye has the whole responsibility for attacking or the safety of his ship and crew.”

“It was a very hard task and entirely different from the fighting in the army,” said Spiegel. “If you were bombarded by artillery and you had orders to leave your trenches and attack you were in full excitement personally. In the submarine perhaps you were sitting in your small cabin drinking your morning coffee and [eating] ham and eggs when the whistle or the phone rang and told you, ‘ship in sight.’ ” The captain gave the order to fire. “And the results of these damn torpedoes were certainly very often heartbreaking.” One ship, struck in the bow, sank “like an airplane,” he said. “In two minutes the 10,000 ton ship disappeared from the surface.”

The first submarine ever credited with sinking an enemy ship was the Confederate navy’s H. L. Hunley, which, during the American Civil War, sank the Union navy’s frigate, the Housatonic. The Hunley, propelled by a crew of eight using hand cranks to turn its propeller, approached the Housatonic after dark, carrying a large cache of explosives at the end of a thirty-foot spar jutting from its bow. The explosion destroyed the frigate; it also sank the Hunley, which disappeared with all hands. This fate was more or less foretold, however. During trials before its launch, the Hunley had foundered three times, killing three crews, twenty-three men in all.

A few months earlier, Lauriat had sold Field a rare volume of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, first published in December 1843. This copy had belonged to Dickens himself and was the one he entered into evidence in a series of legal actions he brought in early 1844 against “literary pirates” who had republished the story without his permission. On the inside of the book’s front and back covers, and elsewhere within, were notes about the lawsuits that had been jotted by Dickens himself. It was an irreplaceable work.

This is so cool; my dream hobby job!

And then came April 22, 1915. Late afternoon, near Ypres; bright sunshine; a light breeze blowing from east to west. The Allied trenches in this sector, or “salient,” were occupied by Canadian and French forces, including a division of Algerian soldiers. The opposing Germans launched an offensive, which as usual began with shelling by distant artillery. This was terrifying enough, and the French and Canadians knew by experience it was a prelude to a head-on infantry attack across no-man’s-land, but at about 5:00 P.M. the look of the battlefield abruptly changed. A gray-green cloud rose from the German side and began drifting across the blasted terrain as German soldiers opened the valves on six thousand tanks filled with over 160 tons of chlorine gas arrayed along a four-mile stretch of the front—the first ever use of lethal gas on a battlefield.

“I saw some hundred poor fellows laid out in the open, in the forecourt of a church, to give them all the air they could get, slowly drowning with water in their lungs—a most horrible sight, and the doctors quite powerless.”

we go down, we’ll all go down together.”

Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!”

One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. “We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let’s hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.

Their crews nicknamed them “suicide boats.” While diving, a U-boat was at its most vulnerable, subject to ramming by warships, and to gunfire from long distances away. Penetration by a single shell would prevent a U-boat from submerging, thus eliminating its one advantage and its sole means of escape.

The firing of a torpedo made a U-boat suddenly 3,000 pounds lighter.

In this day before sonar, a submarine traveled utterly blind, trusting entirely in the accuracy of sea charts. One great fear of all U-boat men was that a half-sunk derelict or an uncharted rock might lie in their path.

“I am always happy when I keep so busy that I cannot stop to think of the sadness of life.”

Gilman claimed that Mitchell’s cure drove her “to the edge of insanity.” She wrote the story, she said, to warn would-be patients of the dangers of this doctor “who so nearly drove me mad.”

“I shall never forget the moment when we had to leave the shelter of the trenches,” wrote British private Ridley Sheldon, of combat at Helles, at the southwest tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. “It is indeed terrible, the first step you take—right into the face of the most deadly fire, and to realize that any moment you may be shot down; but if you are not hit, then you seem to gather courage. And when you see on either side of you men like yourself, it inspires you with a determination to press forward. Away we went over the parapet with fixed bayonets—one line of us like the wind. But it was absolute murder, for men fell like corn before the sickle.”

“They crept right up to our trenches, they were in thousands, and they made the night hideous with yells and shouting, ‘Allah, Allah!’ We could not help mowing them down.” Some managed to reach Moriarty’s trench. “When the Turks got to close quarters the devils used hand grenades and you could only recognize our dead by their identity discs. My God, what a sight met us when day broke this morning.”

Churchill told Runciman: “For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”

“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black,” he wrote, famously, “you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white.

“There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.”

“I did not think that anybody, even women and children, were so much terrified as they were astounded and stunned by the consciousness that the fears, cherished half in ridicule for five days previous, had at last been realized. The German ‘bluff’ had actually come off.”

In his final log entry on the attack, at 2:25 P.M., Schwieger wrote: “It would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire a second torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.” Schwieger directed his U-boat out to sea. His crew was jubilant: they had destroyed the Lusitania, the ship that symbolized British maritime prowess.

One woman, Margaret Gwyer, a young newlywed from Saskatoon, Canada, was sucked into one of the ship’s 24-foot-wide funnels. Moments later an eruption of steam from below shot her back out, alive but covered in black soot. Two other passengers accompanied her into the funnel—Harold Taylor, twenty-one, also newly married, and Liverpool police inspector William Pierpoint. They too emerged alive, with blackened faces and bodies.

“When Death is as close as he was then, the sharp agony of fear is not there; the thing is too overwhelming and stunning for that.”

She recognized the strangeness of the moment, how it juxtaposed joy and tragedy. Here she was, giddy with delight, and yet she had no idea whether her father was alive or not. Another survivor in the cabin believed her own husband to be dead. “It seemed that his loss probably meant the breaking up of her whole life,” Mackworth wrote, “yet at that moment she was full of cheerfulness and laughter.”

OF THE LUSITANIA’S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 survived. Over 600 passengers were never found. Among the dead were 123 Americans.

On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “willful and wholesale murder.”

WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”)

Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

“As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy,” he said, “I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship.” But, he said, “on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.” So much was done for the Orion and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the Lusitania. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, “If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances?”

“If I pondered over those tragic items that daily appear in the newspapers about the Lusitania, I should see red in everything and I am afraid that when I am called upon to act with reference to this situation I could not be just to anyone. I dare not act unjustly and cannot indulge my own passionate feelings.” Sensing that Tumulty did not agree, Wilson said, “I suppose you think I am cold and indifferent and little less than human, but my dear fellow, you are mistaken, for I have spent many sleepless hours thinking about this tragedy. It has hung over me like a terrible nightmare. In God’s name, how could any nation calling itself civilized purpose so horrible a thing.”

“Were I to advise radical action now, we should have nothing, I am afraid, but regrets and heartbreaks.”

Kaiser Wilhelm himself expressed a certain repugnance for attacks on passenger liners. In February 1916, he told fleet commander Admiral Scheer, “Were I the Captain of a U-boat I would never torpedo a ship if I knew that women and children were aboard.”