Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

They needed close attention at all times, for when fully pressurized each stored enough explosive energy to tear a small ship in half. Fifty years earlier, exploding boilers had caused America’s worst-ever maritime disaster—the destruction of the Mississippi River steamboat Sultana at a cost of 1,800 lives.

1903—when Britain feared it was losing the race for dominance of the passenger-ship industry. In America, J. P. Morgan was buying up shipping lines in hopes of creating a monopoly; in Europe, Germany had succeeded in building the world’s fastest ocean liners and thereby winning the “Blue Riband,” awarded to the liner that crossed the Atlantic in the shortest time. By 1903 German ships had held the Riband for six years, to the sustained mortification of Britain.

British government and the company agreed to a unique deal. The Admiralty would lend Cunard up to £2.4 million, or nearly $2 billion in today’s dollars, at an interest rate of only 2.75 percent, to build two gigantic liners—the Lusitania and Mauretania. In return, however, Cunard had to make certain concessions. First and foremost, the Admiralty required that the Lusitania be able to maintain an average speed across the Atlantic of at least 24.5 knots. In early trials, it topped 26 knots. There were other, more problematic conditions. The Admiralty also required that the two ships be built so that in the event of war they could be readily equipped with naval artillery and brought into service as “armed auxiliary cruisers.”

Turner was a strong swimmer, at a time when most sailors still held the belief that there was no point in knowing how to swim, since it would only prolong your suffering.

After two years as master of the Aleppo, he moved on to command the Carpathia, the ship that later, in April 1912, under a different captain, would become famous for rescuing survivors of the Titanic.

In Paris, the big fascination was the trial of Henriette Caillaux, wife of former prime minister Joseph Caillaux, arrested for killing the editor of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro after the newspaper had published an intimate letter that the prime minister had written to her before their marriage, when they were having an adulterous affair. 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.

Britain’s King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain’s expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own navy, for which it created a new class of warship, the Dreadnought, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea.

breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship could stop a merchant vessel and search it but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port, where a “prize court” would determine its fate. The rules forbade attacks against passenger vessels.

(Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.)

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.

Another indicator of velocity was the height to which water rose on the target’s bow. The higher and whiter, the faster. If this had been a French battleship, Schwieger would have had to watch especially closely, for the French navy painted false wakes on the bows of its warships, in an effort to confuse the calculations of U-boat commanders.

TORPEDOES WERE weapons of great power—when they worked. Schwieger distrusted them, and with good reason. According to a German tally 60 percent of attempted torpedo firings resulted in failure. Torpedoes veered off course. They traveled too deep and passed under their targets. Their triggers broke; their warheads failed to explode. Aiming them was an art.

The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.”

A strange calm settled over the deck. People moved “gently and vaguely,” Mackworth recalled. “They reminded one of a swarm of bees who do not know where the queen has gone.”

He signed off with his usual closing, “Yours till hell freezes, Fisher.”