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The first consideration is the safety of the U-boat. ADM. REINHARD SCHEER, Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World War, 1919
U-boat. ADM. REINHARD SCHEER, Germany’s High Sea
On the morning of the ship’s departure from New York, a notice had appeared on the shipping pages of New York’s newspapers. Placed by the German Embassy in Washington, it reminded readers of the existence of the war zone and cautioned that “vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction” and that travelers sailing on such ships “do so at their own risk.”
“The truth is that the Lusitania is the safest boat on the sea. She is too fast for any submarine.
from cunard
the ship became an object of national pride and affection.
coal dust migrated everywhere,
conceived out of hubris and anxiety, at a time—1903—when Britain feared it was losing the race
Lusitania’s hull was to be designed to battleship specifications,
the rate at which it consumed coal made it too expensive to operate under battle conditions.
most sailors still held the belief that there was no point in knowing how to swim, since it would only prolong your suffering.
1915 Turner was the most seasoned captain at Cunard, the commodore of the line.
The company had a remarkable safety record: not a single passenger death
With the death of his wife, Wilson entered a new province of solitude, and the burden of leadership bore on him as never before.
On June 27, the day before Europe began its slide into chaos, newspaper readers in America found only the blandest of news. The lead story on the front page of the New York Times was about Columbia University at last winning the intercollegiate rowing regatta,
boys in the boat!
unintended metaphor for what was soon to befall Europe, she said, “These pistols are terrible things. They go off by themselves.”
woman who killed editor who published her illicit love letters charlie hebdo?
economies of nations were so closely connected
But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain’s
Nationalist fervor was on the rise.
The war began with the geopolitical equivalent of a brush fire. In late June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
Wilson declared America to be neutral
“The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors
Each side had been confident of a victory within months, but by the end of 1914 the war had turned into a macabre stalemate
line of parallel trenches, constituting the western front, ran nearly five hundred miles from the North Sea to Switzerland, separated in places by a no-man’s-land of as little as 25 yards.
Germany’s new and aggressive submarine war that posed the greatest danger.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a year and a half before the war, wrote a short story
mirrors lusitania sinking
“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.”
start of the war, the submarine barely figured in the strategic planning of either side.
hardier and deadlier than expected, well suited to Germany’s guerrilla effort to abrade the strength of Britain’s Grand Fleet.
submarines
(Britain had more than twice as many submarines as Germany but used them mainly for coastal defense, not to stop merchant ships.)
What Germany never acknowledged was that Britain merely confiscated cargoes, whereas U-boats sank ships and killed men.
Germany’s Admiral Scheer wrote, “Does it really make any difference,
men feared that Germany’s undersea war could only lead to disaster by driving America to shed its neutrality and side with Britain.
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.
No one had any illusions. Mistakes would happen.
“Straw Hat Day,” Saturday, May 1,
appetizers included stuffed eagles’ eggs.
mountains of luggage. Cunard allowed each passenger 20 cubic feet.
Babies complicated things. Their clothing was intricate.
manuscript of a book he had been working on for two decades, about his theory of beauty, whose pages now numbered in the thousands. It was his only copy.
“the golden age of American book collecting,” according to one historian, when some of the nation’s great private collections were amassed, later to become treasured libraries,
Bible dating to 1599, a Geneva, or “Breeches,” Bible—so named because it used the word breeches to describe what Adam and Eve wore—drew
one of the most compelling cases of the day, the attempt in U.S. Federal Court by the White Star Line, owners of the Titanic, to limit their financial liability
“You don’t pay much attention to the construction of ships?” “No, as long as they float; if they sink, I get out.”
turner testifying as expert witness in titanic trial
Schwieger had just turned thirty-two years old but already was considered one of the German navy’s most knowledgeable commanders,
