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U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.
U-boats traveled solo and lost contact sooner, typically after sailing only a couple of hundred miles. Once at sea, a U-boat captain was free to conduct his patrol in whatever manner suited him,
The view it provided was a crabbed one at best.
view from periscope
Unlike large surface craft, a U-boat came to reflect the character and personality of its commander,
Schwieger became captain of U-20 in December 1914, and within a short time the boat gained further notoriety, now for ruthlessness.
Spending the night on the ocean floor was common practice for U-boats in the North Sea,
UNDER SCHWIEGER, U-20 had at least one dog aboard.
single most unpleasant aspect of U-boat life: the air within the boat.
“U-boat sweat.”
100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can have no conception
All these discomforts were borne, moreover, against a backdrop of always present danger,
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
on the ship cargo
The unskilled character of Britain’s wartime merchant crews
instinct of fear, the ship’s mascot—a cat named Dowie, after Captain Turner’s predecessor—fled the ship that night, for points unknown.
Thackeray drawings
also valuable cargo
Room 40. In a handwritten directive, Churchill set out its primary mission, “to penetrate the German mind,” or, as one of the group’s key officers put it, “to extract the juice.” From the start, Churchill and Fisher resolved to keep the operation so secret that only they and a few other Admiralty officials would ever know it existed.
The war had grown darker and had sired new tactics for killing.
first ever use of lethal gas on a battlefield.
chlorine gas released bby germans
If the British navy acted in response to every foretold movement of the German fleet, it risked revealing to Germany that its codes had been broken. In a secret internal memorandum,
like in wwtwo code breakers
Staff was obsessed with the idea of secrecy;
IT WAS tedious work. Hundreds of intercepted messages came chattering into the building’s basement every day,
both Room 40 and Capt. Blinker Hall’s intelligence division developed a sense of the flesh-and-blood men who commanded Germany’s U-boats.
most glamorous passenger was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son and primary heir of the late Cornelius,
“Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the Titanic but for one reason or another had changed their minds.
very few passengers had read the German warning.
Only two passengers canceled because of the warning
ninety-five children and thirty-nine infants. Whole families
paranormal phenomena. Belief in such things was widespread in America and Britain at the start of the twentieth century, when an Ouija board was a regular fixture
Theodate liked Farmington so much, however, that she decided to stay. She became a suffragist; at one point she also joined the Socialist Party,
many similarities to lady ig gold time. denial of danger in the face of clear warnings. confidence. feminism.
first female architect licensed in Connecticut.
theodate
Arts and Crafts movement, then in full sway, which held that craftsmanship provided both satisfaction and rescue from the perceived dehumanization of the industrial revolution. By 1910 the movement had swept America,
Craftsman style. It inspired as well the founding of magazines like House Beautiful and Ladies’ Home Journal.
His goal was to convince German military commanders that a British invasion of Schleswig-Holstein, on the North Sea, was imminent,
room 40 ruse to trick germans and divert them away from france. it worked.
U-boats instructing them to depart and to destroy anything that resembled a troop transport.
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.
austrian complicity with germany
AS DISTRACTED as he was by the charms of Mrs. Galt, Wilson also grew increasingly concerned about the drift of world events.
Things can’t go on like this for ever.” The author was a German infantryman of Austrian descent named Adolf Hitler.
hitler referring to the terrible conditions in the trenches
wide-spread waste and destruction.” The nation had become inured to it all,
likepresent day
on this particular voyage, given the convergence of disparate forces, timing was everything. Even the briefest delay could shape history.
departure delayed by 2 hours
Men served as ballast. In order to quickly level or “dress” his boat, or speed a dive, Schwieger would order crewmen to run to the bow or the stern.
Schwieger was now wholly on his own.
President Wilson’s unhappiness at the fact that critics continued to take him to task for allowing the film The Clansman, by D. W. Griffith, to be screened at the White House.
