Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Once the war-zone campaign began, the U-boat attack fell most heavily on the Western Approaches, through which most of Britain’s essential imports passed. This vital area could be reached only by the twenty diesel boats of High Seas Fleet flotillas, leaving the older, heavy-oil-engine boats to operate in the North Sea and the Channel. At first, U-boat captains attempted to discriminate in their attacks. British and French merchant ships were sunk on sight; neutrals were stopped, the ship’s papers were inspected, and, if contraband was found, the crew was allowed to take to its lifeboats and the ship was sunk by bombs or gunfire. In these cases, the papers were sent to a German prize court, which occasionally judged the neutral shipowner entitled to damages. Between February 22, when the campaign was launched, and March 28, German submarines sank twenty-five merchant ships. Sixteen of these were torpedoed without warning and fifty-two crew members were killed. Thirty-eight of these men died in a single attack, when a freighter carrying nitrates blew up. Nevertheless, on board the twenty-five ships sunk, not one passenger died and twenty of the twenty-five ships suffered no loss of life whatever. Meanwhile, every week, between 1,000 and 1,500 ships—more than 4,000 vessels a month—sailed in and out of British ports, a number that exceeded peacetime traffic in the summer of 1914.

  At first, it seemed that there was little the Royal Navy could do to fight the U-boats. The Admiralty advised captains of British merchantmen to hoist neutral colors in the war zone, a questionable act that may have saved some vessels but also provoked a storm of protest from the neutral nations whose flags were flown. As for attacking the submarines themselves, no one knew how. Little thought had been given before the war to submarines as offensive weapons and even less to antisubmarine tactics or weaponry. The earliest British attempts to cope were primitive, even quixotic. Coastal yachts and motorboats patrolled outside British harbors, but only one in ten of these craft was armed with anything larger than a rifle. A few motor launches carried two swimmers, one armed with a black bag, the other with a hammer. If a periscope was sighted, the launch was to come as close as possible. The swimmers were to dive in and one man would attempt to place his black bag over the periscope; if he failed, the other would try to smash the glass with his hammer. Another unsuccessful scheme involved attempting to teach seagulls to defecate on periscopes. The most effective form of attack, ramming or gunfire, demanded that the submarine be caught on the surface. But as long as a submarine remained submerged, it was undetectable and invulnerable. Mines and minefields were laid down, but, being passive defenses, they had to wait for submarines to bump into them. Nevertheless, to protect the Channel from U-boats, twenty-two minefields with 7,154 mines were laid east of the Dover Strait between October and February. This mine barrier proved ineffective because British mines were of poor quality. They were visible on the surface at low tide and when struck they frequently failed to explode. Moreover, about 4,000 either sank to the bottom or drifted away. An effort to build a twenty-mile-long boom of heavy steel harbor-defense nets across the Channel from Folkestone to Cap Gris-Nez failed because the tides placed too great a strain on the mooring cables.

  Not all losses at sea were British, however. During January 1915, two U-boats had been lost—one mistakenly torpedoed by a third U-boat—bringing to seven the total number destroyed in the seven months since the beginning of war. The eighteen remaining of the original twenty-five German submarines were reinforced by twelve new boats brought into service after August 1914, making a total of thirty with which to begin the new campaign. The month of March 1915 brought more German losses. On March 4, U-8 was caught in the Dover nets and sunk by the destroyer Ghurka. On March 10, U-12 was caught on the surface and rammed by the destroyer Ariel off the coast of Scotland. On the same day, the new U-29, commanded by the famous Otto Weddigen, who had sunk Aboukir, Hogue, Cressy, and Hawke, was patrolling off Scapa Flow when she encountered battle squadrons of the Grand Fleet steaming through Pentland Firth. Maneuvering to attack, Weddigen fired a torpedo at the dreadnought Neptune but missed. Apparently engrossed in continuing his attack, Weddigen failed to see the battleship Dreadnought coming up behind him. Dreadnought, spotting the periscope, rammed at full speed. The force of the blow threw the submarine to the surface, revealing her identity as the bow, rising high out of the water, displayed the painted number “U-29.” The U-boat sank with no survivors. In all, forty-nine German U-boats were destroyed in the first twenty-eight months of war, either on the surface or, if submerged, by mines. But the British and Allied navies had neither means of detecting U-boats nor weapons other than mines to destroy them under water. Not until December 13, 1916, when UB-29 was sunk in the English Channel, was a German submarine sunk by a British depth charge.

  Each new, aggressive step in the naval war provoked retaliation. Britain’s November 2, 1914, blockade proclamation had been presented as a response to “indiscriminate” German mining in the North Sea. In turn, the German submarine war-zone proclamation of February 4, 1915, was described as a reprisal for the British proclamation of November 2. On March 11, 1915, Britain upped the ante, announcing that, in response to the German war-zone proclamation and submarine campaign, the Allied navies would establish a total blockade of Germany. An order in council declared that by creating a war zone in which all Allied merchant ships were to be destroyed on sight without ascertaining the nature of their cargoes and the purpose or destination of their voyages, and without heed to the safety of their passengers or crews, Germany was, in effect, imposing a total blockade “with the avowed object of preventing commodities of all kinds including food for the civilian population from reaching or leaving the British Isles.” In response, therefore, the Allied navies now would prevent all cargoes, contraband or not, from reaching Germany. The U.S. government protested this further restriction of the freedom of the seas, declaring that the new order conferred the rights of a blockading squadron upon British squadrons that were not blockading an enemy coast: Admiral de Chair’s squadron, for example, was not patrolling off German harbors; it was strung out on a line hundreds of miles away between the Shetlands and Norway, the Faeroes and Iceland. Nevertheless, the American protest was relatively mild and a note of triumph appeared when Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, the British ambassador in Washington, wrote to Sir Edward Grey at the end of April, “I think we may say that, roughly speaking, you have achieved a very great diplomatic success in your negotiations with this government. You have asserted the rights of a belligerent in a very severe form because these rights are necessary to the existence of this country.”

  Ironically, the grounds on which Spring-Rice’s message claimed and trumpeted a victory were the same—raison d’état—that the German admirals wished to invoke, but were not to be allowed to use for another two years. For the first three months of the submarine campaign, German U-boat commanders had done their best to abide by the policy of restricted submarine warfare; as a result, the U.S. government had found little about which to complain. Neutral ships had been sunk by mistake, but none were of American registry; neutral citizens had died, but none were American citizens. On March 28, this record was marred when, in the St. George’s Channel, off the Irish coast, U-28 fired a shot across the bow of the 5,000-ton British cargo and passenger liner Falaba. When the vessel halted, Falaba’s master was given ten minutes to abandon ship. While disembarkation proceeded, Falaba continued to send wireless messages requesting assistance; even so, U-28 extended the disembarkation period by another ten minutes and then by still another three minutes. As time was expiring, an armed British trawler appeared, whereupon U-28 promptly put a torpedo into Falaba. A hundred and four lives were lost, including that of an American passenger, Leon C. Thrasher, a mining engineer on his way to a job in South Africa. Thrasher thereby entered history as the first U.S. citizen to be killed at sea by a German U-boat. The Woodrow Wilson administration was divided on how to react: the State Department Counselor, Robert Lansing, described the sinking as “an atrocious act of lawlessness” and argued th
at the Germans must be held to the threatened “strict accountability.” Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, however, insisted that American citizens who traveled on ships of belligerent powers passing through a war zone had no more right to claim immunity than they would if they were traveling across a land battlefield while a battle was being fought. President Woodrow Wilson, although disagreeing with Bryan’s premise, decided that the loss of a single citizen was insufficiently grave to provoke a crisis with Germany. For the moment, Wilson merely asked the German ambassador for more information.

  The month of April 1915 passed in relative calm. Then, on May 3, an American ship, the tanker Gulflight, carrying a cargo of oil from Port Arthur, Texas, to Rouen, was torpedoed without warning. The explosion caused only minor damage and no loss of life on board, and the ship did not sink. But two panic-stricken crew members jumped overboard and were drowned, and that night the tanker’s captain died of a heart attack. Lansing characterized the attack as “wanton and indiscriminate”; again, Wilson asked for more details.

  The German government may have concluded from the limited and technical nature of these enquiries that Americans and their president were inclined to acquiesce in the submarine war, but neither the American government nor its people were as indifferent as they might have seemed. If Wilson was slow to protest, it was because he was struggling to integrate the implications of this series of incidents into his personal structure of political and moral belief. Somehow, from far away, Bethmann-Hollweg sensed the deceptive quality of the apparent calm in Washington. On May 6, he wrote to Admiral Bachmann protesting “the growing number of neutral ships falling victim to submarine warfare,” which may “drive the neutral powers into the camp of our enemies.” Demanding once again that the safety of neutral vessels be guaranteed, the chancellor warned that he “could not be responsible for the political direction of the German empire if neutral nations were to be continually antagonized by U-boat warfare.” Ironically, this letter was written one day before the nightmarish episode that the German chancellor had feared became reality. On May 7, 1915, a few miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, a rocky promontory on the southwest coast of Ireland, a U-boat torpedoed the famous Cunard transatlantic liner Lusitania. Among the vessel’s 1,265 civilian passengers were 128 Americans.

  CHAPTER 29 Lusitania and the American Reaction

  When they were built seven years before the Great War, the Cunard sisters Lusitania and Mauretania were the largest, fastest, most luxurious passenger ships afloat. Each was eight decks high, 785 feet long, displaced 30,395 tons, and could carry 3,000 passengers and crew. Gold and white, glass-domed, Louis XVI dining salons and mahogany-paneled lounges and smoking rooms with huge marble mantelpieces provided a fashionable setting for first-class passengers. For those who preferred not to mingle at all with other travelers, the ships offered suites, each with a parlor with a working fireplace, two bedrooms, and a private dining room with another fireplace. Besides providing comfort, the new ships offered lofty social prestige. “Just now,” said the Philadelphia Inquirer, “the man who came over in the Lusitania takes precedence of the one whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.” Both vessels were powered by four turbine engines, which burned 1,000 tons of coal a day and propelled the ship at an average speed of 24 to 25 knots. The two liners were made capable of this speed for two reasons, one obvious, the other shadowy. Cunard’s stated purpose was to defeat the famous “Atlantic greyhounds” of the North German Lloyd and Hamburg-America Lines and reclaim for Britain the “Blue Riband,” the recognition, eventually embodied in a silver chalice, that signified the fastest passenger ship afloat. Lusitania achieved this triumph on her second voyage from Liverpool to New York, which took only four days, nineteen hours, and fifty-two minutes. Within a few years, the two Cunard ships (and a third sister, Aquitania, which entered service in 1914) were exceeded in size by the White Star liners Olympic and Titanic and then by two immense, 54,000-ton Hamburg-America liners, Vaterland and Imperator, each of which had accommodations for 5,500 passengers and crew. But for sheer speed, the Cunard ships were never overtaken.

  There was another, less public reason for building great speed into the new Cunard liners. Before the war the Admiralty had no fear of submarines as a threat to Britain’s maritime supply lines. Danger to British trade, the Admiralty believed, would come from fast German liners converted to armed merchant cruisers. Accordingly, the Admiralty subsidized the building of Lusitania and her sisters; in return, Cunard agreed to make the vessels available to the government upon request; their obvious use would be as fast British armed merchant cruisers assigned to hunt down their German equivalents. The Cunard ships, therefore, were designed to carry as many as twelve 6-inch guns; the necessary magazines, shell elevators, and revolving gun rings in the deck were installed during construction. When war broke out, Mauretania and Aquitania were requisitioned but Lusitania was left in Cunard service. On September 24, 1914, the Admiralty officially informed the ship line that Lusitania’s role would be to continue running a high-speed service between Liverpool and New York with the Admiralty having first priority on her cargo space. By May 1915, Lusitania was the only giant, prewar ocean greyhound from any country still carrying passengers across the Atlantic.

  It was in this primary role that Lusitania backed away from her pier into the Hudson River just after noon on May 1, 1915, and steamed down through New York harbor to begin her 202nd voyage across the Atlantic. On board, she carried 1,265 passengers, including 129 young children and infants, the bachelor millionaire sportsman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, traveling to England on business concerning racehorses, the theatrical producer Charles Frohman,and a crew of 700; no one aboard, passenger or crew, expressed any unusual worry.

  [Frohman, the most successful impresario of his day, was famous for his mordant show-business wit. When the celebrated English actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell reacted to criticism of her acting by saying that she was an artiste, Frohman assured her quickly, “Madam, your secret is safe with me.”]

  Over this voyage, however, ominous portents had begun to gather. The grimmest was a black-bordered news advertisement published in forty-nine American newspapers the morning the Lusitania sailed:

  NOTICE

  Travelers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes waters adjacent to the British Isles; that in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or any of her allies are liable to destruction in those waters and that travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.

  Imperial German Embassy

  Washington, D.C.

  The advertisement was the work of German diplomats and sympathizers in the United States who possessed what they considered to be strong evidence that Lusitania was carrying contraband in the form of munitions and military supplies on her eastward voyages back to Britain. In addition, they were frustrated by frequent statements in the American press of the greater horrors of submarine warfare as compared to blockade. “The American people cannot visualize the spectacle of a hundred thousand, even a million, German children starving by slow degrees as a result of the British blockade, but they can visualize the pitiful face of a little child drowning amidst the wreckage caused by a German torpedo,” said Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, the German embassy’s press attaché.

  If the German notice worried Lusitania’s passengers, it was not enough to persuade any of them to disembark. The voyage seemed safe. Since Germany’s February commencement of submarine warfare against merchant ships, the liner had made four round-trip voyages unmolested. Should a U-boat spot Lusitania in the war zone, the liner would be flying a neutral American flag. (Colonel Edward House, President Wilson’s special envoy, who traveled to Europe several times on the Lusitania after the war began, noted in his diary on February 5, 191
5, “This afternoon, as we approached the Irish coast, the American flag was raised.”) Cunard and the ship’s captain both had assured the passengers that the big ship could easily outrun any submarine. Even if the worst were to happen, there would be sufficient lifeboats; after the Titanic disaster, Cunard had increased the number of Lusitania’s lifeboats from twenty-two to forty-eight.