Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  In fact, there was reason for concern, but it was one of which Lusitania’s passengers were unaware. The ship’s cargo space was—just as the Germans claimed—being used to carry American munitions to Britain. As Lusitania prepared for her last voyage, 1,248 cases of 3-inch artillery shells—four shells to a case—and 4,927 boxes of rifle ammunition—each case containing 1,000 rounds and the total weighing 173 tons, which included ten tons of explosive powder—had been placed in the liner’s cargo. Whether this cargo exploded when a torpedo hit the ship has been the subject of many years of passionate, highly technical, and still unresolved debate.

  The ocean voyage was serene. Captain William Turner, a short, stocky, red-faced man known as Bowler Bill for his taste in off-duty headgear, took his meals alone on the bridge to avoid sitting with passengers, whom he had once described as “a lot of bloody monkeys.” As Lusitania approached the German-designated war zone, he asked male passengers to help keep her dark by not lighting their cigars on deck after dinner. At 8:00 a.m. on May 7, Turner was on his bridge. Because dense fog had lowered visibility, he slowed the ship from 21 to 15 knots and began sounding the foghorn. By mid-morning, when the mists were blowing away, he increased speed to 18 knots and set a course for Queenstown on the Irish coast. His plan was to pass through the St. George’s Channel, between Ireland and Wales, and be off the Liverpool bar the next morning at 4:30.

  Meanwhile, on that same morning of May 7, Captain Walther Schwieger was standing in the conning tower of U-20 near the entrance to the St. George’s Channel, staring into the fog enshrouding his submarine while he charged his electric batteries. The previous day had brought him success: using three torpedoes, he had sunk two British ships. Now, running low on fuel and with only three torpedoes left, Schwieger made a decision: if the fog had not cleared by noon, he would end his cruise and return to Wilhelmshaven. He ordered the boat to submerge and went below for breakfast. Just before noon, he heard the sound of a ship’s engines coming from the surface over his head. Allowing ten minutes for the vessel to move away, Schwieger carefully rose to periscope depth and saw the British light cruiser Juno zigzagging away from him toward Queenstown. The fog had cleared, the sea was calm, and the sun was bright. He surfaced. And then, at 1:20 p.m., Schwieger saw a plume of smoke fourteen miles to the southwest. He waited, and the source of the smoke grew larger and took shape as a massive steamship with four tall funnels. Submerging, Schwieger set a course that would intercept this vessel at a point approximately ten miles off a rocky coastal promontory called the Old Head of Kinsale.

  Two British publications, the 1914 editions of Jane’s Fighting Ships and Brassey’s Naval Annual, were standard issue aboard every German U-boat, and both publications placed Lusitania in the category of “Royal Navy Reserved Merchant Cruiser”—in effect, an armed liner. U-20 also carried a German merchant marine officer whose duty was to help identify any merchant ship targets whose nationality was in doubt. Watching the approaching steamer through the periscope, this civilian officer became increasingly certain of what he saw: “Either the Lusitania or the Mauretania, both armed cruisers used for carrying troops,” he told Schwieger. (In fact, at that moment, Mauretania was 150 miles away at Avonmouth, taking aboard 5,000 soldiers for the Dardanelles.) Schwieger had in his sights what he considered a legitimate target.

  At 2:10 p.m., he fired a single torpedo at a range of 800 yards. The torpedo struck the starboard side of the ship just behind the bridge and slightly forward of the first funnel. No second torpedo was fired, but the detonation of the first was followed by a second, larger explosion in the same part of the ship. The forward superstructure was shattered, the bow ruptured, and fire and smoke billowed along the decks. According to Schwieger’s log, Lusitania immediately slowed and heeled to starboard with water rising quickly over her bow. Still submerged, U-20 came closer and made a circuit of the sinking ship. Staring through the periscope, the civilian pilot said, “Yes, by God, it’s the Lusitania.”

  On board Lusitania, some passengers were still at lunch and others were strolling on deck enjoying the spring sunshine when the torpedo struck. At first, there was concern, but no panic. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt devoted himself to “trying to put life jackets on women and children.” Charles Frohman, smoking an after-lunch cigar, was handed a life jacket, but “soon gave it away to a woman.” Together, passengers and crew members began tying other life jackets onto wicker baskets brought from the nursery, in which infants remained sleeping. When it became apparent that the ship’s rapid list to starboard would make it difficult to fill and launch the lifeboats, concern turned to alarm, then terror. The lifeboats on the starboard side now hung far out over the sea, while those on the port side swung in over the rails or against the side of the ship. Several lifeboats were released at one end only; the first boat launched in this manner was filled with women and children who spilled helplessly into the water seventy feet below. Other boats, lowered too hastily and steeply, touched water bow or stern first and foundered immediately. Still others smashed inboard against the side of the vessel, crushing their passengers as the lifeboat disintegrated. At the end, as Lusitania’s bow plunged toward the granite seafloor 300 feet below, the liner’s stern rose high in the air; at this angle, guy wires snapped and towering seventy-eight-foot funnels and even taller wireless masts toppled onto the decks. Rumbling internal explosions of steam hurled debris, bodies, and huge bubbles of water into the air. When the clouds of steam had cleared, Lusitania was gone. Since the torpedo struck, eighteen minutes had passed. Only six of the liner’s forty-eight lifeboats floated amid the wreckage, and hundreds of men and women were struggling individually in the calm, green, sunlit sea. A ship’s junior officer swimming through the wreckage found himself listening to the cries of infants floating nearby in their wicker baskets. There was nothing he could do. Gradually, the baskets sank.

  Twelve hundred and one people drowned in the catastrophe, among them ninety-four children, of whom thirty-five were babies. Vanderbilt, Frohman, and 126 other Americans died; a total of 764 lives were saved. More would have been rescued if the cruiser Juno, hurrying back from Queenstown and insight of the survivors in the water, had not received a peremptory signal from the Admiralty, ordering her back into port. This command, stemming from the policy of “no live bait in the presence of submarines” laid down after the sinking of Cressy and her sisters, resulted in the passage of almost two hours before fishing trawlers arrived and began pulling survivors out of the sea.

  Most of the world was horror-stricken. The first bodies brought in were photographed and the pictures—mostly those of dead children—were circulated in newspapers, ostensibly to help relatives identify their dead. Photographs of corpses recovered later were never seen by the public, but the American consul in Queenstown reported that “faces registered every shading of the grotesque and hideous. The lips and noses were eaten away by sea birds and the eyes gouged out . . . the trunks were bloated and distended with gases and the limbs were partially eaten away or bitten clean off so that stumps of raw bone were left protruding.” The coroner’s jury at Kinsale charged the submarine’s officers “and the Emperor and Government of Germany, under whose orders they acted, with the crime of willful and wholesale murder.”

  Schwieger entered in U-20’s log that he had watched the calamity with mixed feelings, but his superiors and many of his countrymen were jubilant. Admiral von Pohl signaled: “My highest appreciation of commander and crew for success achieved of which High Seas Fleet is proud.” The Koln-ische Volkszeitung declared: “With joyful pride we contemplate the latest deed of our navy.” Across Germany, schoolchildren were granted a holi-day. A private citizen in Munich created a copper medal depicting, on one side, passengers lining up at a booth from which a skeleton was issuing tickets, and on the other side, the sinking Lusitania, crammed with guns, armored cars, and airplanes.

  [Anti-German feeling in Britain and other countries was vigorously promoted by the activity of an American
citizen living in London. The German in Munich stopped when he had struck forty-four medals. One of these fell into British hands, and 300,000 copies were made in Britain and distributed around the world as evidence of German barbarism. These copies were produced by Gordon Selfridge, an American who had opened a department store in Oxford Street in 1909 and subsequently become a friend of Asquith’s. In 1937, Selfridge became a naturalized British subject.]

  From the point of view of American and international law, the munitions aboard Lusitania would have justified the stopping of the ship and—once its cargo had been identified and its passengers and crew allowed to take to lifeboats—its destruction. But the sudden, brutal torpedoing and the overwhelming loss of innocent lives made law appear irrelevant and shocked the world. Before the sinking, Americans had been angry at Great Britain because of the blockade; it was likely that, over time, this resentment would have festered and grown worse. After the sinking of Lusitania, American indignation and, ultimately, wrath were focused on the German submarine war, not the British blockade.

  The critical question for Britain and Germany was how the American people, and particularly President Woodrow Wilson, would react. Two former presidents, Roosevelt and Taft, called for war. From London, the U.S. ambassador, Walter H. Page, reported that unofficial opinion in England was that the United States must fight or forfeit all respect. Colonel Edward House, the president’s friend and confidential emissary and Page’s guest of honor at an embassy dinner, emotionally told the others around the table that within a month the United States would be at war. In Berlin, U.S. Ambassador James W. Gerard had a similar premonition; he reserved sleeping-car accommodations on a train for Switzerland for himself and his wife.

  The president of the United States had a different reaction. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, a man of iron Calvinist principles and deep Presbyterian faith, believed that his country had a special mission in the world. America had been spared the history of tyranny and corruption that had debased older societies. Coming late into being, it now stood as man’s hope; its destiny was to guide, liberalize, and succor all less fortunate nations and peoples. This mission and destiny were not to be squandered by rushing heedlessly into a European war. Wilson’s faith applied to all aspects of his life, political and personal. “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion,” he once told a friend visiting the White House. At the core of his belief was the conviction of being one of God’s elect, a status justified only by unremitting effort to accomplish good. Wilson’s Calvinist God, as described by the president’s biographer August Heckscher, “was stern, absolute in his judgements, and responsible for every event in history and in the lives of individual men and women. To him, and not to any worldly powers, the believer owed a total obedience.”

  Wilson acquired this creed from his father, the Reverend Joseph Ruggles Wilson, a Presbyterian minister of Scottish descent who delivered it from his pulpits in Staunton, Virginia; Augusta, Georgia; and Columbia, South Carolina. Thus imbued, eighteen-year-old Tommy Wilson, a tall, thin boy with a long face, gray eyes, sandy hair, and large ears, arrived at the College of New Jersey, eventually to be renamed Princeton University. (Later, at his mother’s request, Wilson renamed himself, taking up her maiden name, Woodrow.) He received a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School and a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins; he held professorships of history at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton; he became president of Princeton, and, in 1910, governor of New Jersey. He was immediately considered a presidential possibility, but at the 1912 Democratic convention in Baltimore, he won only on the forty-sixth roll-call ballot. In the November election, Wilson won on a plurality, receiving a million fewer popular votes than Taft and Roosevelt combined, but 435 electoral votes against 84 for Theodore Roosevelt and 8 for President William Howard Taft.

  Once in office, Wilson easily dominated his administration, particularly in foreign policy. Wilson was his own secretary of state.

  [Wilson’s secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska, was an outsized figure in American history who occupied an awkward position in Wilson’s first administration. As a leader of the free-silver movement and an opponent of the gold standard, Bryan had captured the 1896 Democratic convention in Chicago with his celebrated cry, “I shall not aid in pressing down upon the bleeding brow of labor this crown of thorns; I shall not help crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” On the spot, at the age of thirty-six, the orator was nominated for the presidency. Defeated by William McKinley, he continued as the champion of the agrarian West and South against the eastern bankers and industrialists. Nominated twice again for president—in 1900 and 1908—he did not choose to run a fourth time in 1912, but threw his support to Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. Wilson, becoming president, offered Bryan the office of secretary of state in gratitude for the Nebraskan’s role at the convention and also because his friends advised him that not to do so would be “political suicide.”

  In Washington, Bryan quickly became the despair of foreign diplomats: “talking to Mr. Bryan is like writing on ice,” said the British ambassador. When he served grape juice instead of wine to European ambassadors, he became a subject of ridicule; his relations with the press deteriorated until “by self-inflicted degrees [he] passed from the vulnerable to the absurd.” Nevertheless, because of his fame, his oratorical prowess, and his thirty-year leadership of the Democratic party, Bryan, four years younger than Wilson, always seemed the older man.]

  On important matters, he cared little about the views of members of his Cabinet, but he kept a tight finger on the pulse of public opinion. Wilson’s own underlying sympathies were with Britain and the Allies and he told the British ambassador, “Everything that I love most in the world is at stake. . . . If they [the Germans] succeed, we shall be forced to take such measures of defense here as will be fatal to our form of government and to American ideals.” Wilson’s aversion to war and his sense of America’s higher mission were, he was certain, shared by the overwhelming majority of his countrymen; Congress, he knew, had strong isolationist leanings. Accordingly, he was determined that America remain neutral. From the beginning, the effort to preserve this neutrality was arduous; ultimately, it became herculean. At bottom, the difference between Great Britain and Germany was that the injuries inflicted by the two belligerents upon America were of unequal magnitude: the British navy stopped ships and sometimes seized property; the German navy sank ships and sometimes killed people.

  Wilson had been at lunch on Saturday, May 8, 1915, when news of the Lusitania sinking was brought to him. By evening, he knew that over a thousand lives, many of them American, had been lost. Quietly, he slipped out into the night and, ignoring a light rain, walked alone along Pennsylvania Avenue. Returning to the White House, he retreated into his study. Over the weekend, he consulted no one, went to church, played golf, and, on Sunday evening, sat down to write the speech he was scheduled to give in Philadelphia the following day. On Monday, he addressed 15,000 people, many of them newly naturalized citizens. America, he told them, was a peaceful nation and therefore, “the example of America must be a special example . . . the example, not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.” In Philadelphia, Wilson’s words stirred prolonged cheering; when this language reached England, mention of the word “America” was publicly booed and hissed.

  [The Lusitania crisis coincided with turbulent events in the president’s private life. On August 6, 1914, the second day of the war in Europe, Ellen Wilson, Woodrow’s wife of twenty-nine years, had died of Bright’s disease in their White House bedroom. On May 4, 1915, three days before the sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson had declared his love to a widow named Edith Galt and had been gently reb
uffed. Undeterred, Wilson wrote to her after his Philadelphia speech, “I do not know just what I said in Philadelphia . . . because my heart was in such a whirl.”]

  On Tuesday, May 11, the Cabinet met and Wilson read aloud the typed draft of a note he had written to Germany regarding the Lusitania. In the note he expressed disbelief that the German government could have sanctioned so illegal and inhumane an act and then went on to explore in moral terms the nature of submarine warfare against merchant shipping:

  The government of the United States desires to call the attention of the Imperial German Government . . . to . . . the practical impossibility of employing submarines in the destruction of commerce without disregarding those rules of fairness, reason, justice and humanity which all modern opinion regards as imperative. It is practically impossible for the officers of a submarine at sea to visit a merchantman at sea and examine her papers and cargo. It is practically impossible for them to make a prize of her; and if they cannot put a prize crew on board her, they cannot sink her without leaving her crew and all on board to the mercy of the sea in her small boats. . . . Manifestly, submarines cannot be used against merchantmen . . . without an inevitable violation of many sacred principles of justice and humanity.

  Despite the careful, pedagogic tone of Wilson’s language, Bryan objected that the draft was too pro-British and reiterated his opposition to Americans traveling on ships belonging to nations at war. Robert Lansing, the State Department Counselor, riposted that it was too late for that; the American government already had told American citizens that it would hold the German government to “a strict accountability” for American lives and property. The United States “has permitted in silence hundreds of American citizens to travel in British steamships crossing the war zone.” Now, some of them had died. The only course, Lansing urged, was to demand an official disavowal of the attack and a guarantee that it would not happen again. Bryan disagreed and demanded that the United States treat the British and Ger-man systems of economic coercion—blockade and submarine warfare—as equally objectionable; whatever protest was sent to Berlin, he said, must be balanced by an equally vigorous protest to London. The secretary of state was overruled and the American note sent to Berlin emphasized the right of American citizens to sail wherever they wished on whatever ship they chose.