Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  THEODATE LOATHED the war. She saw Germany as wholly at fault and rejected German attempts to shift blame to Britain. “Whatever else could they expect when they have insulted England for years, and she is now simply and honorably keeping her agreement with the Triple Alliance?” Theodate wrote, referring to England’s intervention in defense of Belgian neutrality. She longed for a crushing Allied victory that would leave Germany blasted “beyond recognition.” She did not want the United States to get involved, however. The preceding October she had heard from a spirit medium, an acquaintance, who claimed to have received a message from the beyond: “Under no circumstances, whatever, should the United States participate belligerently in the European conflict.” Theodate had forwarded the message to President Wilson.

  What most caught Theodate’s attention in Saturday’s Sun was an item at the top of page 1, about the German Embassy’s warning. This was the first she had heard of it. The only warning of any kind that she had seen thus far was in the “Information for Passengers” brochure she had received from Cunard after buying her ticket, which named her fellow first-class travelers and included this notice: “Passengers are informed that Professional Gamblers are reported as frequently crossing on Atlantic Steamers, and are warned to take precautions accordingly.”

  The Sun cast the German announcement in benign terms, under the headline “Germany Moves to Stop Tours Abroad.” The item included the text of the warning, calling it the first step in a campaign by Germany “to head off American travel to Europe during the coming summer.”

  Theodate told Friend about it and said, “That means of course that they intend to get us.” She was certain, however, that when the Lusitania reached British waters it would receive an escort. The prospect gave her comfort.

  NELLIE HUSTON, thirty-one years old and on her way back to England after nearly a year staying with her aunt and uncle in Chicago, began a long letter to a woman named Ruth, which she planned to continue writing throughout the voyage. It was full of chatty details. She was traveling in second class and noted how crowded it was because of the additional passengers from the Cameronia—so crowded that the breakfast service had been divided into two sittings. She complained that she had been assigned to the first, at 7:30 A.M., which meant she would have to get up each morning at 7:00. She noted as well that the day was surprisingly cold and that she was glad she had brought her heavy coat.

  A lot of her friends and family knew she was sailing that day on the Lusitania. “My!” she wrote. “The mail I got today. The steward who was giving it out was amused. He said it might be my birthday.” Friends and relatives had sent her letters and gifts. “I had a pair of silk stockings from Prue and a piece of silk from Aunt Ruth and a rose. I had cards from Nellie Casson, Will Hobson, Tom, Edith Klaas and a nice letter from Lu which I’m going to answer.”

  Some were concerned about her voyage. “I’m so surprised to hear that Will and Bee cried, I didn’t think it would worry them.” She herself hated to cry, but, she wrote, “I’ve felt like doing it quite a lot since I’ve left.”

  UPON ENTERING international waters, Turner slowed the ship. In the distance, three large vessels materialized from the haze. These were British warships, stationed there to keep the Vaterland and the other German liners locked in New York Harbor. Turner ordered “full astern” to bring the Lusitania to a complete stop.

  Two of the three ships were cruisers, HMS Bristol and Essex; the third was the Caronia, a Cunard liner converted to military use and now heavily armed. Turner had once been its captain. The two cruisers lay off the Lusitania’s starboard side, the Caronia off the port, each at a distance of about a “cable’s length,” equivalent to a tenth of a nautical mile, or roughly 600 feet. All three warships lowered a small boat, and the sailors in each began rowing toward the Lusitania, through “swirling mist-veils,” as Capt. James Bisset, the Caronia’s master, recalled. The boats carried mail bound for England. “There was scarcely a breeze to ruffle the surface of the ocean,” Bisset wrote. “A light mist clung around the ships, like a shroud.”

  Bisset spotted Captain Turner on the bridge, and Staff Captain Anderson. He knew the two men well. Some years earlier Bisset had served under both as junior third officer on the Umbria, an older passenger liner.

  Turner and Anderson stepped out onto the port-side wing of the bridge and waved to the officers on the Caronia’s bridge. Everyone seemed to know one another, having served under, beside, or over one another through the years. After Turner and Anderson went back inside the bridge, the Lusitania’s second officer, Percy Hefford, appeared on the port wing. “He was a special friend of mine,” Bisset recalled. Before both joined Cunard, they had served together on an ancient tramp steamer. The thing Hefford had wanted most was to serve aboard the Lusitania. “Now, there he was,” Bisset wrote.

  The two men used their arms to semaphore greetings and good-byes.

  “Cheerio!”

  “Good luck!”

  “Good voyage!”

  After the boats pulled away to return to their respective ships, Captain Turner gave the order for maximum speed. Full ahead. The Lusitania’s giant propellers raised a Niagara of water at the stern, and the ship began to move. Turner sounded his foghorn three times, the “Sailor’s Farewell.”

  Ordinarily, all the Lusitania’s furnaces and boilers would be fully engaged during a crossing, with all four funnels belching smoke, but the war had caused a decline in travel so dramatic that Cunard had been compelled to seek cost reductions wherever it could find them. Turner was under orders issued the preceding November to run the ship using only three of its four boiler rooms, for a savings of 1,600 tons of coal per trip. But this also reduced the ship’s maximum speed by 16 percent, from 25 knots to 21, ironic considering the ship’s original mandate. Though seemingly a modest reduction, it nonetheless cut the distance the Lusitania could travel each day by 100 nautical miles, adding one full day to a transatlantic crossing.

  A man aboard one of the warships took a photograph, believed to be the last ever taken of the Lusitania, which showed the ship steaming off into the mist-shrouded Atlantic, smoke pouring from just three funnels. Cunard did not publicize the change, and few, if any, passengers knew it had been made.

  ROOM 40

  CADENCE

  INTERCEPTED POSITION REPORTS: U-20

  SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1915

  2:00 A.M.: “IN 25D AREA 7 (55.21 N [LATITUDE] 3.15 E [LONGITUDE])”

  4:00 A.M.: “IN 157A AREA 5 (55.39 N 2.45 E)”

  6:00 A.M.: “IN 124A AREA 5 (55.51 N 2.15 E)”

  8:00 A.M.: “IN 59A AREA 5 (56.15 N 1.18 E)”

  REPORTS CEASE.

  PART II

  JUMP ROPE AND CAVIAR

  U-20

  “THE BLIND MOMENT”

  BY 8:25 A.M., SUNDAY, FAIR ISLE WAS VISIBLE 3 SEA MILES ahead, to starboard, but Schwieger could not yet make out the “Mainland” of the Orkneys archipelago, off the northernmost tip of Scotland, which by now he expected to see off his port side. The Mainland was the largest island in the Orkneys and had the highest elevation.

  On this third day of the cruise, there was new tension in the boat. U-20 was about to leave “Bright Hans” behind and enter the closely watched waters of the North Atlantic, north of Scotland, in the vicinity of the big British base at Scapa Flow. Schwieger could not have been surprised, therefore, when just after logging his location, he spotted two destroyers in the distance, moving with a deliberation that suggested they were on patrol.

  He ordered a fast dive, climbed down into the conning tower, and closed the hatch behind him.

  SIMPLE ENOUGH in concept, diving was in fact a complex and perilous process that took time and left a U-boat exposed to attack. With a well-trained crew, a submarine of U-20’s class could descend from a fully surfaced condition to a level deep enough to clear the hulls of the largest ships in as little as seventy-five seconds. In a crisis, however, each of those seconds could seem very long. Certain older boat
s needed from two and a half minutes to as many as five. Their crews nicknamed them “suicide boats.” While diving, a U-boat was at its most vulnerable, subject to ramming by warships, and to gunfire from long distances away. Penetration by a single shell would prevent a U-boat from submerging, thus eliminating its one advantage and its sole means of escape.

  The men controlling U-20’s bow and stern hydroplanes—horizontal rudders—now adjusted them for maximum dive, bow planes down, stern planes up. To submerge, a submarine did not simply fill its dive tanks with water and sink. As the boat moved forward under power, water flowed over the planes in the same way that air passes over the wings and flaps of an aircraft, driving the boat below the surface. Seawater would be pumped into the tanks only to the degree necessary to achieve a particular depth. Finding this point took skill, for it varied from day to day, even moment to moment, as sea conditions changed and the weight of the boat steadily declined. The firing of a torpedo made a U-boat suddenly 3,000 pounds lighter. Even the consumption of food diminished the boat’s weight by a perceptible amount. The boxes and crates in which food was stored went overboard; the supply of fresh water, a significant source of weight, fell daily.

  The buoyancy of seawater changed in accord with shifts in temperature and salinity. In the Baltic, boats descended much more readily than in the more heavily salted waters of the North Sea. A submarine passing the mouth of a river might suddenly find itself dropping because of the outrush of fresh water, like an airplane passing through an air pocket. Changes in water temperature due to current and depth also affected buoyancy. A miscalculation could cause catastrophe. A submarine might bob unexpectedly to the surface within view of a destroyer.

  Bad weather further complicated things. High waves could prevent the hydroplanes from digging fully into the sea. Commander Paul Koenig recalled one terrifying morning when, after surfacing into a storm, he spotted the smoke plume of a nearby destroyer and ordered an emergency dive. The men in the control room below opened vents to admit water into the tanks at both sides of the bow to reduce buoyancy. The boat stayed on the surface. Koenig watched through one of the tiny windows in the conning tower with increasing anxiety as each new wave lifted the bow into the air.

  Koenig ordered the hydroplanes tilted to their maximum angles and called for full speed ahead, hoping the acceleration would increase the downward drive of the planes. Still the boat stayed on the surface, rising and falling in the waves.

  At last the planes dug in, and the boat began to descend. But now a new problem presented itself. The boat plummeted downward at an angle so steep that Koenig had to grasp the periscope eyepiece to keep from falling. The “manometer,” which registered depth, showed a startling rate of descent. Then came an impact. Men were propelled forward, along with everything else in the boat that wasn’t bolted in place.

  There was silence. The face of the manometer cast a reddish light through the control room. One officer broke the tension. “Well, we seem to have arrived,” he said.

  The boat stood at a steep angle, about 36 degrees. The stern oscillated up and down. The engines continued running, “raving at intervals in a way that made the whole boat roar from stem to stern,” Koenig wrote. The chief engineer was first to grasp what was happening. He ordered full stop.

  Koenig understood. The submarine’s bow was lodged in the seabed, which here, according to his charts, was 31 meters below the surface, about 100 feet. His boat was twice that in length. With the action of the waves, the stern at intervals protruded from the surface, and the propellers spun in open air, stirring a geyser of foam visible a long way off. Koenig feared—expected—that at any moment a shell from the destroyer would come crashing through the hull.

  Now, with the problem defined, Koenig directed the crew to fill the stern diving tanks and blow water from the bow. Gradually the submarine rose and righted but stayed safely submerged. Koenig ordered full speed and away.

  IN DIVING, timing was crucial. As U-20 began its descent, its engineers shut down the diesel engines and engaged the electric. All vents and exhaust ports leading to the exterior of the hull had to be closed and hatches sealed. Once this was done, Schwieger gave the order to begin admitting water to the dive tanks. Air was forced out through valves at the top, and seawater entered through valves below. Suction engines helped draw the water in. To speed the process, Schwieger sent a contingent of men into the bow.

  Just as U-20 neared its cruising depth, Schwieger ordered air pumped back into the tanks to halt the boat’s descent. The crew always knew when this point was reached because the pumps would engage with an angry growl.

  In the control room, the helmsmen maintained depth by adjusting the hydroplanes. To ascend to periscope depth, they maneuvered only with the planes, not by filling the dive tanks with air. This allowed more precision and reduced the possibility that the boat might unexpectedly surface. While submerged, a U-boat had to keep moving at all times, held trim and steady by the hydroplanes. The only exception was when a boat was in shallow waters, where it could sit on the bottom. In deep seas like the North Atlantic, this was impossible, for the pressures at the seabed would crush a boat’s hull. The constant forward motion caused a problem. When the periscope was up, it produced a wake on the surface, a white feather of water visible for miles.

  As U-20 descended, all activity ceased for a few moments, save for those tasks that made no noise. As always, the crew listened for leaks and monitored internal air pressure.

  Then came the moment crews found so thrilling, when the boat was fully submerged and moving forward through the sea in a way unlike that of any other vessel, not grinding through waves like surface ships, but gliding, like a bird in air.

  A sightless bird, however. The windows in the conning tower afforded a view only of things near at hand and in any case were usually covered by steel shutters. Traveling like this required a great deal of confidence, because Schwieger now had no way of knowing what lay ahead. 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.

  SHORTLY AFTER NOON on Sunday, Schwieger gave orders to ascend. Now came “the blind moment,” as commanders called it, that dismayingly long interval just before the periscope broke the surface. Everyone listened carefully for the sounds of ships transmitted through the hull—the rush of water past a prow, the thrum of propellers. There was no other way to tell what lay above. As Schwieger stared through the eyepiece, the water became brighter and more clear. These seconds were, according to one commander, “some of the most nerve-racking that a man can endure.”

  The biggest fear for Schwieger and fellow commanders was that the periscope would emerge within close range of a destroyer, or worse, in the destroyer’s path. One U-boat surfaced so close to a ship that the vessel’s black hull filled the lens. The commander at first thought he was looking at a particularly dark storm cloud.

  The instant Schwieger’s periscope cleared the surface, he made a fast 360-degree sweep of the surrounding seascape. He saw nothing of concern. Here a U-boat had a significant advantage over surface ships. Schwieger could see the smoke coming from the funnels of steamships at a great distance, but the lookouts aboard those ships had to be much closer to spot him.

  Schwieger gave the order to bring the submarine fully to the surface. Now, in addition to using the hydroplanes, the crew adjusted the air-water mix in the dive tanks to increase buoyancy. Within U-20, the crew heard a roar as compressed air was blasted into the tanks to force seawater out. Sometimes a commander chose to come all the way up, exposing the boat’s deck; at other times he ran “awash,” with just the conning tower above the surface, imparting a sensation akin to walking on water.

  U-20 EMERGED, but now Schwieger found a situation very different than his initial view through the periscope had led him to expect. The sea ahead was swarming with British patrol vessels—six of
them—strung in a line between Fair Isle and the northernmost island of the Orkneys, North Ronaldsay, whose lighthouse was familiar to any mariner traversing these waters.

  And behind him, Schwieger spotted two more destroyers. He had seen these earlier in the day but believed he had outdistanced them. In his log he wrote, “they heave in sight again, course towards ‘U20’; one of the patrol boats turns towards us.”

  LUSITANIA

  A SUNDAY AT SEA

  AFTER HIS RENDEZVOUS WITH THE THREE BRITISH warships, Captain Turner brought the Lusitania to the speed he hoped to maintain throughout the voyage, 21 knots. He set a northeasterly bearing to begin a “circle course” that would take him across the Atlantic. This being May, when icebergs calved in northern seas, Turner chose the “long course,” which veered farther south than the route followed in late summer and fall. Assuming all went well, Turner would arrive at the Mersey Bar outside Liverpool Harbor shortly before dawn on Saturday, May 8. Timing was crucial. Large ships could cross the bar only at high tide. Before the war, this had posed no particular problem. If a captain arrived too early or too late he could just stop and loiter awhile in the Irish Sea. But now that any such pause could prove fatal, captains timed their arrivals to cross the bar without stopping.