Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  They could not see each other too often, lest they draw “unwelcome publicity,” she wrote; and when they did see each other, it had to be at the White House, or during a drive with a chaperone always at hand, whether Helen Bones, or Dr. Grayson, or Wilson’s daughter Margaret. A car full of Secret Service men invariably followed. The only wholly private means of communication was by mail, and so their letters continued, his ever passionate and filled with declamations of love, hers welcoming and warm but at the same time curiously distant.

  IN BERLIN, Germany’s Chancellor Bethmann was growing increasingly perturbed. The war in the trenches was not going well, and he feared that Germany’s U-boats might make things much worse. A month earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm had issued an order that permitted U-boat commanders to keep their vessels submerged when attacking merchant ships in order to avoid the danger inherent in surfacing and approaching suspected enemy freighters to first confirm their identity. The effect was to give commanders still more freedom. Combined with improved spring weather at sea, this had led to a startling increase in attacks on neutrals, like that against the American tanker Gulflight.

  On Thursday, May 6, Bethmann wrote a letter to Germany’s top naval official, in which he complained that over the preceding week U-boats had sunk “more and more” neutral ships. “This fact is eminently bound not only to alter our good relations with the neutral states but also to create the gravest complications and, finally, to throw those states into the enemy’s camp.” The empire’s situation was “tense” enough as it was, he wrote, and warned, “I cannot accept the responsibility of seeing our relations with the neutral states further worsened, to which the pursuit of the submarine war in its present form will certainly lead.”

  He demanded that the naval high command “take necessary measures to guarantee that our submarines will in all circumstances avoid attacking neutral ships.”

  THAT EVENING, the Washington Times reported that four more ships had been sunk, including two neutral steamers and an English schooner. Two of the ships had been attacked by submarines; the other two were destroyed by a sea mine and shellfire from a German warship.

  THE LUSITANIA was now two days out from Liverpool. At midnight that Thursday, May 6, the powerful German transmitter at Norddeich broadcast a message to all U-boats that the Lusitania would begin its return trip to New York on May 15.

  This message was intercepted and relayed to Room 40.

  U-20

  FOG

  SCHWIEGER AND HIS CREW SPENT A PEACEFUL NIGHT FAR out at sea. At five o’clock Friday morning, May 7, he ordered the submarine back to the surface and climbed into the conning tower. He shifted to diesel power and began charging the batteries below.

  At intervals U-20 passed through mist and clarity. “From time to time, it clears up a little,” Schwieger wrote. These brief periods of clearing at first gave hope of better visibility to come, but soon all sunshine disappeared and the fog returned as dense as ever.

  It was discouraging and affirmed Schwieger’s earlier decision not to proceed to Liverpool. He later recounted the story of that morning to his friend and fellow U-boat commander Max Valentiner. The heavy fog allowed “small chance of sinking anything,” Schwieger told him. “At the same time, a destroyer steaming through the fog might stumble over us before we knew anything about it.”

  Schwieger wrote in his War Log, “Since the fog didn’t subside, decided already to begin the return trip now.”

  He set a new course for home. As far as he was concerned, this patrol was over.

  PART III

  DEAD WAKE

  THE IRISH SEA

  ENGINES ABOVE

  EARLY FRIDAY MORNING A NUMBER OF PASSENGERS awoke and dressed and climbed to the topmost decks to watch the sun come up. Although sunrise would not officially occur until 5:30, already the eastern sky was beginning to brighten. Elbridge and Maude Thompson of Seymour, Indiana, both thirty-two years old and traveling in first class, were in position by 4:30 A.M., as were second-cabin passengers Belle, forty-nine, and Theodore Naish, fifty-nine, of Kansas City. At about five, the two couples spotted a warship off the port side, distant, traveling fast on a course parallel to the Lusitania. Mrs. Thompson called it a “battleship,” though in fact it was the HMS Partridge, a high-speed destroyer with three funnels. Aboard the Partridge, the officers and crew of the early morning watch also saw the Lusitania.

  For early risers like the Naishes and Thompsons the sight of this robust warship was a comfort. Its presence affirmed the reassuring remarks Captain Turner had made at the previous night’s concert. Said Mrs. Naish, “We had been told that we were protected all the way by warships, wireless, and that submarine destroyers would escort us in the channel.” By “channel” she was referring to the St. George’s Channel.

  The Partridge had no such orders. The destroyer, capable of making over 30 knots, continued past at a brisk pace.

  AT ABOUT 6:00 A.M. the Lusitania encountered heavy fog. Captain Turner reduced speed to 15 knots and ordered the ship’s foghorn activated. Like other passengers aboard, the Naishes had a penchant for timing things, a function perhaps of the fact that there was little else to do aboard ship. They clocked the blasts of the foghorn at one a minute. Theodore found the horn unsettling. “I do not like this,” he told his wife; “it is too much like calling for trouble.”

  Throughout the ship, passengers awoke abruptly and upon looking out their portholes and windows saw only a milky blur. Charles Lauriat stayed in bed until his usual shipboard wake-up time of eight o’clock, then got up and took his usual sea bath. This morning he had little enthusiasm for the process. “As the horn was blowing and the weather was thick, I returned to my berth for a few hours’ extra snooze. I instructed the steward that if he didn’t hear from me by 12 o’clock he was to call me, as that would give me ample time to get ready for lunch at one.” The foghorn seemed not to bother Lauriat, possibly because of his inside room and its lack of portholes.

  Captain Turner placed extra lookouts to watch for other vessels. One of these was Leo Thompson, a crewman assigned “special lookout” duty for the two-hour watch that began at 10:00 A.M. He climbed the ladder to the crow’s nest, about one-third the way up the forward mast. There he and another crewman, George Clinton, were to spend the next two hours staring into the fog, sometimes with marine glasses—Thompson owned a pair of his own—sometimes just with the naked eye. It was tedious but crucial work.

  Fog was dangerous, especially in crowded waters like these. But it also afforded protection from submarines. In heavy fog, only chance could bring a submarine commander close enough to a ship to see it through his periscope or from his conning tower, and if he was that close, he was too close, at great risk of collision. As long as the fog persisted, Captain Turner had little cause to worry about U-boats.

  At eleven o’clock, the fog began to dissipate.

  IN THE crow’s nest Thompson and Clinton now had the extraordinary experience of moving through the dispersing fog as if flying in an aircraft through clouds. At intervals sun warmed their perch and leavened the morning chill. Sometime between eleven and noon, Thompson caught his first sight of the Irish coast. He was able to see it over the top of the fog, but only with his binoculars, and even then the terrain was obscured by mist. What he saw, he said later, was “just the loom of the land through the haze.”

  He called out to the bridge below, “Land on the port beam.”

  The fog continued to fade, and soon the decks were bathed in a yellowing mist that foretold sunshine to come.

  IN LONDON, a mosaic of information had by now accumulated in Blinker Hall’s intelligence division and in Room 40 that showed that only one submarine was in the waters off County Cork, and that it had to be U-20, commanded by Capt. Walther Schwieger, a talented and aggressive commander.

  As the morning progressed, more information arrived, in the form of two messages that provided additional details about the demise of the Centurion. The ship had been attacked
at 1:00 P.M. Thursday; all forty-four of its crew were rescued after spending ten hours at sea in lifeboats. One message stated, “Number and directions of submarine unknown.”

  But by then, news about the attacks on the Centurion, the Candidate, and the schooner Earl of Lathom was already in Liverpool newspapers. Alfred Allen Booth, chairman of Cunard, learned of the attacks while reading his morning paper, over breakfast at his home. The meaning was clear, at least to him. He knew his company’s flagship was due to travel the same waters that very day.

  Booth quit breakfast and rushed to see the senior naval officer at Liverpool, Capt. Harry Stileman, and pleaded with him to take measures to protect the Lusitania. Booth urged that a message be sent to Turner, notifying him that the two Harrison Line ships had been torpedoed and sunk. Under war rules, Booth was not himself empowered to send a warning, or any other command, directly to Turner. At the start of the war, all ships of British registry came under the dominion of the Admiralty’s trade division, to give the Admiralty maximum flexibility in commandeering ships for military use, as well as to prevent confusion that might arise if conflicting orders were sent to a ship from both its owners and the Admiralty, a circumstance that Cunard chairman Alfred Booth conceded could be “very dangerous.”

  Exactly what else occurred during Booth’s meeting with Admiral Stileman is unclear, but Booth came away believing that a detailed message would be sent and that the Admiralty would order the Lusitania to divert to Queenstown, well short of Liverpool, until the immediate U-boat threat was past.

  OFF IRELAND, the Lusitania moved through pockets of fog, but visibility improved by the minute, and the threat of collision rapidly receded. Turner ordered the foghorn deactivated. Now, however, the risk of detection by a submarine increased.

  Anxiety on the bridge rose sharply with the arrival, at 11:30 A.M., of a wireless message from the Admiralty, which stated: “Submarines active in Southern part of Irish channel last heard of 20 miles South of Coningbeg Light Vessel.”

  The sender added, “Make certain ‘Lusitania’ gets this.”

  The Coningbeg Light Vessel was dead ahead on Turner’s course, just before the narrowest expanse—45 miles across—of the St. George’s Channel. The message also indicated there was more than one submarine.

  If the submarines, plural, were in fact 20 miles south of the lightship, they were positioned about halfway across the channel. On a clear day—and by now the fog was nearly gone—the smoke from the Lusitania’s three operating funnels would be visible for 20 miles in any direction, meaning a lookout on a submarine at the center of the channel would have an excellent chance of spotting the ship. The warning described the submarines as being “active,” but what exactly did “active” mean?

  The message was apparently the product of Chairman Booth’s plea, but it fell short of what he had asked for. Only eighteen words long, it conveyed no details about what had occurred over the previous twenty-four hours. Captain Turner, the one man at that moment who needed details the most, never learned of the loss of the two Harrison Line vessels and the Earl of Lathom.

  With the fog now dissipated, Turner brought his speed up to 18 knots. He ordered maximum pressure maintained in his three available boiler rooms in the event a sudden burst of speed became necessary.

  AT NOON, as per Charles Lauriat’s request, the steward assigned to his cabin arrived to awaken him. The steward told Lauriat the ship had “picked up Cape Clear,” a familiar landmark at the southwest tip of Ireland, and that the ship’s time had been set ahead to Greenwich Mean Time. Lauriat got out of bed, put on his Knickerbocker suit, and was up on deck by 12:50. He knew the time because he checked his wristwatch, set as always to Boston time, and calculated the Greenwich equivalent.

  Lunch for first-class passengers began at one o’clock; he wanted to take a ten-minute stroll first. He noted that the ship seemed to be “loafing along” and saw as well that the results of the mileage pool, posted at noon, showed the ship had traveled only 484 miles. Although Lauriat found this slow, in fact it worked out to an average of slightly more than 20 knots, and that included several hours through fog at 15. Still, this was well below the 25-knot pace he had expected the ship to maintain.

  “It was a beautiful day then, light wind, a smooth sea, and bright sunshine,” Lauriat wrote. Along the port side, he saw “the good old Irish Coast.” The coast, though, was still a long way off, merely a green slash on the horizon. The fine weather made Lauriat uneasy. “I thought to myself that if a German submarine really meant business, she would have to wait weeks for a more ideal chance than the present weather conditions. With a flat, unbroken sea, such as that around us, the periscope of a submarine could certainly carry a long distance.”

  The smoothness of the sea was the remarkable thing. Lauriat likened it to a pancake; one of the ship’s bellboys said it was “just flat as a billiard table.”

  CONNECTICUT PASSENGER Jane MacFarquhar climbed to one of the upper decks and looked out over the glittering seascape. She and her sixteen-year-old daughter had just finished setting out the clothes they would wear upon arrival in Liverpool the next morning. They planned to leave their current outfits behind, on the ship. “The view was grand,” MacFarquhar said, “the sun shining, the water smooth and land visible on either side. As I gazed around the beautiful scene, I thought:—‘Where is this spoken-of danger?’ The end of our voyage is almost in view and we have had no sign of danger whatever.”

  ON FRIDAY MORNING, Schwieger kept U-20 on the surface to continue recharging its batteries. He stood atop the conning tower. The sea was quilted with fog, but here and there sunlight gleamed through. Visibility improved quickly. The sea was flat, under a 1-knot breeze.

  “All of a sudden visibility has become very good,” Schwieger wrote in his log. While this gave him a long view of the surrounding sea, it also provided that view to any British patrol boat or destroyer that happened to be in the vicinity. The flatness of the surface increased the danger that enemy lookouts would spot U-20, even when submerged to periscope depth, for the feathery white wake of Schwieger’s periscope would be visible for miles.

  And in fact, a trawler off in the distance now began moving in U-20’s direction. Schwieger ordered a fast dive and raised his periscope. The vessel approached slowly, in a manner he found unsettling.

  “Therefore,” he wrote, “we dive to a depth of 24 meters to get away from the trawler.” The time was 10:30 A.M. “At 12 P.M.,” he wrote, “I shall rise again to a depth of 11 meters and take a periscopic observation.”

  But shortly before that was to happen, at 11:50 A.M., a surge of excitement passed through the submarine. Even 80 feet below the surface, the men in U-20 could hear the sound of a ship overhead, transmitted through the hull. Schwieger wrote in his log, “A vessel with a very heavy engine passes over our boat.”

  From the sound, Schwieger knew it was neither a destroyer nor a trawler but something far larger, moving fast. It passed directly above, confirming the prudence of cruising at a depth that cleared even the largest ships’ keels.

  Schwieger waited a few minutes, then returned to periscope depth to try to identify the ship.

  WITH THE foghorn off, and the sun high and bright, the Lusitania’s passengers took to the open decks to play shuffleboard, throw medicine balls, and take part in other deck games. Older children played jump rope, as always. The youngest paraded the decks with nannies and stewardesses, on foot or in prams, with their sucking tubes hung around their necks or affixed to their clothing. In the shaded portions of the deck and in those areas exposed to the 18-knot breeze generated by the ship’s forward motion, it was still cool enough to require coats. One woman wore a large black fur.

  This being the last full day of the voyage, with the sun so bright and the air so clear, passengers seemed to take a special effort to dress well and with a little flair. A seven-year-old girl wore a pink-and-white-striped cotton frock under a black velvet coat lined with red silk, then added a gold ring
, a red coral necklet, and a mother-of-pearl brooch. The coat imparted to her the look of a red-winged blackbird. Pink seemed to be a popular color—for boys. One five-year-old boy tore around in a pink wool coat over a checked jacket and knickers. A man in his late twenties dressed with clear intent to dazzle. He wore:

  Blue serge trousers

  Striped cotton shirt (“Anderson Bros., Makers, 27, Bridge Street, Glasgow”)

  White merino pants

  Light lace-up boots (stamped inside with “Holober Bros., 501, West 14th Street, New York”)

  Gray socks, with light-blue soles

  Light-colored suspenders

  Leather belt and nickel buckle

  And this:

  A pink merino vest.

  MANY PASSENGERS settled into deck chairs to read, just as they’d done over the preceding six days. Dwight Harris sat on deck for a time reading a book about the Medicis, then went to the purser’s office to retrieve his engagement ring, his other jewels, and the $500 in gold that he had parked there at the start of the voyage. He went to his cabin and used a watch chain to hang several pieces around his neck, including the ring. “I pinned the big diamond brooch inside the pocket of my coat,” he wrote, “and before leaving my cabin unlocked the camera bag that held my life belt.” This was the belt he had bought at Wanamaker’s in New York the day before sailing. Harris had not yet run out of exclamation points. “I put the gold in my trousers pocket, and then went down to lunch!”