Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  She eventually adopted the “gold collar” and married a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Wallace Riddle. She achieved her goal of creating a progressive boys’ school as a memorial to her late father. She built it in Avon, Connecticut, and called it Avon Old Farms School, which exists today.

  Her companion, Edwin Friend, had indeed been lost but was reported by members of the reconstituted American Society for Psychical Research to have paid the group several visits.

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Gun in the Museum

  IN THE DUSTY TIMELINE of world events installed in my brain back in high school, the Lusitania affair constituted the skimpiest of entries, tucked somewhere between the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. I always had the impression, shared I suspect by many, that the sinking immediately drove President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, when in fact America did not enter World War I for another two years—half the span of the entire war. But that was just one of the many aspects of the episode that took me by surprise. As I began reading into the subject, and digging into archives in America and Britain, I found myself intrigued, charmed, and moved.

  What especially drew me was the rich array of materials available to help tell the story in as vivid a manner as possible—such archival treasures as telegrams, intercepted wireless messages, survivor depositions, secret intelligence ledgers, Kapitänleutnant Schwieger’s actual war log, Edith Galt’s love letters, and even a film of the Lusitania’s final departure from New York. Together these made a palette of the richest colors. I can only hope I used them to best effect.

  Finding these things was half the fun. Every book is an expedition into unfamiliar realms, with both an intellectual and a physical component. The intellectual journey takes you deep into a subject, to the point where you achieve a level of expertise. A focused expertise, however. Am I an expert on World War I? No. Do I know a lot now about the Lusitania and World War I–era U-boats? Yes. Will I ever write another book about a sinking ship or submarine warfare? Most likely not.

  The physical journey proved especially compelling, in ways I had not anticipated. At one point I found myself aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 in a Force 10 gale during a winter crossing from New York to Southampton. At another, I wound up horribly lost in Hamburg with a German-speaking GPS system that unbeknownst to me had been tuned to a different city but gamely tried to direct me to my hotel all the same. I felt like a character in the Bourne Identity, taking wild turns down alleys and into cul-de-sacs, until I realized no GPS system would ever send a driver the wrong way down a one-way street. My travels took me as far north as Thorsminde, Denmark (in February no less); as far south as Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia; as far west as the Hoover Library at Stanford University; and to various points east, including the always amazing Library of Congress and the U.S. National Archives, and equally enticing archives in London, Liverpool, and Cambridge. There will always be an England, and I am so very glad.

  Along the way came quiet moments of revelation where past and present for an instant joined and history became a tactile thing. I live for these moments. No sooner did I sit down to work at the Hoover Library at Stanford University than an archivist brought me, unbidden, a fragment of planking from a lifeboat stamped with the name Lusitania, originally found beside the corpse of a passenger who had washed ashore. In the Strandingsmuseum St. George, in Thorsminde, Denmark, I was able to stand beside and touch the deck gun of U-20—the actual gun that had sunk the Earl of Lathom—adopting poses that my wife assured me were beyond dorky. At the National Archives of the United Kingdom, in Kew—well guarded by swans—I opened one file box to find the actual codebook, the SKM, or Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine, that had been retrieved by the Russians and given to Room 40 in 1914. One of the most powerful moments came when I was given permission by the University of Liverpool, repository of the Cunard Archive, to view morgue photos of Lusitania victims. The effect of such moments is like sticking a finger in a mildly charged electric socket. It is always reassuring, because no matter how deeply I immerse myself in a subject, I still like having actual, physical proof that the events I’m writing about really did occur.

  Strangely, in the week before I sent my initial draft to my editor, the Korean ferry Sewol sank in the Yellow Sea, subjecting hundreds of schoolchildren to an experience very close to that of the passengers on the Lusitania. One morning I finished rewriting a passage dealing with the Lusitania’s severe list and how it impaired the launching of lifeboats, only to visit CNN’s website a few minutes later to read about exactly the same phenomenon occurring with the Sewol.

  My voyage on the Queen Mary 2—a beautiful and gracious ship, by the way—brought me invaluable insights into the nature of transoceanic travel. Even today, when you are in the middle of the Atlantic you are very much alone, and far from rescue if something cataclysmic were to occur. Unlike the passengers of the Lusitania, before we left New York we all were required to try on our life jackets. No one was exempted, regardless of how many voyages he or she had already made. This was serious business and, frankly, a bit scary, for putting on a life jacket forces you to imagine the unimaginable.

  WHEN WRITING about the Lusitania, one has to be very careful to sift and weigh the things that appear in books already published on the subject. There are falsehoods and false facts, and these, once dropped into the scholarly stream, appear over and over again, with footnotes always leading back to the same culprits. Fortunately, I had a guide to help me through all this, Mike Poirier of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, an amateur historian who very likely knows more about the ship and its passengers than any other living soul, and who read my manuscript for things that might cause Lusitania buffs to howl with laughter. One gets the sense that Mike cares about the “Lucy’s” passengers as if they were his nephews and nieces. His help was invaluable. I was aided as well by another Lusitania aficionado, Geoffrey Whitfield, who gave me a tour of modern-day Liverpool. I must assert, however, that if any errors persist in this book, the fault is solely my own.

  For evaluations of pace and narrative integrity—whether the book worked or not—I relied on my trusted cadre of advance readers, my great friends Carrie Dolan and Penny Simon, my friend and agent David Black, and my secret weapon, my wife, Christine Gleason, whose margin notations—smiley faces, tear-streamed eyes, down arrows, and long rows of zzzzzs—as always provided excellent markers as to where I went wrong and what I did right. My editor at Crown Publishing, Amanda Cook, wrote me an elevenpage letter that provided a brilliant road map to tweaking the narrative. She proved a master at the art of offering praise, while at the same time shoving tiny knives under each of my fingernails, propelling me into a month of narrative renovation that was probably the most intense writing experience of my life. Thanks as well to copy editor Elisabeth Magnus for saving me from having one character engage in the decidedly dangerous practice of dressing with “flare,” and from having passengers go “clamoring” aboard. I must of course thank the three Superheroes—my term—of Crown, Maya Mavjee, Molly Stern, and David Drake, who I confess are far more adept at managing martinis than I. Thanks also to Chris Brand and Darren Haggar for a truly excellent cover. And finally cheers to the real heroes, Emma Berry and Sarah Smith.

  In the course of my research, I sought whenever possible to rely on archival materials, but I did find certain secondary works to be of particular value: Arthur S. Link’s monumental multivolume biography of Woodrow Wilson, titled, well, Wilson—the most valuable volume being, for me, The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914–1915; A. Scott Berg’s more recent Wilson; John Keegan’s wrenching The First World War; Martin Gilbert’s The First World War; Gerhard Ritter’s The Schlieffen Plan; Lowell Thomas’s 1928 book about World War I U-boats and their crews, Raiders of the Deep; Reinhard Scheer’s Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World War; Churchill’s The World Crisis, 1911–1918; Paul Kennedy’s The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914; and R. H. Gibson and Maurice P
rendergast’s primer, The German Submarine War, 1914–1918.

  I especially enjoyed the many works of intimate history—memoirs, autobiographies, diaries—that I came across along the way, though these of course must be treated with special care, owing to fading memories and covert agendas. Their greatest value lies in the little details they offer about life as once lived. These works include Starling of the White House, by one of Wilson’s Secret Service men, Edmund W. Starling (“as told to” Thomas Sugrue), who took me aboard Wilson’s honeymoon train; Woodrow Wilson: An Intimate Memoir, by Wilson’s physician, Cary T. Grayson; My Memoir, by Edith Bolling Wilson; Commodore, by James Bisset; Voyage of the Deutschland, by Paul Koenig; The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner, by Georg-Gunther Freiherr von Forstner; The Lusitania’s Last Voyage, by Charles E. Lauriat Jr.; This Was My World, by Margaret Mackworth (Viscountess Rhondda); and When the Ships Came In, by Jack Lawrence. Another such intimate work, valuable for grounding me in British high society before the war, was Lantern Slides: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1904–1914, edited by Mark Bonham Carter and Mark Pottle, which I found utterly charming. I confess to having fallen a little in love with Violet, the daughter of British prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith.

  THE FOLLOWING LIST of citations is by no means exhaustive: to cite every fact would require a companion volume and would be tedious in the extreme. I cite all quoted material and anything else that for one reason or another requires noting or amplification or that might cause a Lusitania buff to burn a lifeboat on my lawn. Throughout I have included small stories that I could not fit into the main narrative but that struck me as worth telling all the same for the oblique insights they offer but also for the best reason of all: just because.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS USED IN NOTES

  Foreign Relations

  U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States. 1915, Supplement, The World War, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, http://digital.​library.​wisc.​edu/​1711.​dl/​FRUS.​FRUS1915Supp.

  “Investigation”

  “Investigation into the Loss of the Steamship ‘Lusitania,’ ” Proceedings Before the Right Hon. Lord Mersey, Wreck Commissioner of the United Kingdom, June 15–July 1, 1915, National Archives UK.

  Lauriat, Claim

  Charles E. Lauriat Jr., Claim, Lauriat vs. Germany, Docket 40, Mixed Claims Commission: United States and Germany, Aug. 10, 1922. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, MD.

  Merseyside

  Maritime Archives, Merseyside Maritime Museum.

  Schwieger, War Log

  Walther Schwieger, War Log. Bailey/Ryan Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

  U.S. National Archives–College Park

  U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, MD.

  U.S. National Archives–New York

  U.S. National Archives and Records Administration at New York City.

  A WORD FROM THE CAPTAIN

  1 “vessels flying the flag”: See New York Times, May 1, 1915. An article about the warning appears on p. 3, the ad itself on p. 19.

  2 “thinking, dreaming, sleeping”: Liverpool Weekly Mercury, May 15, 1915.

  3 He assured the audience: Preston, Lusitania, 172.

  4 “The truth is”: Bailey and Ryan, Lusitania Disaster, 82.

  5 on two previous occasions: Ibid., 65; Beesly, Room 40, 93; Ramsay, Lusitania, 50, 51.

  6 “You could see the shape”: Testimony, Thomas M. Taylor, Petition of the Cunard Steamship Company, April 15, 1918, U.S. National Archives–New York, 913.

  PART I: “BLOODY MONKEYS”

  LUSITANIA: THE OLD SAILORMAN

  1 Despite the war in Europe: “General Analysis of Passengers and Crew,” R.M.S. Lusitania: Record of Passengers & Crew, SAS/29/6/18, Merseyside.

  2 This was … the greatest number: New York Times, May 2, 1915.

  3 During an early trial voyage: Cunard Daily Bulletin, July 19, 1907, Merseyside.

  4 “a vote of censure”: Ibid.

  5 “for I calculate that there is room”: Ibid.

  6 “Please deliver me”: Ibid.

  7 “The inhabitants were warlike”: “Lusitania,” D42/S9/5/1, Cunard Archives.

  8 “Rule, Britannia!”: The title of this song is often written and said incorrectly, as if it were a declaration. The title, however, is meant to be an exhortation, as in “Go Britain!”

  9 “You do not get any idea”: Letter, C. R. Minnitt to Mrs. E. M. Poole, July 9, 1907, DX/2284, Merseyside.

  10 The ship’s lightbulbs: Minutes, Cunard Board of Directors, July 10, 1912, D42/B4/38, Cunard Archives; Fox, Transatlantic, 404.

  11 He found it “very gratifying”: Letter, W. Dranfield to W. T. Turner, Jan. 20, 1911, D42/C1/2/44, Cunard Archives; Letter, W. T. Turner to Alfred A. Booth, Feb. 6, 1911, D42/C1/2/44, Cunard Archives.

  12 Its 300 stokers: Bisset, Commodore, 32.

  13 Cunard barred crew members: The company called the permissible matches “Lucifer matches,” though in fact that name harked back to a decidedly unsafe early precursor that lit with a pop and sent embers flying.

  14 “counteract, as far as possible”: “Cunard Liner Lusitania,” 941.

  15 The guns were never installed: Strangely, this remained a point of controversy for decades, reinforced by reports by at least one diver who reported seeing the barrel of a naval gun protruding from the wreckage. But no passenger ever spoke of seeing a gun aboard, and a film of the ship’s departure shows clearly that no guns were mounted. Also, a search by Customs in New York found no evidence of armament.

  16 “devil-dodger”: Hoehling and Hoehling, Last Voyage, 42.

  17 “Had it been stormy”: Hobart Mercury, March 8, 1864.

  18 “I was the quickest man”: Hoehliing and Hoehling, Last Voyage, 42.

  19 “never, at any time”: Letter, George Ball to Adolf Hoehling, July 22, 1955, Hoehling Papers.

  20 “On the ships”: Letter, Mabel Every to Adolf Hoehling, May 4, 1955, Hoehling Papers.

  21 “a load of bloody monkeys”: Preston, Lusitania, 108; also see “William Thomas Turner,” Lusitania Online, http://www.​lusitania.​net/​turner.​htm.

  22 On one voyage: “Captain’s Report, Oct. 15, 1904,” Minutes, Cunard Executive Committee, Oct. 20, 1904, D42/B4/22, Merseyside.

  23 “Madam, do you think”: Letter, George Ball to Adolf Hoehling, July 22, 1955, Hoehling Papers.

  24 more “clubbable”: Preston, Lusitania, 108.

  25 “He was a good, and conscientious skipper”: Letter, R. Barnes (dictated to K. Simpson) to Mary Hoehling, July 14, 1955, Hoehling Papers.

  26 “Captain’s compliments”: Albert Bestic to Adolf Hoehling, June 10, 1955, Hoehling Papers.

  27 “one of the bravest”: Letter, Thomas Mahoney to Adolf Hoehling, May 14, 1955, Hoehling Papers.

  28 “The wave,” Turner said: New York Times, Jan. 16, 1910.

  29 The Cunard manual: The manual was an exhibit in the New York limit-of-liability proceedings. Cunard Steamship Company, “Rules to Be Observed in the Company’s Service,” Liverpool, March 1913, Admiralty Case Files: Limited Liability Claims for the Lusitania, Box 1, U.S. National Archives–New York.

  30 The dangers of fog: Larson, Thunderstruck, 376.

  31 “to keep the ship sweet”: Cunard Steamship Company, “Rules,” 54.

  32 “The utmost courtesy”: Ibid., 43.

  33 “much to the amusement”: New York Times, May 23 and 24, 1908.

  34 “should not be made a market place”: Minutes, Sept. 1910 [day illegible], D42/B4/32, Cunard Archives.

  There were other sorts of complaints. On a couple of voyages in September 1914 third-class passengers “of a very superior type” complained about the fact that Cunard did not supply them with sheets, unlike other less exalted steamship lines, according to a report by the chief third-class steward. He
wrote, “They did not quite understand why sheets should not be supplied on vessels like the LUSITANIA and MAURETANIA where higher rates were charged.” The company studied the matter and found that it could supply two thousand sheets and one thousand quilts at a cost of £358 per voyage. Memoranda, General Manager to Superintendent of Furnishing Department, Sept. 30, 1914, and Oct. 2, 1914, D42/PR13/3/24-28, Cunard Archives.

  35 “When you have it on”: Lauriat, Lusitania’s Last Voyage, 21.

  36 “to be severely reprimanded”: Captain’s Record: William Thomas Turner, D42/GM/V6/1, Cunard Archives.

  37 “tired and really ill”: Preston, Lusitania, 110; Ramsay, Lusitania, 49.

  WASHINGTON: THE LONELY PLACE

  1 The train carrying the body: Schachtman, Edith and Woodrow, 41; G. Smith, When the Cheering Stopped, 11; New York Times, Aug. 12, 1914.

  2 just a year and a half: In 1913, Inauguration Day came in March.

  3 “For several days”: Schachtman, Edith and Woodrow, 72.

  4 “felt like a machine”: Ibid., 48. Harlakenden House was owned by an American author named Winston Churchill, whose books were, at the time, very popular—enough so that he and the other Winston exchanged correspondence and the latter resolved that in all his writings he would insert a middle initial, S, for Spencer. His full and formal name was Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill.