Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  An hour later another warning came in from Queenstown on the southern coast of Ireland and Turner ordered all the portholes closed and as many of the watertight doors as possible. He doubled the lookouts, had extra men placed on the bridge and ordered the engine room to be ready to make a run for it if necessary. Nothing was being left to chance.

  U-20, under the command of 32-year-old Walter Schweiger, had finished unsuccessfully chasing an ageing British warship when she resurfaced at 1.20 p.m. The commander was called to look out on a conspicuously large ship coming into view, ‘a forest of masts and stacks’. The crew of the U-boat didn’t know it, but 14 miles to the south-west it was the Lusitania emerging over the horizon. Possibly unaware of the ship’s identity, they submerged immediately and began racing towards her as fast as they could; but at 9 knots when under the surface it couldn’t possibly be fast enough to catch her. They got within 2 miles but Lusitania was heading away from them. It appeared as though Turner and his ship had been lucky.

  Some twenty minutes later Lusitania came within sight of the Old Head of Kinsale, blissfully unaware that Schweiger had her in his sights. Owing to the fog Turner had been travelling further towards land as a precaution but he had since reverted to his original course. The ship jolted and began making for the Coninbeg lightship, some four hours north-east off the coast of County Wexford. He had unwittingly played right into U-20’s hands. As Schwieger looked through the periscope the Lusitania had turned straight for him. ‘She could not have steered a more perfect course’ if she had been trying to give him a target to fire at. Schweiger was not about to lose his chance. He closed to within half a mile and at 800 yards a single bronze torpedo shot out of the U-20 and made straight for the passenger liner.

  On the starboard side of the Lusitania one of the lookouts had just come up on deck when he saw two white lines racing towards her. He grabbed a megaphone and began hollering to the bridge. Captain Turner was nearby and he ran up the stairs to the bridge on hearing the commotion. He arrived just in time to see the torpedo strike his ship in between the second and third funnels on the starboard side, right where Audley Drake’s cabin was situated.

  Many of Audley’s fellow first-class passengers were finishing lunch or out walking on deck. There was a loud bang, a shaking sensation and a column of white water shot up and cascaded down on the deck amongst smoke and fire. A rumbling came from deep inside the ship and almost instantly a secondary explosion went off. Turner immediately ordered the ship turned towards Kinsale some 10 miles away. The steering had failed and his next inclination was to try to bring her to a stop but steam pressure had plummeted. The Lusitania continued to plough helplessly through the calm sea. The main staircase outside Audley’s cabin, leading from the lower portion of the first-class dining room, was already beginning to fill up, overrun with passengers in a state of rising panic attempting to push their way up on deck. The ship had immediately begun to list to starboard. Four minutes after the torpedo struck, whilst many were still dazed and wondering what to do, Lusitania’s electrical supply failed completely. Much of the inside of the ship was rendered pitch black in an instant. Terror-stricken passengers felt their way along darkened passages and up staircases to try to get out into the open.

  Unlike the Titanic disaster, so fresh in people’s minds as they ran towards the lifeboats, the Lusitania would not take some two hours to sink. She now had about fifteen minutes until she plunged beneath the waves and, as yet, she still had more than 1,200 people on board. Whether or not passengers and crew stood a chance of being saved was a lottery.

  A group of butchers jumped inside a food lift to try to reach the upper decks. They became trapped and others who had found a way out were haunted by the sounds of them hammering in the tiny enclosure that would take them to their watery graves. A young mother ran to fetch her baby daughter and suddenly remembered that the woman in the next cabin had a toddler. She burst into the cabin and there he was, having been put down for a nap. She tried to pick him up but the little boy was too heavy and she could not carry both. She had to leave him behind.

  The ship’s bow was beginning to dip below the surface and the list had now reached some thirty degrees. Thanks to the recommendations following the Titanic disaster there were more than enough spaces available for everybody on board in twenty-two boats slung from davits as well as twenty-six more collapsible ones with folding sides stacked about the boat deck. Passengers were swarming up from all classes to make their escape, some of them screaming.

  The ship’s list was growing worse. People began naturally running to the port side of the ship, which was rising higher and higher away from the water. Launching boats was proving to be futile here though. They clunked against the hull as the crew tried to launch them, spilling frightened passengers into the water some 60ft below. The lack of seamen left one officer shouting for help from male passengers to try to push more than two tons worth of lifeboat away from the ship so it could be launched safely, whilst beating off men trying to jump in. One boat smashed on to the deck and rolled along it, crushing those in its wake. Others that managed to get to the surface crashed on to people who had fallen out as they flailed in the water.

  Things were even worse on the starboard side. There was no public address system for communicating with passengers and the shouts of the officers and seamen were drowned out by the screams and anguish of those attempting to pile into the boats. Here the list had caused the boats to swing away from the listing hull and left an 8ft gap. Some jumped it, others consented to be thrown across but many terrified women and children stood rooted to the spot and refused to move. The ship’s forward momentum meant that boats hitting the water were dragged into the path of the next and over all of those that had fallen in. A trail of humanity was being left in the Lusitania’s wake.

  It was still less than fifteen minutes since Schweiger’s torpedo had pierced the ship’s side. Boats couldn’t be detached from their davits in the chaos and were being dragged underwater with their terrified occupants still in them. The angle of the ship meant that the 80ft funnels were now hanging overhead. Children were being handed off into the boats but many had become lost in the panic. One young man returning to Britain to enlist found two abandoned babies on deck, shoved one under each arm and jumped towards a lifeboat. As the end neared passengers began to line the rails and jump into the water to escape being sucked down with the ship, some of them stripping off to give themselves more mobility.

  The Lusitania’s four bronze propellers were now sticking out of the water, still turning. To those on the starboard side the list had become so pronounced that it looked as if she might roll over on top of them entirely. Icy water was beginning to wash over the top deck and the stricken passengers and crew were running out of places to flee to. As the sea cascaded towards them people were sucked under and washed away. Charles Frohman, the man who had funded J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan on both sides of the Atlantic, appeared to have made peace with his fate. He was heard quoting the play in the final seconds. ‘Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure that life gives us.’

  At 2.25 p.m. Walter Schweiger decided that he had seen enough. He had the U-20 turned around and made off, deciding that it would be too much to launch a second torpedo at his victims. He was not unmoved by the scenes, but consoled himself with the knowledge that they had seen a cruiser nearby and that if he were to try to help, his comparatively tiny submarine could make very little impact on rescuing those condemned to the water.

  Lifeboats still swung from the ship and the stern remained packed with people when the Lusitania met her end. She was only in 340ft of water and the bow stuck on the seabed, but any momentary hope that that might act as a reprieve for those still aboard was soon snatched away. The beautiful liner pivoted, let out a roar and fell gracelessly to the bottom on her side.

  Of nearly fifty lifeboats, only six had been successfully launched. Everyone else who had not already suffered a fatal injury or become trappe
d inside the ship now thrashed helplessly in the water. Gradually hypothermia and exposure overcame them and they began to die. Distraught women who had been clinging to their dead babies let them go and watched the little bodies float away. One survivor drifting along with the current heard someone singing ‘Abide With Me’, but gradually the cries died away and a hush descended over the water.

  News of the ship’s fate was wholly different to that from the front, where death was a likely outcome. Schweiger was dubbed ‘The Baby Killer’ amidst worldwide public outcry and disgust. No less than 1,201 people died when the Lusitania was sunk on 7 May 1915, including Audley Drake, one of eight Etonians to die at sea in the Great War, four of them whilst travelling as passengers1. His body was never identified. Audley was 23 years old. His travelling companion was lost too, so piecing together Audley’s movements throughout the sinking is impossible. Nobody survived who would have been able to tell his story, but what is certain is that he died in an eighteen-minute window of panic and despair thrust upon over a thousand civilians by Germany’s policy of unrestricted submarine warfare.

  With Audley went 128 American passengers. There was outrage in the United States, though at this juncture it did not translate into a willingness to go to war as Britain might have hoped. Although Schweiger and his crew were greeted as heroes when they returned home, Germany was soon confronted with the consequences of this single act and was ultimately compelled to put an end to her uncompromising U-boat policy.

  When she resumed it two years later though, America joined the Allied cause. Her soldiers marched off to war having seen recruitment posters depicting the sinking of the famed Cunard liner and they did so with cries of ‘Remember the Lusitania’. She may have failed to get 198 Americans safely into Liverpool, but in 1917 the tragic ship arguably helped to deliver two million of them to Europe to tip the balance of the war in favour of the Allies.

  Compared to the army, navy traditions at Eton were extremely limited, even allowing for the difference in the size of the two services. Of some 5,650 Etonians who went into uniform during the Great War, less than 3 per cent of them joined any of the naval services2. There were various reasons for this huge weighting towards the land forces. For sixty years or so the structure of recruitment for officers in the Royal Navy had dictated that a boy went to Dartmouth for training at the age of twelve or thirteen. Two years later he would go to sea for a period of three more years. This obviously meant the foregoing of an education at the likes of Eton and explained why so few OEs found their way to the Royal Navy. In 1913 a system of special entry for public school leavers had been established to try to deal with an increasing demand for naval officers. It enabled boys of seventeen or eighteen to choose the navy over the army when leaving school bent on a career in the armed forces, but at the onset of the Great War the scheme had simply not been in existence long enough to have had a significant impact.

  A lack of naval tradition amongst Etonian families also explained low numbers of them going to sea during the Great War. Boys were flocking to the army to follow ancestors and living relatives who already had an affiliation with a certain regiment and there was not the same heritage in place to propel them towards the water. Yet Etonians still managed to populate all corners of the Royal Navy. George Lascelles Kirk, a pre-war engineer, was picked out to put his skills to use in submarines, whilst three OEs acted as surgeons and two as chaplains. The son of a housemaster joined the staff of Room 40 in naval intelligence after a wound brought his army career to an end and, at 18, the 9th Earl De Le Warr declared himself a conscientious objector and instead of going to the front he took up work with the Royal Naval Reserve in a trawler section.

  Charles Alexander John Fuller-Acland-Hood was one wartime school leaver who took advantage of the public school scheme and opted to join the navy. Despite the fact that his family bore numerous connections to the army, part of his surname indicated a rich naval heritage. Captain Alexander Hood, his great grandfather, had accompanied Captain Cook around the world and was later killed aboard his ship HMS Mars in 1798. Wounded whilst battling a much older French ship of the line off the coast of Brittany, he apparently succumbed to a nasty leg wound just as the opposing captain was surrendering his sword into his hands. Another relative was Sir Samuel Hood, mentor to Nelson, a vice-admiral and a hero of the Napoleonic Wars.

  ‘Charlie’ had arrived at Eton in 1910, another of Hubert Brinton’s boys. Suffering severe growth spurts, he also spent a year recuperating from a nasty double break of his collarbone that hampered any attempts he might have made to have an impact on school life. In 1915 he left Eton to go to Newport Pagnell for intensive cramming to give him a good shot at his navy exams. He was promoted to Midshipman in time for the beginning of 1916 and wasn’t at all sorry that he had chosen a different path from his schoolmates. ‘I like being in the navy very much,’ he wrote. He visited Brinton whenever he could and had tried to promote the Royal Navy as a viable option for those about to leave school and join the war effort. ‘It is a grand life and I wish you would crack it up to any members of the house who may be thinking over it. The opportunity of the Public School entry is well worth [it] and I don’t think it has been sufficiently advertised at Eton.’

  In mid May 1916 Charlie was happily back at school on leave, ‘full of glorious spirits and sun’ before he rushed back to duty at Rosyth in the Firth of Forth. There too was a cousin of his, Rear Admiral Sir Horace Lambert Alexander Hood. A former naval secretary to Churchill, Hood had his own Eton connection. Having joined the navy at 12 he was not an OE himself, but his elder brother was. Horace had recently married an American widow with at least three children from her first marriage, including one son, George Nickerson. On returning to England after the wedding in 1910 they had decided to send him to Mr Heygate’s house where he still resided in 1916.

  Horace Hood embodied the proud spirit of the Royal Navy heart and soul and his record read like an adventure yarn. Handsome, bright, enterprising and brave, not to mention still only in his mid 40s he was one of the youngest flag officers of the fleet and had earned a DSO battling hand-to-hand with dervishes alongside the Hampshire Regiment in Somaliland. The daughter of his stepson’s housemaster remembered him with great fondness. She was friendly with George’s sisters and was mesmerised by the fact that the dashing admiral had two different coloured eyes. ‘This hereditary distinction proved so fascinating that I found it hard not to stare at him and lament my own pair that matched.’

  In 1915 Hood had assumed command of his own squadron and raised his flag in HMS Invincible, the ship to which Charlie Acland-Hood had subsequently been sent as soon as he was ready to go to sea. Their ship was a groundbreaker. Whilst Admiral Fisher was brainstorming the future of naval warfare and sending his German counterparts into a state of panic with his revolutionary battleship HMS Dreadnought, he was also masterminding a new type of warship for the Royal Navy.

  Not quite battleships, but better than an armoured cruiser, their comparatively light armour was supposed to be offset by top speeds of an impressive 25 knots, which would enable them to outrun destruction at the hands of an enemy ship. HMS Invincible was the first example of what were to be dubbed ‘battlecruisers’. Launched in 1907, at 567ft she was armed with an impressive array of 12in guns, maxims and five torpedo tubes to complement her speed in what was considered to be an unbeatable naval combination. Elizabeth Heygate had been invited by the admiral with her brother to look over the ship at Portsmouth before the war and was just as mesmerised by it as she was by Hood’s eyes. They presented their passes at the dockyard gates. ‘Saluting figures sprang to attention’ as they followed a rating on to the ship, clattering up and down steel companionways. ‘He explained the mysteries of gun turrets and we threaded our way under hammocks strung in unexpected places.’ She was amazed at the use of every available bit of space. The name Invincible was stamped everywhere like Royal Navy propaganda and she believed in it wholly.

  Despite the aggressi
veness of the naval arms race and its contribution to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, all the sea-going firepower that had been accumulating in German and British ports had yet to face each other in battle in the early summer of 1916. The Royal Navy had thus far not been impressed with the cautious endeavours of the German High Seas Fleet. British sailors retained the upper hand, but to their chagrin did so sitting still doing nothing whilst the army was being decimated. A number of plans had been considered for luring the Germans into battle, but ultimately what was the point when by risking very little the Royal Navy was effectively winning the war at sea?

  The German High Seas Fleet was loath to emerge and risk a full-on confrontation with the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet. But all of this changed in 1916 when the offensively-minded Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer took over command of the Kaiser’s ships. He was determined to end the British blockade that was crippling Germany. Although he shied away from taking on the whole of the numerically superior Grand Fleet, he thought that he might be able to draw off a smaller portion of it. Then by flinging every facet of naval warfare at them, ships, aeroplanes, submarines, he hoped to chip away at British naval supremacy.

  Scheer was in paroxysms of rage when Germany was forced to withdraw her policy of unrestricted submarine warfare in the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania. For an advocate of it such as he was it was humiliation on a grand scale; and humiliation aimed at the German Navy. Something had to be done and he resolved to put his fleet to sea.

  Almost as soon as Charlie Acland-Hood returned to HMS Invincible he was on the move. His ship, HMS Inflexible and HMS Indomitable formed Horace Hood’s 3rd Battlecruiser Squadron, the ‘Invincibles’, and they were being detached from their counterparts at Rosyth and sent further north to Scapa Flow. There, behind steel submarine nets and minefields, the Grand Fleet sat at anchor under the command of Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Jellicoe. It had been ordained that all three of the Invincibles needed some gunnery practice and they were to spend three weeks in the Orkney Islands with him.