by G. J. Meyer
Why had Turner not been instructed to approach Liverpool via the North Channel, which separated Ireland from Scotland, had recently been opened for use by commercial ships, and was known to be much safer than Ireland’s south coast? Even Schwieger had written in his log that the fact that the Lusitania “was not sent through the North Channel is inexplicable.”
Why had Turner not been sent more detailed information—information that the Admiralty possessed—about the threat that the U-20 posed? Schwieger had sunk three ships the day before the Lusitania crossed his path, and had done so in waters through which the liner would soon be passing. Turner might have taken a different course, or increased his speed, if the Admiralty had told him more.
Why had none of the destroyers and torpedo boats in the vicinity been sent to guard the Lusitania as she approached serious danger? This was standard practice. Perhaps six hours before the U-20’s attack, actually, the chairman of the Cunard Line, owner of the Lusitania, was so alarmed upon learning of the previous day’s sinkings off the coast of Cork that he hurried from his breakfast table to see the senior naval officer at Liverpool. He implored him to send protection and departed believing that this was going to be done. He knew that four destroyers were within reach, along with high-speed torpedo boats. Any one of them probably would have been sufficient to put a submarine to flight.
Shamefully, First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill and First Sea Lord John Fisher decided to pin the blame on Turner. The director of the Admiralty’s trade division joined them, declaring that Turner “appears to have displayed an almost inconceivable negligence, and one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he has been got at by the Germans.” They were foiled when a formal inquiry, which at their insistence had been conducted in unprecedented secrecy, refused to cooperate and instead ruled that Turner was in no way responsible for the tragedy.
Questions remain to this day. What was the cause of the second explosion? Inevitably, Schwieger was accused of having fired a second, murderously gratuitous, torpedo. Thanks partly to its monitoring of U-boat wireless transmissions, the Admiralty knew by the time of the inquiry that there had been no second torpedo, though it kept its knowledge secret.
Possibly it was coal dust, stirred up by the first explosion in the ship’s huge and, at voyage’s end, nearly empty storage bunkers.
Possibly it was something in the cargo hold. Attention has focused on fifty barrels and ninety-four cases of aluminum powder and fifty cases of bronze powder, en route to England for use in the production of munitions. One theory is that the detonation of these extremely volatile substances blew a hole in the bottom of the Lusitania and so caused her to sink as swiftly as she did. This hypothesis cannot be tested, because the wreck lies bottom-down on the seafloor, leaning to starboard and concealing her secrets beneath her.
Was the Lusitania, designed for service as an auxiliary cruiser in wartime, equipped with artillery at the time she was sunk? Apparently not; she had been deemed too expensive for military use, burning a thousand tons of coal a day when under way. But why, then, would it later be learned that the British had dropped large numbers of depth charges to the bottom of the sea in an effort to demolish her remains? Was there evidence to be destroyed?
For weeks after the sinking, bodies washed up across a broad expanse of the Irish coast. Ultimately only 173 bodies were recovered, though presumed fatalities totaled 1,193. A corpse found on a beach on July 11 proved to be not from the Lusitania at all. It was the mortal remains of Leon C. Thrasher, the American engineer whose disappearance in the sinking of the Falaba had created such a stir in Washington more than three months before.
Almost from the start there were rumors that the British authorities had intentionally sacrificed the Lusitania in hopes of bringing an outraged United States into the war. Churchill, for one, is on record as hoping for a crisis of exactly that kind. But conspiracy theories are inevitable in such situations, and deserve to be met with the firmest skepticism.
Still…questions linger.
Among the doubters was Patrick Beesly. He was a British naval intelligence officer who after leaving active service became a historian and author specializing in the Royal Navy’s espionage operations during the Great War, including the secret monitoring of U-boat radio communications. What he had to say about the Lusitania near the end of his life is deserving of at least passing attention.
“On the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available,” he told an interviewer, “I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war. If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very curious circumstances.”
Chapter 5
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Marked Cards and a Stacked Deck
OVER THE HALF year from September 1915 to February 1916, Secretary of State Lansing, hoping as always that the United States would enter the war but do so on legally unimpeachable grounds, had been trying to clear away the difficulties created by Britain’s arming of her merchant ships and orders for them to attack any U-boats they could not escape. In January he took a new approach to the old idea of working out a compromise, proposing that Britain agree to disarm her merchantmen in return for a German return to cruiser rules. The president’s enthusiastic response to what became known as Lansing’s modus vivendi—he said that it had his “entire approval”—might have stemmed from the same thing that had motivated the secretary to suggest it: the expectation, the hope, that the Germans would refuse and by doing so put themselves irretrievably in the wrong. On the other hand, it is not inconceivable that Wilson agreed in good faith, thinking compromise still possible.
In any case it was the British who rejected the idea, and they did so indignantly. They claimed that the modus vivendi would doom their merchant fleet, adding, preposterously, that it showed the Wilson administration to be not neutral at all but pro-German. “I cannot adequately express the disappointment and dismay with which such an attitude on the part of the United States would be viewed here,” Sir Edward Grey said in a wire to the State Department. House in a telegram told the president what he said at all such junctures: that pushing any initiative not acceptable to Britain would destroy all possibility of the United States being accepted as a mediator. Wilson responded as House hoped he would, immediately reversing himself and disavowing Lansing’s plan.
Wilson scholar Arthur Link has argued that Lansing “blundered badly” in putting his proposed compromise forward. It is difficult to agree except by first accepting House’s view that the United States should never attempt anything that Britain was not certain to approve. Be all that as it may, Lansing, like Bryan before him, was being given reasons to resent both House and the president himself. He would prove to have a less forgiving nature than Bryan.
On February 1, 1916, preparing to depart London for home, the colonel sent Wilson a message making clear that he regarded the complications created by the blockade not as a danger but as an opportunity. “I doubt whether a crisis with Germany can be long avoided,” he wrote. “The petty annoyances of the blockade will make the demand imperative [by the German public] that an attempt be made to break it by the transcendent sea warfare. We will then be compelled to break relations.” This was less a warning of possible trouble than a prescription for making it happen.
Shortly before departing, House received from Grey a written account of the understanding that the two of them had discussed in their latest conversations. This document, famous as the House-Grey Memorandum, took House up on his offer to call for a peace conference whenever the Allies wished. The colonel had been disappointed by Grey’s failure, when the offer was first made, to respond with the expected enthusiasm. He had been slow to grasp just how unwilling the British were to discuss even a possible peace conference without an absolute American commitment to enter
the war. And he appears to have been almost blind to the skill with which Grey managed, even when at his most receptive, to avoid committing Britain to do or not do any specific thing.
The understanding, as put in writing by Grey, was that if a conference were convened and “failed to secure peace, the United States would leave the conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies, if Germany was unreasonable.” The memo repeated what House had said about Alsace-Lorraine and Constantinople, and it ended by noting—a crucial addition—that Grey had not consulted with his own government or with France or Russia about these matters. This was a delicate way of stating for the record that the memo was nothing more than a summary of some friendly but unofficial talks between its author and Colonel House, and that the men whose approval would be required for implementation of the agreement were not even necessarily aware of it. House was pleased all the same. He thought that he and Grey had worked out a way of ensuring a satisfactory end to the war, eventually if not soon. Both men were playing an intricate double game. House was pretending to Grey that Wilson was ready to commit to war, and pretending to Wilson that the British were ready for serious negotiations. Eager to share the good news, the colonel took ship for home.
Late in January 1916 President Wilson sent war fever up a few degrees by departing on a nine-day speaking tour in support of the fast-growing Preparedness Movement, with its demands for expansion of the American armed forces. This was the latest of his recurrent efforts to go over Congress’s head, in this case to mobilize public support for more military spending. When he returned to Washington and found that his tour had done nothing to soften congressional opposition, he washed his hands of the proposed Continental Army of reservists and left the preparedness issue to Congress. His secretary of war, the lawyer and former New Jersey judge Lindley M. Garrison, resigned in disgust, later calling Wilson a man of high ideals and no principles. The president had little reason to regret Garrison’s departure. The secretary had made no secret of his desire not only for a bigger increase in military spending than Wilson was willing to propose, but also for conscription. This had made him a lightning rod for congressional opponents of both things and an excuse to distrust the administration. And he had always been less respectful of the chief executive than Wilson expected his lieutenants to be, even daring to interrupt the president during cabinet meetings. If Wilson might have benefited from having more such bold spirits around him, he himself certainly did not think so.
Next came a struggle over a measure called the Gore-McLemore bill, which called for American citizens to be warned about the dangers of traveling on belligerent ships. At the time of its introduction, the bill had broad support in both houses; Wilson, however, saw it as an affront to himself and a challenge to his right to make foreign policy unimpeded. He brought such hard pressure to bear on wavering Democrats that the bill was doomed to defeat. Its supporters were demoralized by being crushed in this way. The Allies were delighted, the Germans disgusted, to see the energy with which the White House had fought to block this small attempt to remove a source of serious diplomatic friction.
The bill’s chief Senate sponsor, Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, was undeterred. A progressive powerhouse in spite of having been blind since childhood, he introduced bills to prohibit the government from issuing passports for travel on the ships of belligerent nations, to prevent such ships from carrying American citizens to or from U.S. ports, and to forbid U.S.-registered ships to carry munitions and passengers at the same time. All were smothered in committee, but the president was offended nonetheless. He was becoming increasingly sharp in his dealings with Congress, even with longtime allies when he judged them to be unsatisfactorily loyal. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Stone, who had given Wilson crucial support at the 1912 Democratic convention and afterward contributed greatly to the success of his legislative agenda, drew a barbed open letter from the president by making it known that he was skeptical about the administration’s supposed neutrality and “more troubled than I have been in many a day.”
“The honor and self-respect of the nation is involved,” Wilson wrote. “We covet peace, and shall preserve it at any cost but the loss of honor. To forbid our people to exercise their rights for fear we might be called to vindicate them would be a deep humiliation indeed. Once accept a single abatement of right and many other humiliations would certainly follow and the whole fine fabric of international law might crumble under our hands.” The letter appeared in newspapers across the country. The threat of war was unmistakable in its warning that when the rights of citizens were violated by acts like those of the German U-boats, “we should, it seems to me, have in honor no choice as to what our own course should be.” The president was limiting Germany to the two options that House had always urged. She could accept his demands in full or face war with the United States.
Stone was not won over, and he was not the only senator who was showing uneasiness about the president’s repeated invocation of “rights” that had never existed, and his apparent determination to raise a solvable dispute over naval tactics to a level so rarefied, even so spiritual, as to make compromise unthinkable. Most of the nations involved in the European death struggle had gone to war in the genuine belief that their survival depended on it. Others later entered the conflict because of what they thought they could gain from it. None had done so for something as diaphanous as the “honor” that Wilson was invoking.
The kaiser’s government and military high command, meanwhile, were still struggling with the need to respond conclusively to Wilson’s notes. On February 11, with the blockade now creating serious hardship for Germany’s civilian population and Q-ships and the arming of British merchantmen making U-boat operations almost impossibly dangerous, Berlin announced that, as of the end of the month, all armed enemy ships would be dealt with as warships. Passenger liners, even the biggest, would no longer be exempt. Army Chief of Staff Falkenhayn, who previously had been unwilling to provoke the United States because “our situation is so serious that it would be irresponsible to make it worse,” had by this time swung around to support Tirpitz and the other naval chiefs. This simplified the dispute: now it was a contest between the men in uniform on one side and Chancellor Bethmann and a few other members of the civil government on the other, with a distressed Kaiser Wilhelm holding the deciding vote but reluctant to cast it in the absence of consensus.
The new submarine rules compromised, if they did not altogether disavow, Germany’s Arabic pledge. In Washington there was much uncertainty about how to respond. The Foreign Ministry in Berlin sent Secretary Lansing an attempted explanation, saying that the change in policy was necessary because “a submarine commander cannot possibly warn an enemy liner, if the liner has the right to fire on the submarine.” The White House made no comment when the story broke in the newspapers. Editorial coverage was muted, and the public, beginning to have some awareness of the more questionable aspects of British policy, reacted calmly. Even the strongly pro-Entente and pro-Wilson New York World, perhaps assuming that silence from the White House indicated acceptance of what Germany was doing, editorialized that “nobody ever held that a merchantman could attack anything without becoming a ship of war or possibly a pirate, thus losing its character and immunity as a merchantman.”
But Wilson’s silence did not mean assent. He had simply gone off for a cruise on the presidential yacht, and upon returning he hastened to make clear that he accepted nothing. On February 15, on the president’s instructions, the State Department issued a statement totally at odds with the positions Secretary Lansing had taken earlier. It declared that in arming her merchant ships Britain was acting in full accord with international law, and that U-boats were obliged to observe cruiser rules even if doing so put them in mortal danger. It repeated the president’s long-standing insistence that Americans had an unqualified right to travel on armed belligerent ships and be safe in doing so. The questions of people like Senator Gore, who was echoin
g William Jennings Bryan by asking whether “a single citizen should be allowed to run the risk of drenching this nation in blood merely in order that he may travel upon a belligerent rather than a neutral vessel,” were ignored by the White House and its friends.
In Washington, a distraught Ambassador Bernstorff showed Lansing an article in which a legal authority pronounced that armed merchant ships “according to international law cease to be peaceful trading ships.” With escalating urgency, the ambassador was continuing to warn Berlin that another disaster on the scale of the Lusitania would bring the United States into the war. This strengthened Bethmann’s hand, Kaiser Wilhelm being still deeply fearful of antagonizing the United States, but the military and naval authorities argued that unrestricted submarine operations could win the war while failure to permit such operations would lead inexorably to a slow and agonizing defeat. In March, after days of heated discussion, Bernstorff persuaded the kaiser to refuse the navy’s demands to lift the remaining restrictions on submarine operations. Tirpitz’s resignation followed.
President Wilson, when House returned from London and presented the House-Grey Memorandum like a trophy, shared his friend’s pleasure over what appeared to be a great achievement. He accepted the memorandum, House told his diary, in toto. This was not quite true; the president made one small change, the insertion of a single adverb. Once this was done, the memorandum no longer said that if a peace conference were arranged and the results did not satisfy the Allies, the United States would “leave the conference as a belligerent on the side of the Allies.” It said instead that America would probably leave et cetera. Much has been made of this by some historians, who claim that it made the memorandum a fatally defective instrument in the eyes of Edward Grey. But in fact it was a simple acknowledgment that only Congress can declare war. Grey was too knowledgeable not to understand that.