by James Wyllie
The man charged with performing this balancing act was the German ambassador to the United States, 51-year-old Count Johann von Bernstorff, a tall, polished, cold-eyed charmer with a blonde moustache. One of his first actions after the war began was to hold court for journalists in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton, a three-year-old luxury hotel in midtown Manhattan, conveniently located near all the New York social clubs of which von Bernstorff was so fond, as well as a short taxi ride away from the German Club on Central Park South. As newspapermen peppered the count with questions about the war in Europe, he paced the room excitedly, explaining to them in his flawless, witty English that they and their journals were wrong about the ferocious and unprecedentedly fatal battles being fought in Europe: the French were thoroughly beaten, the German invasion of Paris was imminent, and in any case, the Russians had started all the trouble.
Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the USA, 1908–17
This was the first shot in a publicity war that von Bernstorff would wage as he tried to construct the ‘right kind of news’ for America by planting stories in pro-German newspapers like The Fatherland and Staats-Zeitung, throwing money at the New York Evening Mail and even attempting to buy the Washington Post.
Von Bernstorff had been recalled to Berlin in early July, shortly after the assassination of heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the flame that lit the fuse of war. While there, he met with Lieutenant Colonel Walter Nicolai, head of Abteilung Drei-Bai, or Section 3B, Germany’s military intelligence unit. Nicolai explained to the ambassador that all of the country’s military intelligence officers had been deployed to the conflict zones of Europe. It was now up to von Bernstorff to add to his diplomatic duties the most undiplomatic of missions: he was to become Germany’s unofficial spymaster and saboteur in North America. To help him on his way, von Bernstorff received $150 million in German treasury notes (worth almost $3.5 billion today), in order to buy ‘munitions for Germany, stopping munitions for the Allies, necessary propaganda, forwarding reservists – and other things’.
Von Bernstorff’s chances of being able to keep the United States out of the war were boosted by US President Woodrow Wilson’s isolationist attitude to the European conflict. On 4 August 1914, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, Wilson, who was under heavy stress due to his beloved wife Ellen’s terminal nephritis, which would kill her two days later, issued a detailed proclamation of American neutrality, which barred any American or anyone living in the United States from aiding any of the belligerents in prosecuting the war. Even so, in reality, the USA’s economic machinery soon started to work in favour of the Allies.
When war broke out, the United States was suffering from an industrial recession and a bear market. The intense lobbying of J. P. Morgan & Company and other financiers in Washington and London would by October see the US allow sales of war products to the combatants, which of course meant the Allies, as the Germans couldn’t get through the British blockade. On top of that, the British awarded all their US war purchasing to J. P. Morgan, to prevent war profiteering and create price stability, a contract that saw Morgan take a staggering commission of $30 million. The relaxing of restrictions also created a boom for American manufacturers, farmers and banks, and would see the US replace England as the world’s financial superpower by the war’s end.
As far as many Germans were concerned, these developments effectively made the US a belligerent in the conflict: an enemy power and therefore a legitimate target, not just at sea but also on home soil. At the same time, the countries on its immediate borders, Canada and Mexico, offered opportunities for causing the Allies trouble.
Canada, to the north, was a young, muscular and resource-rich Dominion of Great Britain eager to assert its own identity in the war with Germany; Mexico was aflame with a revolution that had begun in 1910 and that would last for a decade, illuminating its long, bloody history with the US. And the United States itself, with nearly 100 million people, of whom 2.3 million were German-born immigrants, was a wealthy, diverse and powerful base from which to work German propaganda – or outright sabotage against America’s allegedly neutral war machine.
Von Bernstorff had spent the first 11 years of his life at the Court of St James in London, where his father, Count Albrecht, served as Germany’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. When his father died in 1873, von Bernstorff moved back to Germany, and graduated with a baccalaureate from Dresden before joining the diplomatic service. He took the fast track: from military attaché in Constantinople in 1899 to first secretary in London in 1902, where he caught the eye of Kaiser Wilhelm as a man who could win goodwill for Germany with his keen political skills and considerable personal charm. After serving as consul general in Cairo from 1906–8 – a launch pad to the diplomatic big league – von Bernstorff was appointed Imperial German ambassador to Mexico and the United States in 1908. Along the way, like so many other European aristocrats who had ancient titles to dangle, he acquired a wealthy American wife (and eventually an American mistress).
The first real test of his capacity to calm American fears about German intentions would be brought about by U-boat action in the Atlantic. On 1 May 1915, the day that the Lusitania set sail on her final journey, 40 newspapers across the United States published a chilling notice from the Imperial German embassy in Washington DC, one echoing those it had published since launching their submarine war on Atlantic shipping. Its message was lethally simple: ‘travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her Allies do so at their own risk’.
The German warning to passengers sailing on transatlantic ships of the dangers they faced
The Washington Times splashed the warning at the top of their front page, next to a photograph of a sinisterly arrogant von Bernstorff, and an ominous piece reported how nine prominent passengers about to set sail on the Cunard liner the RMS Lusitania from New York to Liverpool had received anonymous telegrams threatening trouble on the seas.
‘Alfred G. Vanderbilt was told in one of these messages that the vessel would be torpedoed,’ the Times article revealed. ‘Other passengers were warned that the liner would meet some mysterious end. The messages were ‘followed up’ by the circulation, by a number of strangers on the crowded pier, of similar veiled warnings. The strangers hurried away as soon as the fact that they were accosting passengers was reported to the Cunard private detective force.’
Vanderbilt had inherited the patriarchal place at the Vanderbilt family table when his father, Cornelius II, died in 1899. He had cancelled his booking on the Titanic three years earlier at such a late hour that some reports of its destruction listed him as one of the dead. Now, however, he and other well-heeled travellers were being warned by mysterious forces: ‘THE LUSITANIA IS DOOMED. DO NOT SAIL ON HER,’ read the telegram received by Vanderbilt, its macabre signature, ‘morte’. Death.
The Lusitania had been a German target since the beginning of the war. The British Admiralty had registered the ship as an armed merchant cruiser in September 1914, planning to fit guns on her decks. The plan was scrapped as too energy-expensive, but the idea created the abiding impression that the liner was not a luxurious vessel for civilians but a weapon of war. The fact that the Lusitania was a target was not news to the codebreakers in Room 40. In March 1915, Blinker Hall’s team had been reading intercepted German intelligence reports detailing ships heading for British ports, as well as those heading to the neutral Netherlands. On 2 April, after the Germans had sunk neutral Dutch, Spanish, Norwegian and Greek ships, much to their governments’ outrage, the Kaiser declared that the ships of neutral countries would not be targets. On 10 March, Room 40 intercepted German intelligence broadcast from the high-power long-wave station in the North Sea town of Norddeich reporting that the ‘fast steamer Lusitania leaves Liverpool March 13th’.
While the Lusitania was clearly an enemy ship insofar as she flew Britain’s nautical flag the Red Ensign, the ominous telegr
ams sent to prominent passengers in New York imply that her targeting had more sinister motives, a suggestion that has led to many conspiracy theories since her doom.
One of the most compelling is that Room 40, while not having a direct hand in her destruction, certainly helped create a climate of terror around her. The telegrams sent to Vanderbilt and others all originated at the Providence Journal. This small local newspaper punched far above its weight during the First World War, often breaking stories then picked up by global powerhouses such the New York Times. The Providence Journal was run by John Revelstoke Rathom, who had risen from being the paper’s managing editor, to running the operation as editor and general manager in 1912. Rathom was an Australian ex-pat who happened to be great mates with another Australian ex-pat, Guy Gaunt, the British Naval Attaché in Washington DC.
Captain Guy Gaunt, the British Naval Attaché to the USA
Guy Gaunt, like other foreign service operatives, spent much of his time in New York City, which fuelled both his access to and his love of society, and his considerable ego. While not trained in intelligence, he was Britain’s de facto spy for the entire United States for the first two years of the war, reporting back to Blinker Hall first, and MI5, second. As such, Gaunt would have access to Room 40’s intelligence and through his friendship with Rathom, a friendly newspaper in which to plant whatever seeds he needed to sow.
The threatening telegrams arrived on the same day as the warning issued by the German embassy, which was likely penned for von Bernstorff by his unofficial propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, editor of the pro-German five-cent weekly The Fatherland. On the cover of its 28 April 1915 edition it featured a drawing of an Allied liner not unlike the Lusitania – though with a gun prominent on her bow – listing after being hit by a torpedo. The caption beneath the depiction of survivors in lifeboats and floundering in the water read: ‘The Work of a German Submarine’. And, with no small irony, beneath that the title of the edition’s featured article was ‘German Love of Peace’.
Those who boarded the Lusitania on 1 May 1915 might have taken comfort in a New York Times article accompanying von Bernstorff’s warning, in which Cunard’s agent, Charles B. Sumner, claimed that when he first heard the warning submitted over the telephone the previous night, he thought it was another blackmailer. Sumner reported that Cunard had received several blackmail attempts against its Atlantic liners, most recently one demanding $15,000 to prevent a similar notice threatening harm, which he dismissed as a nuisance ‘to annoy the line and make its passengers uncomfortable’.
Sumner had no fear for the safety of Cunard’s passengers, and indeed stressed the security measures that the line employed.
‘No passenger is permitted aboard … unless he can identify himself.
No express matter (i.e. unaccompanied parcel) of any sort is taken.
Every passenger must identify his baggage before it is placed on board.’ He added that the British navy was responsible for all ships in the danger zone off the British Isles, and ‘especially for Cunarders … As for submarines I have no fear of them whatever.’
Anyone sceptical about a Cunard employee practising damage control would have taken no solace in another New York Times piece that day, which reported that a German submarine crew had mocked the survivors of a ship they had torpedoed. B. T. Peak, the second engineer of the British steamer SS Falaba, which had been sunk by submarine U-28 off the Irish coast on 28 March – resulting in 100 dead, including an American – said from his London hospital bed: ‘I was hoping they would pick me up but instead they were laughing and seemed to treat it all as a huge joke … It was quite evident the Germans were prepared to see the people drown.’
The Fatherland 28 April 1915
The Germans had sunk 19 merchant ships in the Atlantic between October 1914 and the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, and that total was about to rise sharply (by the end of the war they would have sunk 5,000 Allied ships). The British Admiralty sent destroyers to escort passenger ships, and instructed them not to fly flags or otherwise call attention to their nationality. The Lusitania had her orange and black funnels painted dark grey during the voyage to make her well-known profile less visible to submarines, but Cunard had also shut down one of her four engine boiler rooms to save money on light passenger loads, reducing the ship’s top speed by three and a half knots, to 22 knots, or about 25 miles per hour.
Nearly one week on from the sinking of the Falaba, after the first-class passengers had taken their Friday lunch in the frescoed gold and white Louis XVI dining room, the Lusitania was on the home stretch of her journey, sailing in patchy fog about 11 miles off the fishing village of Kinsale, on the south coast of Ireland. The liner’s captain, William Turner, who had spent 46 of his 59 years at sea, had reduced speed, partly due to the fog, and partly to time his arrival in Liverpool for after dark, when it would be harder for a submarine to target the ship. Despite Sumner’s assurance, there were no British cruisers escorting the Lusitania safely through the danger zone.
The German submarine U-20, however, was sailing in those waters, hunting for Allied shipping. The codebreakers of Room 40 knew the vessel was active, and so too did the Admiralty. The U-boats maintained regular wireless contact with their home bases, messages that were intercepted and then decoded by Room 40. This accumulated data gave the codebreakers intimate insights into the habits and patterns of the U-boats – when they left port, their direction and speed, until the U-boat was out of wireless range – as they hunted for easy prey around the British Isles.
However, because of Room 40’s isolation from other sections of the Admiralty, and even from other departments within Naval Intelligence, it had no way of applying the knowledge it gathered, deprived as it was of any information regarding the location or trajectory of Allied shipping. Room 40 simply passed its findings on for others to analyse. Nevertheless, messages intercepted by the codebreakers from German submarines and wireless transmitting stations were passed on to the British navy, and to ships at risk, via the slightly creaky chain of command.
This particular U-boat’s commander, Walter Schwieger, and his 32-man crew had gained notoriety for firing at – and missing – the Asturias, a British hospital ship, in February of that same year. On 5 May, U-20 sank the three-masted wooden British schooner the Earl of Lathom, in a grenade attack. The next day, it sank the British steamers Candidate and Centurion.
Schwieger was planning on heading back to base, but had to linger to avoid HMS Juno, a passing British cruiser. He had just two torpedoes left, and the Juno was moving fast and zigzagging. This, combined with the fog, made the prospect of a shot at her the kind of chance Schwieger didn’t want to take.
And then along came the Lusitania, which Schwieger knew was an English ship. Her course and speed gave him a target that no amount of planning could guarantee: a clear bow shot from 700 metres. At 2.10 p.m., the single torpedo fired by Schwieger’s U-20 struck the Lusitania just under her bridge. Schwieger later described the scene in his diary: ‘A second explosion must have followed that of the torpedo (boiler or coal or powder?) … The ship stopped immediately and quickly listed sharply to starboard, sinking deeper by the head at the same time. It appeared as if it would capsize in a short time. Great confusion arose on the ship; some of the boats were swung clear and lowered into the water.’
The second explosion was the source of much outrage, another example of German overkill. However, the fatal blow was struck by U-20’s torpedo; the secondary explosion was likely the result of a chemical chain reaction in the Lusitania’s cargo. The result, though, was lethal to more than half of the 1,959 passengers on board. In the end, 1,196 died – 128 of them American citizens, the majority of whom were women and children.
The death of American women and children was trumpeted by the Allies, in case the Americans had been unmoved by this latest, and to date worst, German atrocity involving the slaughter of innocents. In London, the newspapers called the
Lusitania’s sinking a massacre in cold blood. Across the United States, the press followed the story first with hope that all had survived; the 7 May edition of the Tacoma Times of Washington State, enjoying an eight-hour time difference from the site of the sinking, claimed that ‘latest reports say that all persons on board were saved by lifeboats’. The next day, the reports were angry and sad, as details came into focus: ‘Germany Glad Ship Sunk: 1,200 Die’ shouted a banner headline on the El Paso Herald, adding beneath it, ‘Weeping Widows Mourn Dead’.
Would this be the fatal blow to bring the United States into the European war on the side of the Allies? Former President Theodore Roosevelt, who made no secret of his desire to get America into the fight, said, ‘It seems inconceivable that we should refrain from taking action on this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.’ From the White House, however, there was a disquieting silence.
There was nothing but noise from the German-American community. At Lüchow’s popular German restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan, exuberant German families enjoyed the orchestra’s patriotic German songs, while a few blocks north, at Hofbrau Haus, patrons were raising toasts to the Kaiser and to the sinking of the Lusitania. At the exclusive German Club, one cavalry captain, stranded in New York by the war, said, ‘This is a masterstroke which will curb transatlantic travelling and isolate Great Britain more effectively than a whole fleet of super-dreadnoughts could possibly accomplish. It’s the doom of Great Britain.’