Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

  ALSO BY ERIK LARSON

  In the Garden of Beasts

  Thunderstruck

  The Devil in the White City

  Isaac’s Storm

  Lethal Passage

  The Naked Consumer

  Copyright © 2015 by Erik Larson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Larson, Erik, 1954–

  Dead wake : the last crossing of the Lusitania / by Erik Larson.—First edition.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Lusitania (Steamship) 2. World War, 1914–1918—Naval operations, German. 3. Shipping—Government policy—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Title: Last crossing of the Lusitania.

  D592.L8L28 2015

  940.4′514—dc23 2014034182

  ISBN 978-0-307-40886-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-44675-3

  Maps: Jeffrey L. Ward

  Frontispiece: Mary Evans/Epic/Tallandier

  Jacket design: Darren Haggar

  Jacket photography: Stefano Oppo/Getty Images

  v3.1

  For Chris, Kristen, Lauren, and Erin

  (and Molly and Ralphie, absent, but not forgotten)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  MINING SUSPENSE

  Epigraph

  A WORD FROM THE CAPTAIN

  PART I “BLOODY MONKEYS” Lusitania: The Old Sailorman

  Washington: The Lonely Place

  Lusitania: Sucking Tubes and Thackeray

  U-20: The Happiest U-Boat

  Lusitania: Menagerie

  Room 40: “The Mystery”

  Lusitania: A Cavalcade of Passengers

  Room 40: Blinker’s Ruse

  Washington: Lost

  Lusitania: Under Way

  U-20: Toward Fair Isle

  Lusitania: Rendezvous

  Room 40: Cadence

  PART II JUMP ROPE AND CAVIAR U-20: “The Blind Moment”

  Lusitania: A Sunday at Sea

  Room 40; Queenstown; London: Protecting Orion

  U-20: A Perilous Line

  Lusitania: Halibut

  U-20: The Trouble With Torpedoes

  Lusitania: Sunshine and Happiness

  Room 40: The Orion Sails

  U-20: Frustration

  London; Berlin; Washington: Comfort Denied

  Lusitania: The Manifest

  U-20: At Last

  Sighting

  Room 40: Schwieger Revealed

  Lusitania: Helpful Young Ladies

  U-20: Spectacle

  Lusitania: Life After Death

  U-20: Change of Plan

  Lusitania: Messages

  London; Washington; Berlin: Tension

  U-20: Fog

  PART III DEAD WAKE The Irish Sea: Engines Above

  London; Washington: The King’s Question

  The Irish Sea: Funnels on The Horizon

  Lusitania: Beauty

  U-20: “Treff!”

  PART IV THE BLACK SOUL Lusitania: Impact

  First Word

  Lusitania: Decisions

  U-20: Schwieger’s View

  Lusitania: The Little Army

  Telegram

  Lusitania: A Queen’s End

  All Points: Rumor

  Lusitania: Adrift

  U-20: Parting Shot

  Lusitania: Seagulls

  Queenstown: The Lost

  PART V THE SEA OF SECRETS London: Blame

  Washington; Berlin; London: The Last Blunder

  EPILOGUE: PERSONAL EFFECTS

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  About the Author

  MINING SUSPENSE

  (A Note to Readers)

  I FIRST STARTED READING about the Lusitania on a whim, following my between-books strategy of reading voraciously and promiscuously. What I learned both charmed and horrified me. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the incident, but, as so often happens when I do deep research on a subject, I quickly realized how wrong I was. Above all, I discovered that buried in the muddled details of the affair—deliberately muddled, in certain aspects—was something simple and satisfying: a very good story.

  I hasten to add, as always, that this is a work of nonfiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from a memoir, letter, telegram, or other historical document. My goal was to try to marshal the many nodes of real-life suspense and, yes, romance that marked the Lusitania episode, in a manner that would allow readers to experience it as did people who lived through it at the time (although squeamish readers may wish to skip the details of a certain autopsy that appears late in the narrative).

  In any event, I give you now the saga of the Lusitania, and the myriad forces, large and achingly small, that converged one lovely day in May 1915 to produce a tragedy of monumental scale, whose true character and import have long been obscured in the mists of history.

  ERIK LARSON

  SEATTLE

  A WORD ABOUT TIME: To avoid confusing myself and readers, I’ve converted German submarine time to Greenwich Mean Time. Thus an entry in Kptlt. Walther Schwieger’s War Log for 3:00 P.M. becomes 2:00 P.M. instead.

  AS FOR BRITAIN’S ADMIRALTY: It is important always to keep in mind that the Admiralty’s top official was the “First Lord,” who served as a kind of chief executive officer; his second-in-command was “First Sea Lord,” essentially the chief operating officer, in charge of day-to-day naval operations.

  The Captains are to remember that, whilst they are expected to use every diligence to secure a speedy voyage, they must run no risk which by any possibility might result in accident to their ships. They will ever bear in mind that the safety of the lives and property entrusted to their care is the ruling principle which should govern them in the navigation of their ships, and no supposed gain in expedition, or saving of time on the voyage, is to be purchased at the risk of accident.

  “RULES TO BE OBSERVED IN THE COMPANY’S SERVICE,” THE CUNARD STEAM-SHIP COMPANY LIMITED, MARCH 1913

  The first consideration is the safety of the U-boat.

  ADM. REINHARD SCHEER,

  Germany’s High Sea Fleet in the World War, 1919

  A WORD FROM THE CAPTAIN

  ON THE NIGHT OF MAY 6, 1915, AS HIS SHIP APPROACHED the coast of Ireland, Capt. William Thomas Turner left the bridge and made his way to the first-class lounge, where passengers were taking part in a concert and talent show, a customary feature of Cunard crossings. The room was large and warm, paneled in mahogany and carpeted in green and yellow, with two fourteen-foot-tall fireplaces in the front and rear walls. Ordinarily Turner avoided events of this kind aboard ship, because he disliked the social obligations of captaincy, but tonight was no ordinary night, and he had news to convey.

  There was already a good deal of tension in the room, despite the singing and piano playing and clumsy magic tricks, and this became more pronounced when Turner stepped forward at intermission. His presence had the perverse effect of affirming everything the passengers had been fearing since their departure from New York, in the way that a priest’s arrival tends to undermine the cheery smi
le of a nurse.

  It was Turner’s intention, however, to provide reassurance. His looks helped. With the physique of a bank safe, he was the embodiment of quiet strength. He had blue eyes and a kind and gentle smile, and his graying hair—he was fifty-eight years old—conveyed wisdom and experience, as did the mere fact of his being a Cunard captain. In accord with Cunard’s practice of rotating captains from ship to ship, this was his third stint as the Lusitania’s master, his first in wartime.

  Turner now told his audience that the next day, Friday, May 7, the ship would enter waters off the southern coast of Ireland that were part of a “zone of war” designated by Germany. This in itself was anything but news. On the morning of the ship’s departure from New York, a notice had appeared on the shipping pages of New York’s newspapers. Placed by the German Embassy in Washington, it reminded readers of the existence of the war zone and cautioned that “vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction” and that travelers sailing on such ships “do so at their own risk.” Though the warning did not name a particular vessel, it was widely interpreted as being aimed at Turner’s ship, the Lusitania, and indeed in at least one prominent newspaper, the New York World, it was positioned adjacent to Cunard’s own advertisement for the ship. Ever since, about all the passengers had been doing was “thinking, dreaming, sleeping, and eating submarines,” according to Oliver Bernard, a theater-set designer traveling in first class.

  Turner now revealed to the audience that earlier in the evening the ship had received a warning by wireless of fresh submarine activity off the Irish coast. He assured the audience there was no need for alarm.

  Coming from another man, this might have sounded like a baseless palliative, but Turner believed it. He was skeptical of the threat posed by German submarines, especially when it came to his ship, one of the great transatlantic “greyhounds,” so named for the speeds they could achieve. His superiors at Cunard shared his skepticism. The company’s New York manager issued an official response to the German warning. “The truth is that the Lusitania is the safest boat on the sea. She is too fast for any submarine. No German war vessel can get her or near her.” Turner’s personal experience affirmed this: on two previous occasions, while captain of a different ship, he had encountered what he believed were submarines and had successfully eluded them by ordering full speed ahead.

  He said nothing about these incidents to his audience. Now he offered a different sort of reassurance: upon entering the war zone the next day, the ship would be securely in the care of the Royal Navy.

  He bade the audience good night and returned to the bridge. The talent show continued. A few passengers slept fully clothed in the dining room, for fear of being trapped below decks in their cabins if an attack were to occur. One especially anxious traveler, a Greek carpet merchant, put on a life jacket and climbed into a lifeboat to spend the night. Another passenger, a New York businessman named Isaac Lehmann, took a certain comfort from the revolver that he carried with him always and that would, all too soon, bring him a measure of fame, and infamy.

  With all but a few lights extinguished and all shades pulled and curtains drawn, the great liner slid forward through the sea, at times in fog, at times under a lacework of stars. But even in darkness, in moonlight and mist, the ship stood out. At one o’clock in the morning, Friday, May 7, the officers of a New York–bound vessel spotted the Lusitania and recognized it immediately as it passed some two miles off. “You could see the shape of the four funnels,” said the captain, Thomas M. Taylor; “she was the only ship with four funnels.”

  Unmistakable and invulnerable, a floating village in steel, the Lusitania glided by in the night as a giant black shadow cast upon the sea.

  PART I

  “BLOODY MONKEYS”

  LUSITANIA

  THE OLD SAILORMAN

  THE SMOKE FROM SHIPS AND THE EXHALATIONS OF THE river left a haze that blurred the world and made the big liner seem even bigger, less the product of human endeavor than an escarpment rising from a plain. The hull was black; seagulls flew past in slashes of white, pretty now, not yet the objects of horror they would become, later, for the man standing on the ship’s bridge, seven stories above the wharf. The liner was edged bow-first into a slip at Pier 54, on the Hudson, off the western end of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, one of a row of four piers operated by the Cunard Steam-Ship Company of Liverpool, England. From the two catwalks that jutted outward from the ship’s bridge, its “wings,” the captain could get a good look along the full length of the hull, and it was here that he would stand on Saturday, May 1, 1915, a few days hence, when the ship was to set off on yet another voyage across the Atlantic.

  Despite the war in Europe, by now in its tenth month—longer than anyone had expected it to last—the ship was booked to capacity, set to carry nearly 2,000 people, or “souls,” of whom 1,265 were passengers, including an unexpectedly large number of children and babies. This was, according to the New York Times, the greatest number of Europe-bound travelers on a single vessel since the year began. When fully loaded with crew, passengers, luggage, stores, and cargo, the ship weighed, or displaced, over 44,000 tons and could sustain a top speed of more than 25 knots, about 30 miles an hour. With many passenger ships withdrawn from service or converted to military use, this made the Lusitania the fastest civilian vessel afloat. Only destroyers, and Britain’s latest oil-fueled Queen Elizabeth–class battleships, could move faster. That a ship of such size could achieve so great a speed was considered one of the miracles of the modern age. During an early trial voyage—a circumnavigation of Ireland in July 1907—a passenger from Rhode Island sought to capture the larger meaning of the ship and its place in the new century. “The Lusitania,” he told the Cunard Daily Bulletin, published aboard ship, “is in itself a perfect epitome of all that man knows or has discovered or invented up to this moment of time.”

  The paper reported that the passengers had taken “a vote of censure” against Cunard “for two flagrant omissions from the ship. She has neither a grouse moor nor a deer forest aboard.” One passenger noted that if the need for a new Noah’s ark ever arose, he would skip the bit about building the boat and just charter the Lusitania, “for I calculate that there is room on her for two of every animal extant and more.”

  The Bulletin devoted the last paragraph to waggling Cunard’s fingers at Germany, claiming that the ship had just received news, by wireless, that Kaiser Wilhelm himself had sent a telegram to the ship’s builders: “Please deliver me without delay a dozen—baker’s measure—Lusitanias.”

  From the first, the ship became an object of national pride and affection. In keeping with Cunard’s custom of naming its ships for ancient lands, the company had selected Lusitania, after a Roman province on the Iberian Peninsula that occupied roughly the same ground as modern-day Portugal. “The inhabitants were warlike, and the Romans conquered them with great difficulty,” said a memorandum in Cunard’s files on the naming of the ship. “They lived generally upon plunder and were rude and unpolished in their manners.” In popular usage, the name was foreshortened to “Lucy.”

  There was nothing rude or unpolished about the ship itself. As the Lusitania departed Liverpool on its first transatlantic run in 1907, some one hundred thousand spectators gathered at various points along the Mersey (pronounced Merzey) River to watch, many singing “Rule, Britannia!” and waving handkerchiefs. Passenger C. R. Minnitt, in a letter he wrote aboard ship, told his wife how he had climbed to the highest deck and stood near one of the ship’s four towering funnels to best capture the moment. “You do not get any idea of her size till you get right on top and then it is like being on Lincoln Cathedral,” Minnitt wrote. “I went over parts of the 1st class and it is really impossible to describe, it is so beautiful.”

  The ship’s beauty belied its complexity. From the start, it needed a lot of attention. In its first winter, woodwork in the first-class writing room and dining saloon and in
various passageways began to shrink and had to be rebuilt. Excess vibration forced Cunard to pull the ship from service so that extra bracing could be installed. Something was always breaking or malfunctioning. A baking oven exploded, injuring a crew member. Boilers needed to be scaled and cleaned. During crossings in winter, pipes froze and ruptured. The ship’s lightbulbs failed at an alarming rate. This was no small problem: the Lusitania had six thousand lamps.

  The ship endured. It was fast, comfortable, and beloved and, as of the end of April 1915, had completed 201 crossings of the Atlantic.

  TO READY the ship for its Saturday, May 1, departure, much had to be done, with speed and efficiency, and at this Capt. William Thomas Turner excelled. Within the Cunard empire, there were none better than he at handling large ships. While serving a rotation as captain of Cunard’s Aquitania, Turner had achieved a measure of fame during an arrival in New York by fitting the ship into its slip and snugging it to its wharf in just nineteen minutes. He held the record for a “round” voyage, meaning round-trip, which he achieved in December 1910, when, as captain of the Lusitania’s twin, the Mauretania, he piloted the ship to New York and back in just fourteen days. Cunard rewarded him with a Silver Salver. He found it “very gratifying” but also surprising. “I did not expect to receive any such recognition of my part in the matter,” he wrote, in a thank-you letter. “We all on board simply tried to do our duty as under any ordinary circumstances.”

  Complex, detailed, and messy, this process of readying the Lusitania involved a degree of physical labor that was masked by the ship’s outward grace. Anyone looking up from the dock saw only beauty, on a monumental scale, while on the far side of the ship men turned black with dust as they shoveled coal—5,690 tons in all—into the ship through openings in the hull called “side pockets.” The ship burned coal at all times. Even when docked it consumed 140 tons a day to keep furnaces hot and boilers primed and to provide electricity from the ship’s dynamo to power lights, elevators, and, very important, the Marconi transmitter, whose antenna stretched between its two masts. When the Lusitania was under way, its appetite for coal was enormous. Its 300 stokers, trimmers, and firemen, working 100 per shift, would shovel 1,000 tons of coal a day into its 192 furnaces to heat its 25 boilers and generate enough superheated steam to spin the immense turbines of its engines. The men were called “the black gang,” a reference not to their race but to the coal dust that coated their bodies. The boilers occupied the bottom deck of the ship and were gigantic, like wheelless locomotives, each 22 feet long and 18 feet in diameter. They needed close attention at all times, for when fully pressurized each stored enough explosive energy to tear a small ship in half. Fifty years earlier, exploding boilers had caused America’s worst-ever maritime disaster—the destruction of the Mississippi River steamboat Sultana at a cost of 1,800 lives.