Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  The U-boat commanders had one thing in common, however. When it came to wireless, all were talkative, as Room 40 and Blinker Hall were delighted to learn. They used their wireless systems incessantly. In the course of the war, Room 40 would receive twenty thousand intercepted messages that had been sent by U-boats. This “extreme garrulity,” as Room 40’s Clarke put it, allowed the group to keep close watch over U-boat travels, all duly recorded in a ledger kept by Commander Hope.

  In January 1915, Room 40 was able to pinpoint the first time a U-boat traveled as far as the Irish Sea, the body of water that separates England and Ireland. The group even identified the particular zone to which the U-boat’s captain had been ordered—a square of sea near Liverpool. On that occasion, the value of the intelligence was immediately apparent, and the Admiralty acted at once. It sent a warning to the home fleet, identifying the source of its information only as a “reliable authority.” Destroyers converged on the U-boat’s patrol zone from north and south. Two large Cunard liners, the Ausonia and Transylvania, were en route to Liverpool at the time, carrying naval gun barrels made by Bethlehem Steel. The Transylvania, then under the command of Captain Turner, also carried passengers, among them forty-nine Americans. The Admiralty ordered both ships to change course immediately and speed as fast as possible to Queenstown, on the south coast of Ireland, and wait there until destroyers could arrive to escort them to Liverpool. Upon arriving safely, Turner expressed his relief at having evaded attack. “I fooled ’em that time,” he said.

  Room 40 had long followed Kptlt. Walther Schwieger’s U-20 and kept a running record of his patrols: when he left, which route he took, where he was headed, and what he was supposed to do once he got there. In early March 1915, Commander Hope monitored a voyage Schwieger made to the Irish Sea that coincided with a disturbing message broadcast from a German naval transmitter located at Norddeich, on Germany’s North Sea coast just below Holland. Addressed to all German warships and submarines, the message made specific reference to the Lusitania, announcing that the ship was en route to Liverpool and would arrive on March 4 or 5. The meaning was obvious: the German navy considered the Lusitania fair game.

  The Admiralty found the message disconcerting enough that it dispatched two destroyers to rendezvous with the ship and escort it to port. One destroyer sent an uncoded message asking the ship’s then captain, Daniel Dow, to report his position in order to arrange the meeting. Dow refused to give it, fearing that a U-boat had sent the message. The rendezvous never came off, but Dow succeeded in reaching Liverpool on his own. It was soon after this that he asked to be relieved, and Captain Turner took his place.

  As that spring of 1915 advanced, the code solvers in Room 40 honed their skills, delighted and a bit astonished by the fact that the German navy still did not revise its codebooks. The Mystery remained secure and continued to yield revelations about the travels of German U-boats.

  TOWARD THE end of April, as Captain Turner readied the Lusitania for its May 1 departure, Room 40 learned of a new surge of U-boat activity. Intercepts showed that on Friday, April 30, four U-boats left their bases. In response, war-staff chief Dummy Oliver sent an urgent, ultrasecret message to Jellicoe at Scapa Flow. “Four submarines sailed yesterday from Heligoland,” the message read. It identified their expected destinations. “They appear to be making good 12½ knots. Do not divulge exact source of information in any steps you take.” Within hours, Room 40 got word that two more U-boats also had departed, these from a base at Emden, on Germany’s North Sea coast. One of these was Schwieger’s U-20. Considering that the German navy typically had only an average of two U-boats in the North Sea or the Atlantic at any one time, this was an extraordinary development.

  Room 40’s code breakers found it a simple matter to follow U-20 through the first day or so of its voyage: Schwieger’s wireless man repeated the boat’s position fourteen times in twenty-four hours.

  Room 40 did not have to look far to find the reason for this new and dangerous assault by Germany’s U-boats. As it happened, it was the German navy’s response to a ruse concocted by intelligence chief Blinker Hall himself, in the application of what he described as one of the first principles of the profession, “that of mystifying and misleading the enemy.”

  LUSITANIA

  A CAVALCADE OF PASSENGERS

  BY SATURDAY, MAY 1, THE HEAT WAVE HAD DISSIPATED. The morning was cold, the sky pewter. The temperature made it easier for passengers arriving at Cunard’s Pier 54 to transport their belongings, for now they could simply wear their heavy coats, rather than bearing them draped over their arms along with all the other things they carried, their canes, umbrellas, valises, parcels, books, and babies, all in evidence on the sidewalk outside the terminal, as a long black line of taximeter cabs emerged from Eleventh Avenue and pulled close to the curb. Large bags traveled on the floor beside the drivers and were hauled from the cabs by squat, strong-looking men in open jackets and bully caps.

  All these things were captured on film by a motion-picture camera stationed just outside the entrance to the terminal. Passengers crossed its plane of view: men in topcoats, fedoras, and snap-brim caps; women with large hats mounded with sewn-on flowers; toddlers bundled as if for the Arctic, one with a knit cap pulled low over the ears. Now and then a face appeared in startling closeup, with that look travelers have always had over time, stern, concentrating, trying to pay the cabbie, hold the cane and gloves—the empty glove fingers flexing like a cow’s udder—and still keep track of the suitcase and trunk receding into the Cunard terminal.

  At the far side of the building, the Lusitania’s hull rose high above the wharf in a black wall of steel and rivets. The ship seemed as indestructible as anything that could be imagined, even for an age that imagined well and placed so much trust in immensity and invention.

  The furnaces in its boiler rooms flared as firemen raised steam for departure; its funnels exhausted braids of gray smoke into the mist above.

  AS ALWAYS there were passengers who had achieved fame, and their arrival created a stir among the thousands of well-wishers, kin, and spectators now gathered along the wharf to see the ship off. Cunard had built grandstands to honor the custom, and these were full as always; they afforded a view not just of the ship but of a portion of Lower Manhattan and the wharves and vessels jutting from the shore on both sides of the Hudson. Just north stood the piers of the White Star Line, which three years earlier, almost to the month, were to have received the Titanic. Among the spectators the attention given to the Lusitania and its passengers was more acute than usual, given the German warning published in the city’s papers that morning.

  Here came Charles Frohman, the theater impresario, who had made Ethel Barrymore a star and had brought the play Peter Pan to America, for which he dressed Maude Adams in a woodsy tunic with a broad collar, and in so doing forever engraved a particular image of the boy in the world’s imagination. Frohman also produced the stage show Sherlock Holmes, with William Gillette as its namesake hero, with deerstalker cap and meerschaum pipe. Frohman, wearing a blue double-breasted suit, walked with a marked limp and used a cane. A friend of his also came aboard, Marguerite Lucile Jolivet, twenty-five years old, known universally by her stage and film name, Rita Jolivet. Though she had already performed in Shakespearean plays in London, including a turn as Juliet, and had appeared in several silent films made in Italy, she was still only a fledgling star, but Frohman liked her, and his interest virtually assured her a vibrant career. She was traveling now to Europe to act in several more Italian films.

  Another arrival was George Kessler, a wealthy wine importer known the world over as the “Champagne King.” Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst, he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as “freak dinners”—perhaps most notably the “Gondola Party” he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel’s courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant g
ondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.

  By far the most glamorous passenger was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son and primary heir of the late Cornelius, whose death in 1899 had left Alfred a rich man. Something of a rake, Alfred was tall and lean, with dark eyes and hair, and a taste for expensive suits. He was a welcome presence on board, especially among the women, despite the fact that he was married and carried with him a history of scandal. His first wife, Ellen French, had divorced him in 1908, charging him, as the New York Times put it, with “misconducting himself with an unknown woman” in his private railcar. The woman turned out to be Mary Ruiz, wife of a Cuban diplomat. The scandal drove Ruiz to commit suicide. Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America’s awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune. She was not on board. Vanderbilt was also a member of what a Minnesota newspaper called the “Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the Titanic but for one reason or another had changed their minds. Needless to say, Vanderbilt traveled in style, booking one of the Lusitania’s “Parlor Suites.” He lodged his valet two doors down the corridor, in an interior room with neither porthole nor bath. Vanderbilt paid for both tickets in cash, $1,001.50, equivalent to over $22,000 in today’s dollars.

  Reporters came aboard, as usual, looking to interview famous or notorious passengers, only today their interest was more focused than usual. It was a mark of the importance of shipping and the frequency with which transatlantic liners called at New York that every newspaper had a “ship news” reporter. Each paper devoted a page to the arrivals and departures of the great liners and to advertisements and schedules for the many shipping lines with piers in the city. It was on these pages that the German warning had appeared in a number of Saturday morning editions.

  The ship-news reporters worked out of a shedlike structure near Battery Park, in Lower Manhattan, adjacent to the terminal for the Staten Island Ferry, where a battered green door gave way to a room full of worn desks and telephones used by reporters for a dozen newspapers and one wire service. The reporters tended to favor certain ships, often for intangible reasons. “Ships do have personalities,” wrote Jack Lawrence, the shipping writer for the New York Evening Mail. Some ships “have character and a warm, friendly atmosphere while others are only steel plates riveted around throbbing turbines.” One of the favorites was always the Lusitania. The ship invariably provided news, because as the fastest and most luxurious ocean liner still in service it tended to draw the richest, most prominent passengers. Part of the ship’s appeal was also due to the fact that its longtime chief purser, James McCubbin, sixty-two, welcomed the reporters’ attention and directed them to passengers likely to be of interest. As purser, McCubbin had the responsibility to make sure all passengers were tucked into their cabins and berths as quickly as possible, to store their valuables, and—no small thing—to compile their bar bills at the end of the voyage. In the words of the Cunard officers’ manual, he was “to give satisfaction to all classes of passengers.”

  The reporters met the Lusitania just before its departures, but also upon arrival, when they would sail out to the quarantine station in New York Harbor. A ritual followed. They gathered in McCubbin’s cabin. He would order a cabin boy to bring some ice, club soda, and a couple of bottles of Cunard Line Scotch. He shut the door and handed out passenger lists. The last such session had taken place the previous week, when the Lusitania arrived from Liverpool, and had brought the reporters some unwelcome news. McCubbin announced that his next voyage, the return to Liverpool departing Saturday, May 1, would be his last crossing. Company rules required that he retire. “I’m about to become the most useless mortal on earth,” he told the reporters—“the sailor home from the sea.” He called it a joke. “Sailors don’t have homes,” he said, and added, “When a sailor gets so old he can’t work any more they ought to sew him up in a staysail rag and heave him over the side.”

  On Saturday morning, reporter Jack Lawrence went aboard as usual, but now with a particular story in mind. He carried with him a copy of the German Embassy’s warning.

  Lawrence stopped by the cabin of Alfred Vanderbilt and knocked on the door. Vanderbilt himself opened it, wearing an elegant suit with a pink carnation in one lapel. In the room beyond, his valet was hard at work unpacking a small mountain of baggage. Lawrence had tried to interview Vanderbilt in the past and had typically found it a pointless exercise because the man rarely had much to say. “Alfred Vanderbilt may have been a riot among the ladies,” Lawrence wrote, “but in the presence of newspapermen he was a shy and shrinking violet.”

  Vanderbilt commented that there seemed to be an unusual amount of excitement aboard. “Lots of talk about submarines, torpedoes and sudden death,” Vanderbilt said. “I don’t take much stock in it myself. What would they gain by sinking the Lusitania?”

  He showed Lawrence a telegram he had received after boarding. “The Lusitania is doomed,” it read. “Do not sail on her.” It was signed “Mort.” Vanderbilt said he didn’t know anyone named Mort but wondered if it might have been an allusion to death. “Probably somebody trying to have a little fun at my expense.”

  Out on deck, Lawrence came across Elbert Hubbard, at this point one of the most famous men in America—the soap salesman turned author who had founded a collective in East Aurora, New York, called the Roycrofters, where men and women built furniture, bound books, made prints, and produced finely crafted goods of leather and metal. As an author, he was best known for his inspirational book, A Message to Garcia, about the value of personal initiative, and for an account of the Titanic disaster that centered on one woman’s refusal to enter a lifeboat without her husband; he was headed now to Europe with the goal of interviewing Kaiser Wilhelm. Hubbard was famous as well for coining crisp aphorisms, including “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” He wore a Stetson hat and a flamboyant black cravat—more like a large gift ribbon—and had long flowing hair. When Lawrence approached him, Hubbard was standing beside his wife and eating a large red apple.

  Hubbard hadn’t seen the warning. “When I showed it to him he merely glanced at it and went right on chewing his apple,” Lawrence wrote. Hubbard took another apple out of his pocket and gave it to Lawrence. “Here, have an apple and don’t bother your head about those Potsdam maniacs. They’re all crazy.”

  Lawrence pressed him. What if the German navy really was planning an attack?

  “What’ll I do?” Hubbard said. “Why, I’ll stay on the ship. I’m too old to go chasing after lifeboats and I never was much of a hand at swimming. No, we’ll stay by the ship.” He turned to his wife. “Won’t we Ma?” It was Lawrence’s impression that Mrs. Hubbard did not share his view.

  Lawrence discovered that very few passengers had read the German warning. He did not find this surprising. “When you are getting ready to sail on a transatlantic liner at noon,” he wrote, “you seldom have time to sit down and peruse the morning papers.”

  Even those who had seen the warning paid little attention. The idea that Germany would dare attempt to sink a fully loaded civilian passenger ship seemed beyond rational consideration. And even if a U-boat did try, common wisdom held that it would inevitably fail. The Lusitania was simply too big and too fast, and once in British waters would doubtless be too well protected by the British navy.

  Only two passengers canceled because of the warning itself, a wealthy shoe dealer from Boston, named Edward B. Bowen, and his wife. They did so at the last minute. “A feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen to the Lusitania,” Edward said, later. “I talked it over with Mrs. Bowen and we decided to cancel our passage—although I had an important business engagement in London.”

  A few others canceled for r
easons of illness and altered plans, or because they had resolved, warning aside, that sailing on a British ship in wartime wasn’t prudent. The famed Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry planned initially to travel with producer Frohman on the Lusitania, but well before the warning appeared she canceled her booking and switched to an American ship, the New York. She encouraged Rita Jolivet to do likewise, but Jolivet kept her original booking. One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes. Second class was so full that a number of passengers learned to their delight that they had been given first-class rooms.

  For those passengers who did feel unsettled by the German warning, Cunard offered comforting words. Wrote passenger Ambrose B. Cross, “From the very first the ship’s people asseverated that we ran no danger, that we should run right away from any submarine, or ram her, and so on, so that the idea came to be regarded as a mild joke for lunch and dinner tables.”

  Moreover, a conviction existed among passengers that upon entering the waters off Britain’s west coast, the so-called Western Approaches, the ship would be met by the Royal Navy and escorted to Liverpool. Cunard encouraged this belief, and may have believed it as well, on the basis of the Royal Navy’s past efforts to direct and escort the company’s ships. Long before the sailing, Oscar Grab, twenty-eight, a newly married clothing importer from New York, made an appointment to talk with a Cunard representative about submarines and the overall safety of transatlantic crossings. Grab’s wife of thirty-nine days had begged him to take an American ship. Grab and the Cunard official had a long talk, during which Grab was told that steps would be taken to protect the ship during the crossing. He felt reassured enough to buy a first-class ticket, although he waited to do so until the day before departure.