Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Throughout Sunday, May 2, the ship encountered rain and fog, and seas just turbulent enough to cause seasickness. Many passengers retreated to their rooms, but hardier souls walked the decks, played cards, engaged the ship’s typists for their correspondence, and sipped tea in the Verandah Cafe, a calming gardenlike place with five hanging baskets, six shrubs in containers, and forty other plants in boxes around the room. Some passengers read books on C Deck—also called the Shelter Deck—protected from rain by the underside of the deck above. Passengers could rent deck chairs for a dollar per voyage; another dollar got them a blanket, known in the ship’s vernacular as a “rug.”

  At 10:30 Sunday morning, church services began for two denominations: Church of England, in the first-class saloon; Roman Catholic in second. Many passengers slept late, planning to wake at about eleven, in time for lunch.

  THEODATE POPE awoke after a difficult night. Her cabin had been noisy, owing to its proximity to the three staterooms booked by the Crompton family, who proved to be a boisterous group, as families of six, including an infant, tend to be. Always prone to insomnia, she found the noise intolerable and asked the purser, McCubbin, to find her a more suitable stateroom. Changing accommodations while under way could be a tricky business, but McCubbin obliged and placed her in a new stateroom three decks up.

  SECOND-CLASS PASSENGER William Uno Meriheina, a twenty-six-year-old race-car driver from New York traveling to South Africa as a “special agent” for the General Motors Export Company, got up early and took “a dandy salt water bath.” The tubs on board were supplied with heated seawater. Afterward, he dressed and went to breakfast. “Plenty of seasickness on board,” he noted, in a long day-by-day letter he was writing to his wife, Esther, “but I feel splendid.”

  Meriheina—who, except when traveling, went by the name William Merry Heina—had been born in Russia, in the Duchy of Finland (which would become independent in 1917), and emigrated to New York in 1893. He had a fascination with speed and by 1909 was racing cars in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, including one race that lasted twenty-four hours. He was also one of the first drivers to race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway after it opened in 1909. He survived two crashes, one in which his car, a Lozier, rolled over twice, but left him unhurt. He also tried his hand at flying and survived a collision at an airfield in Garden City, Long Island, in which another aircraft settled on top of his in midair. Once again he emerged unscathed. Said his wife, “A braver man never lived.”

  He had chosen the Lusitania because he believed it to be the “safest” ship. In the rush to board and say good-bye to his wife and their daughter, Charlotte, he had not had a chance to open the newspaper he had bought before boarding. It was only when the ship was about fifty miles from New York that he read about the German warning.

  He wasn’t worried. Now and then the ship encountered French and British warships. One French dreadnought turned around and followed, but the Lusitania left it behind.

  Like other passengers, he was unaware that the liner was traveling at reduced speed with one boiler room closed, despite the obvious visible clue provided by the lack of smoke coming from the fourth funnel. He believed the ship was moving at its top speed of 25 knots and took pride in the pace. “We have passed quite a few vessels bound both ways,” he wrote. “Owing to our great speed we don’t stay in sight of any one ship very long.”

  He was also under the impression the ship was being watched over by British naval forces. “Evidently,” he wrote, “we are being carefully convoyed all the way across.”

  THAT MORNING Charles Lauriat got up at 8:00 A.M., called back to consciousness by his steward. He also took a sea bath. Once dressed, he strolled the first-class promenade, stopping to chat with the Hubbards and other acquaintances. He dined with his traveling companion, Lothrop Withington. They took their meals together in the opulent first-class dining room at the center of D Deck, where some 470 passengers at a time dined at tables arrayed on two levels under a dome frescoed with cherubs, amid palm trees, potted plants, white plaster walls, and fluted Corinthian columns with gilded capitals. Gold leaf seemed to coat every raised surface, from plaster wreaths and vines to balustrade rails.

  Lauriat was sufficiently well known to Cunard officers and crew that on some past voyages he had been allowed to climb up into the crow’s nest on the ship’s forward wireless mast and stay there throughout the day. This was not, however, something Captain Turner was likely to let him do. Dealing with bloody monkeys on deck was one thing; having them climbing the wireless mast was another.

  Lauriat knew well the routines of shipboard life, including the daily pools where passengers placed bets on how many miles the ship would travel in a given day. Places in the pool denoted a particular distance and were auctioned by a ship’s officer. Passengers based their bets on their sense of how the ship would fare given the weather and sea conditions likely to prevail over the next twenty-four hours. The most unpredictable factor was fog, which if it persisted would sharply limit a ship’s progress, for the only safe way of coping with fog was to cut speed and start blowing the ship’s foghorn. The mileage pool and its associated strategizing and arguing and the cigars and whiskey consumed by those present invariably helped spark friendships and break down barriers of formal courtesy and convention.

  On Sunday, the ship’s first full day at sea, it traveled 501 miles, according to Lauriat’s recollection. He found this surprising. He too assumed the ship was moving at 25 knots. At that rate, equivalent to about 29 miles an hour, it should have covered 700 miles. The periodic fog accounted for part of this sluggishness, he gauged, but certainly not all. At noon the next day, Lauriat and Withington would discover the ship was traveling even more slowly. “At this rate,” Lauriat told Withington, “we’re not going to make Liverpool on time.”

  Lauriat retired to his stateroom to examine the Thackeray drawings. He looked them over, mulling what he would ask Lady Ritchie to write and planning how each drawing would be mounted.

  FOR CAPTAIN TURNER, the voyage thus far was routine, and it was likely to remain so for at least the next four days. The weather was peaceful, for the most part, and there was little likelihood of encountering a German submarine in mid-ocean. When the ship neared Ireland, however, the danger of attack would grow. While Turner himself expressed little anxiety about submarines, within Cunard there was a growing sense that the threat they posed was becoming more acute.

  Before each crossing, the company gave Turner confidential advisories and notices about conditions that might affect the voyage. Lately these had included Admiralty memoranda that delineated the growing submarine threat and offered advice on what to do if confronted by a U-boat. Cunard’s managers still shared the widely held belief that no U-boat commander would dare sink a passenger liner; at the same time, they had watched as Germany began conducting attacks against other merchant ships without scruple. U-boats now ventured as far as Liverpool. One merchant victim, the Princess Victoria, was torpedoed just off the Mersey Bar.

  These attacks prompted the Admiralty to issue new advisories to address the danger. Cunard relayed to Turner orders to halt all wireless transmissions from the ship’s Marconi room except when “absolutely necessary.” Its wireless operators were expressly prohibited from “gossiping.” Passengers could receive messages but could not send them. Another Admiralty advisory warned, in italics, “Ships should give prominent headlands a wide berth.”

  The Admiralty issued its most comprehensive set of instructions in February 1915, in a secret memorandum that captains were to store “in a place where it can be destroyed at a moment’s notice.” The document revealed a mixture of naïveté and sophistication about the nature of the submarine threat. It called the deck gun of a submarine “an inferior weapon” and stated, “Gun-fire from most submarines is not dangerous.” The instructions also advised that if a vessel got hit with a torpedo, there was no need to worry: “There will generally be ample time for the crew to escape in the boats, if
the latter are kept ready for service.” The memorandum evaded entirely the matter of passengers and how they might fare under the same circumstances.

  But it also embodied a realistic appraisal of the vulnerabilities of U-boats and urged captains to exploit these at every opportunity. “If a submarine comes up suddenly close ahead of you with obvious hostile intention, steer straight for her at your utmost speed, altering course as necessary to keep her ahead.” In short, the Admiralty was asking merchant captains to transform their ships into offensive weapons and ram their attackers. This was an effective maneuver given the inherent fragility of submarines, as would be proved a month later when the HMS Dreadnought rammed and sank Kapitänleutnant Weddigen’s U-29, thereby avenging the dead crews of the Aboukir, the Cressy, and the Hogue. The memorandum recommended that British ships disguise themselves as neutrals whenever possible and fly false colors. “It is not in any way dishonorable. Owners and masters will therefore be within their rights if they use every device to mislead the enemy and induce him to confuse British vessels with neutrals.”

  The memorandum also included a strict order, the codified effect of the Aboukir disaster: “No ocean-going British merchant vessel is permitted to go to the assistance of a ship which has been torpedoed by a submarine.”

  THE ADMIRALTY later claimed that Turner possessed still another advisory, dated April 16, which reported, “War experience has shown that fast steamers can considerably reduce the chance of successful surprise submarine attack by zigzagging that is to say altering the course at short and regular intervals say in ten minutes to half an hour.” The memo noted that this tactic was used by warships in waters likely to be patrolled by submarines.

  The Admiralty may have erred, however, in presuming Turner really did have this particular memo among his papers at the time the ship sailed from New York. (Cunard’s lawyers later would hedge the point with a heroic bit of legal prose in which they stated that while Cunard believed such a notice had been given to the captain, the company had no knowledge of what the delivered memo actually said.) Whether such a communiqué had in fact been delivered to Turner became a matter of debate. The Admiralty’s Board of Trade had indeed crafted a statement on zigzagging, but one prominent naval historian asserted that the advisory was not approved by First Lord Churchill until April 25 and was not actually distributed to captains and shipping companies until May 13, long after the Lusitania’s May 1 departure.

  Even had this memo been in Turner’s possession, it probably would have made little impression. For one thing, the memo did not order captains to zigzag; it merely described the practice. For another, zigzagging at the time was a proposition that merchant captains considered worthy of ridicule, and that none was likely to endorse, especially not the master of a grand ocean liner. The idea of subjecting passengers, many of them prominent souls in first class, to the hard and irregular turns of a zigzag course was beyond contemplation.

  NOW, IN open seas, the Lusitania maintained an average speed of 21 knots, 6 knots faster than the maximum speed a U-boat could attain while surfaced and more than twice what it could achieve while fully submerged.

  This was also faster than any other civilian ship still in service. On Sunday afternoon the Lusitania quickly overtook and passed the American liner New York, with the Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry aboard.

  THAT SUNDAY, Dwight Harris, the New Yorker traveling to England to get married, planned what he would do if in fact the Lusitania were torpedoed. He wrote, “I took a look around and decided that if anything did happen in the ‘War Zone’ I would go to the bow if possible.” First, however, he planned to grab the custom life belt he had bought at Wanamaker’s in New York.

  ROOM 40; QUEENSTOWN; LONDON

  PROTECTING ORION

  THE GERMAN WIRELESS MESSAGES INTERCEPTED BY ROOM 40 caused deep anxiety within the Admiralty. But it was not the Lusitania the Admiralty was concerned about. It was the HMS Orion, one of Britain’s largest and most powerful battleships, a “superdreadnought.” The ship had undergone a refitting in Devonport, on England’s southwest coast, and was now ready to sail north to rejoin the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.

  On Sunday, May 2, Admiralty Chief of Staff “Dummy” Oliver sent a note to First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, in which he recommended that the Orion’s departure be postponed. “There will be less moon & less risk every night now that we wait,” he wrote.

  Fisher agreed, and at 1:20 P.M. Oliver sent a telegram to the commander in chief of the fleet, Admiral Jellicoe, ordering him to hold the Orion in Devonport a while longer. That same afternoon the Admiralty also urged Jellicoe, “in view of the submarine menace West of the West Coast of Ireland,” to take precautions to protect lesser ships, such as colliers and tenders.

  Over the next several days, Oliver would send explicit warnings to two other warships, HMS Gloucester and HMS Duke of Edinburgh, and would direct a third, HMS Jupiter, to take a newly opened route, the so-called North Channel, deemed far safer than alternative paths. The Admiralty had closed the route previously because of German mines but had declared it clear on April 15 and promptly made it available to navy ships but not merchant vessels. The route passed between Scotland and Ireland, through waters bracketed by friendly shores and heavily patrolled by the Royal Navy.

  Despite the North Channel’s safety, Admiral Oliver issued orders to have the Jupiter escorted by destroyers.

  THAT SUNDAY there was more news of the North Channel. Adm. Richard Webb, head of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, which in wartime held dominion over all British merchant shipping, received notice that the new route would now in fact be open to all vessels, merchant and military alike. This meant that civilian freighters and liners sailing to Liverpool could henceforth avoid the Western Approaches altogether and sail instead over the top of Ireland, then turn right and go south to Liverpool.

  Admiral Webb did not transmit this new information to Cunard or to the Lusitania.

  Through much of Sunday, the Admiralty also tracked the progress of the wounded American tanker Gulflight, under tow and escorted by the navy. At 4:05 that afternoon the ship was reported making “good progress.” Two hours later it arrived at St. Mary’s Island in the Scillies, with its foredeck nearly submerged, its propeller visible at the stern.

  IN QUEENSTOWN, IRELAND, America’s local consul opened a newspaper and read for the first time about the warning the German Embassy had published in American newspapers the previous day.

  The consul was Wesley Frost, now just beginning his second year of service in Queenstown. The town was still a major port, although Cunard’s largest liners no longer stopped there, having “touched bottom” in its harbor once too often. Although Frost knew the Lusitania was at this moment on its way to Liverpool, he felt no particular concern. “The reference to the Lusitania was obvious enough,” he recalled later, “but personally it never entered my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpability of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for an intelligent people to take upon themselves.”

  THAT SAME SUNDAY, well to the south in London, U.S. ambassador Walter Page, Frost’s chief, took a few moments to write a letter to his son, Arthur, an editor at the New York publishing company that the ambassador and his partner, Frank Doubleday, had founded in 1899.

  Page was an Anglophile through and through. His dispatches consistently favored Britain and time and again struck President Wilson as being decidedly un-neutral. In fact, Wilson had by now lost confidence in Page, though the ambassador did not yet seem to know it. The president had left enough hints, however, often failing to respond to Page’s communiqués. The presence of Colonel House in London as Wilson’s personal emissary should, by itself, have been evidence enough of Page’s diminished influence, but the ambassador still seemed not to grasp just how little Wilson cared for him and the information he supplied.

  Page wrote often to his son and now, in his Sunday letter, told him of his concern that Ameri
ca might be drawn into the war. Later this letter would seem prescient to an uncanny degree.

  “The blowing up of a liner with American passengers may be the prelude,” the ambassador wrote. “I almost expect such a thing.”

  He added, “If a British liner full of Americans be blown up, what will Uncle Sam do? What’s going to happen?”

  U-20

  A PERILOUS LINE

  AT 12:30 P.M. SUNDAY, FINDING HIMSELF BRACKETED by patrol boats and destroyers, Schwieger ordered another fast dive. The line of vessels ahead seemed to be an antisubmarine cordon, with Fair Isle at the top and North Ronaldsay in the Orkneys at the bottom. Schwieger suspected the cordon might be a permanent presence in these waters. If so, he wrote in his log, by way of warning other captains, “it would not seem advisable to pass this line during the day, especially when visibility is very good.”

  U-20 traveled submerged for the next four hours. At 4:30 P.M., Schwieger ascended to periscope depth and immediately spotted a patrol boat off to starboard. He dove back to cruising depth.

  So much underwater travel was taxing for his crew. The atmosphere grew close and warm. But it was especially taxing for the submarine’s batteries. Even moving at a mere 5 knots, a boat of U-20’s class could cover a maximum of only 80 nautical miles before the batteries failed.

  Schwieger kept the boat submerged for another two and a half hours. He noted in his log that his batteries were making a crackling noise. By this point U-20 had traveled 50 nautical miles on electric power.

  At 7:00 P.M. Schwieger again tried his periscope and to his relief saw no imminent threat. “Emerged,” he wrote, “and steered towards the open sea in order to get away from the patrol boats whose smoke is still visible astern.”

  In an addendum to his log, he noted that if still more destroyers had been posted beyond this Fair Isle–Ronaldsay line, thus forcing his boat to stay submerged even longer, “our situation could have been critical as our battery was pretty nearly gone.” These were deep waters—too deep for U-20 to hide on the bottom. Had the batteries failed here, Schwieger would have had no choice but to come to the surface and run until his diesel engines succeeded in recharging the system. But destroyers, capable of moving at speeds more than twice U-20’s maximum, would have had no difficulty overtaking him and would have begun firing long before.