by Erik Larson
Despite the calm weather, Kansas City passenger Theodore Naish was seasick, as he had been throughout the voyage. He urged his wife, Belle, to go up on deck without him to see the Irish coast and its islands in sunshine. He knew from past experience how lovely the view was. Belle at first demurred: “I replied that his word was enough, I would see them when we returned, and if fog prevented, pictures would satisfy me.” But Theodore insisted, and she obliged; she was glad that she had. “A lovelier day cannot be imagined—the air was warm, no wind, bright sun, smooth sea.”
Throughout the ship there was that mix of sorrow and expectation that always marked the end of a voyage, but now it was joined by the relief of having made it to England safe and sound.
ON THE BRIDGE, Turner received a new message from the Admiralty that confused things further: “Submarines 5 miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10 A.M.”
The Lusitania had already passed Cape Clear. If correct, this message indicated the threat might also be past—the submarines, plural again, were behind and heading out to sea. Captain Turner congratulated himself on apparently missing these in the fog. He knew that even if their commanders now spotted the smoke from the ship’s funnels and turned around, they would have no hope of catching up.
While this offered some comfort, there was still the matter of the earlier report of submarines active in the St. George’s Channel, south of the Coningbeg Light Vessel, dead ahead.
AT HIS PERISCOPE, Schwieger made a fast 360-degree sweep of the sea, then rotated the apparatus until he found the ship that had just passed overhead. It was a prize indeed, and not just in terms of tonnage. Long and narrow, with a razor bow, it sliced easily through the flat sea. Its funnels blew thick black smoke that showed its engine crew were working hard to achieve maximum speed. Schwieger did not need his war pilot, Lanz, to help identify this ship. It was a large armored cruiser, British, of about 6,000 tons.
He let it go. He had no choice. At his top submerged speed of 9 knots, Schwieger had no chance of catching the cruiser. Even his surface maximum of 15 knots would not have helped, for the cruiser was speeding away at what he estimated to be 18 knots. And had Schwieger for some reason been foolhardy enough to try surfacing, the warship’s guns would have sunk his boat within minutes.
Schwieger followed anyway, at periscope depth, in case the cruiser happened to change its course in a manner that would allow him to overtake it and launch an attack. But the ship ran at top speed, zigzagging, and soon was far in the distance. Schwieger later told his friend Valentiner how at this point, exasperated, he unleashed a torrent of profanity. “After the early days of the war,” Valentiner explained, “you rarely had a chance to loose a torpedo at any warship as big as a cruiser, and many a U-boat never caught sight of one during the entire war.” The British navy, like its German counterpart, kept its big warships locked safely away “and did not send them roaming around to act as good targets for U-boats.”
The ship was in fact the HMS Juno, an old cruiser now serving as a coastal patrol vessel. It was based in Queenstown and was speeding back to port precisely because of the latest submarine alerts issued by the Admiralty. As it traveled, its crew took a routine measure of water temperature and found it to be 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
“After I was through swearing,” Schwieger told Valentiner, “I noticed that the fog was lifting. Presently I could see blue sky.”
Schwieger recorded the encounter at 12:15 P.M. Half an hour later, he surfaced and returned to his westward course, to continue his voyage home. Conservation of fuel was now a priority. He could not delay—the journey back to Emden would take another week.
By now the weather had cleared to a degree that was almost startling. “Unusually good visibility,” Schwieger noted; “very beautiful weather.”
On the horizon, something new caught his eye.
LONDON; WASHINGTON
THE KING’S QUESTION
IN LONDON, ON FRIDAY, COLONEL HOUSE, STILL ACTING in his role as President Wilson’s unofficial emissary, met with Sir Edward Grey, Britain’s foreign secretary, and the two traveled to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for a walk among the garden’s beds of spring flowers, its alleys, or “vistas,” of cedars, and its most celebrated structure, the Palm House, an immense conservatory built of glass and iron said to have influenced the design of London’s Crystal Palace. The two men discussed the submarine war. “We spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk,” House wrote, “and I told him if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into war.”
Oddly enough, the subject came up again a couple of hours later, when Colonel House paid a call on King George V at Buckingham Palace.
The king turned to House at one point, and asked, “Suppose they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers aboard?”
EARLY THAT MORNING, Churchill, having concluded his naval negotiations with his French and Italian counterparts, left Paris on his journey to the headquarters of Britain’s forces in France, at St. Omer, where Sir John French was planning an offensive against German forces at Aubers despite a severe shortage of artillery shells.
Seeking to experience battle firsthand, Churchill hoped to get as close to the front as possible, while not, as he put it, “incurring unjustifiable risks.” He saw shellfire and smoke but little else. “Without actually taking part in the assault it was impossible to measure the real conditions,” he wrote. “To see them you had to feel them, and feeling them might well feel nothing more. To stand outside was to see nothing, to plunge in was to be dominated by personal experiences of an absorbing kind.”
He received his most vivid sense of the war at a “casualty clearing station” in a convent at Merville, about 40 miles east of headquarters, where men “suffering from every form of horrible injury, seared, torn, pierced, choking, dying, were being sorted according to their miseries.” Ambulance after ambulance pulled up at the door. The dead were carried out the back and buried. As Churchill passed the operating theater, he saw doctors at work trepanning a soldier, that is, cutting a hole in his skull. “Everywhere was blood and bloody rags,” Churchill wrote.
AT THE White House, with a fresh spring Friday in the offing, Wilson wrote again to Edith. She had come to dinner the night before, and he was feeling far more optimistic about the possibility of one day marrying her.
“In this clear morning air,” he wrote, “the world seems less in the way, seems less to stand between us.”
THE IRISH SEA
FUNNELS ON THE HORIZON
U-20 MOVED THROUGH A BLUE-ON-BLUE MORNING. THE fog was gone, the sky was empty of clouds, the sea was still. Schwieger trained his binoculars—his Zeiss “godseyes”—on a smudge at the horizon and was startled to see “a forest of masts and stacks,” as he later described it to Max Valentiner. “At first I thought they must belong to several ships,” he said. “Then I saw it was a great steamer coming over the horizon. It was coming our way. I dived at once, hoping to get a shot at it.”
In his log, at 1:20 P.M., Schwieger wrote, “Ahead and to starboard four funnels and two masts of a steamer with course triangular to us comes into sight (coming from SSW it steered towards Galley Head). Ship is made out to be a large passenger steamer.”
Once at periscope depth, Schwieger ordered his maximum submerged speed—9 knots—and set a course “converging with that of the steamer.” The ship was still miles off, however. When the liner was 2 miles away, it veered onto a new course that further widened the gap. Frustrated again, Schwieger wrote, “I had no hope now, even if we hurried at our best speed, of getting near enough to attack her.”
Schwieger followed anyway, just as he had done earlier with the cruiser Juno, in case the liner happened to make another course change that would bring it back onto a converging trajectory.
He called for his pilot, Lanz, to come to the periscope to take a look. Why he felt the need to do so is unclear. The ship was
one of the most distinctive on the high seas, and a prize of the first order. He was near despair: this one ship, by itself, would have given him his best monthly tonnage count of the war.
The day remained startlingly clear and still. This meant that Schwieger could not keep the periscope raised for long, lest it be detected by the target’s lookouts or, worse, by a destroyer on patrol. In weather this clear and with seas this smooth there’d be little chance for escape. On two previous occasions, the wake cast by his periscope on a flat sea had forced him to abort attacks. One would-be target, a Royal Mail steamer, had turned toward him with obvious intent to ram, causing him to order a fast dive and full speed away.
Lanz entered the control room. At about the same moment, something happened that Schwieger deemed the equivalent of a miracle.
ON THE Lusitania’s bridge, Captain Turner faced a dilemma that nothing in his long experience at sea had prepared him to manage. If the morning’s wireless messages were correct, there were U-boats directly ahead of him, and behind.
On top of this, he faced a timing problem. Liverpool at this point still lay about 250 nautical miles ahead. At the entrance to the city’s harbor lay the notorious Mersey Bar, which he could pass only at high tide. If Turner accelerated and proceeded at the highest speed he could achieve with only three boiler rooms in operation, or 21 knots, he would arrive far too early. With stopping out of the question, he would be forced to circle in the Irish Sea, smoke billowing from the ship’s three operating funnels in open invitation to any submarine within a radius of twenty miles.
There was another dimension to the problem. The time was now just past noon. No matter what speed Turner traveled, he would end up having to pass through the St. George’s Channel at night, with fog an ever-present danger. As it was, the fog that had enclosed the ship all morning had left Turner with a less precise sense of his location than he would have liked. Compounding this imprecision was the fact that he was farther from the coast than usual—about 20 miles, when in fine weather he might come as close as 1 mile.
He called his two most senior officers to the bridge, Staff Captain Anderson and First Officer John Preston Piper, to ask their advice, and at length reached a decision. First, he would pinpoint his location. The Irish coast was by now visible, but the ship’s distance from shore was difficult to reckon precisely. Being a sailor of the old school, Turner liked to use a procedure known as a four-point bearing. This would require him to run parallel to the coast at a steady speed for roughly thirty minutes while First Office Piper took four bearings off a single shore landmark, in this case the lighthouse atop the Old Head.
Once Turner knew his precise position, he planned to maintain a speed of 18 knots so that he would arrive at the Mersey Bar early the next morning, at just the right time to enter the harbor without pause. Though slower than the 21 knots his three operating boiler rooms would allow, it was still faster than any other merchant ship then in service and certainly faster than any submarine. Turner planned as well to alter his course later in the day to bring the Lusitania closer to shore, so that he would pass near the Coningbeg Light Vessel before entering the narrowest portion of the St. George’s Channel. He understood that this contravened the Admiralty’s advisory that captains pass lightships and other navigational markers at “mid-channel.” But the Admiralty had reported submarines 20 miles south of the lightship, a location that any mariner traversing that 45-mile-wide stretch would have described as midchannel. To follow the Admiralty’s advisory would have meant sailing directly toward the waiting submarines.
At about 1:30 P.M. Captain Turner ordered the officer at the helm to make a turn to starboard, to bring the ship in line with the coast, so that Piper could take the first of the four bearings. This turn and several previous course changes persuaded some passengers that Turner was directing the ship on a zigzag course to evade submarines, though in fact he was not. Paradoxically, owing to the shape of the coastline, the turn would have seemed to passengers like a turn toward open sea.
Measles-wracked Robert Kay peered through his porthole in quarantine. The Bronx boy, now spotted and enflamed, watched the world pass, his only diversion. The day outside was full of sunshine and sparkle, the Irish coast a vivid green. But as he watched, the ship began its turn to starboard, and to his great disappointment the land began to recede.
THAT MORNING “Champagne King” George Kessler followed through on his decision to talk to Captain Turner about including passengers in the ship’s drills. The two men smoked as they talked.
Kessler wrote, “I suggested that the passengers should be given tickets with a number denoting the number of the boat they should make for in case anything untoward happened, and that it seemed to me this detail would minimize the difficulties in the event of trouble.”
Turner told him that the idea had come up in the wake of the Titanic disaster but that Cunard had rejected it as “impractical.” He added that he did not have the authority to institute the practice on his own without first getting approval from the Admiralty’s Board of Trade.
The conversation shifted to “the torpedo scare which neither of us regarded as of any moment,” Kessler recalled. Turner may have downplayed his own concerns to put Kessler at ease.
JUST AS Pilot Lanz arrived at U-20’s periscope, Schwieger saw the giant steamer change course again, this time to starboard. “She was coming directly at us,” Schwieger told Valentiner. “She could not have steered a more perfect course if she had deliberately tried to give us a dead shot.”
The time was 1:35 P.M. The ship’s new heading suggested it was bound for Queenstown. Schwieger set a course that would put U-20 in front of the ship, at a 90-degree angle. He ordered full ahead, and for the next twenty-five minutes sped forward on an intersecting course, as the ship grew steadily larger in his viewfinder. “A short fast run, and we waited,” he told Valentiner.
Although this patrol had affirmed Schwieger’s distrust of torpedoes, he had no choice but to use one. His deck gun would have been useless against such a large vessel, and dangerous, for after the first couple of shells the big ship likely would have turned and run, or even attempted to ram his boat. Schwieger selected a G6 torpedo.
Within the submarine the tension mounted. All the ship had to do was make another turn, away from U-20, and the chase would be over. Queenstown was near. There was also the possibility the ship’s lookouts would spot Schwieger’s periscope and that its captain would summon a pride of destroyers.
Strangely, the ship had no escorts whatsoever. Even stranger, in Schwieger’s view, was that the vessel was in these waters at all, especially after his two successful attacks the day before. That the ship “was not sent through the North Channel is inexplicable,” he wrote in his log.
Schwieger ordered the torpedo set to run at a depth of 3 meters, about 10 feet. He had not yet had time to let Lanz take a look at the target. The big ship continued its approach, its giant hull black against the otherwise gleaming seascape.
Schwieger’s firing crew armed the torpedo and flooded its tube.
THE LUSITANIA was now about sixteen hours from Liverpool, or, put another way, three meals out—one lunch, one dinner, and, on Saturday, a last breakfast in Liverpool Harbor. Now came the lunch. First-class passengers had only one seating, in the dining saloon at the center of the ship under the great dome; second-class had two, at 12:30 and 1:30. Over lunch there was talk of the talent show the night before, and of the latest war news, published in the ship’s daily Cunard Bulletin, and, of course, of the fact that the ship was now well into the “war zone.”
Charles Lauriat went to lunch with Lothrop Withington, as always, and they sat at their usual table in the first-class saloon. Lauriat noted that portholes on either side of the room were open. He was certain of this, he said later, because the unusual warmth of the day had conjured an annoyance that had plagued the two men throughout the voyage. Owing to the warm weather, the stewards had opened portholes throughout the dining room and
turned on a large electric fan positioned directly over Lauriat’s table, thereby creating a draft that was strong enough to be irritating. The same thing had happened several times previously during the voyage, and each time, as now, Lauriat felt compelled to ask the steward to turn the fan off.
Otherwise, the lunch was a pleasant one. The two men looked forward to the ship’s arrival. “We had a jolly time together,” Lauriat wrote, “and made plans for seeing each other in London, as his rooms were near our London office.”
It was clear now that the unexpectedly slow pace of the Lusitania would cost Lauriat a day’s work in London, but soon enough he’d be handing off the Dickens Christmas Carol and meeting with Thackeray’s daughter, Lady Ritchie, to plan the notes she would write for each of the 118 drawings still locked in the shoe case in his cabin. Next he would meet with the framers and binders who would transform those drawings into items worth far more than the paltry $4,500 he had paid for them.
ELSEWHERE IN the dining room, Theodate Pope and her companion, Edwin Friend, were finishing up their lunch. “A young Englishman at our table had been served with his ice cream and was waiting for the steward to bring him a spoon to eat it with,” Theodate recalled. “He looked ruefully at it and said he would hate to have a torpedo get him before he ate it. We all laughed and then commented on how slowly we were running. We thought the engines had stopped.”
The ship, however, was still moving at a brisk 18 knots. This perception of slowness was likely caused by the fact that the sea was so smooth, which reduced the level of vibration transmitted through the hull.
