Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  Dwight Harris, with his engagement ring hanging snug under his shirt, joined his usual luncheon companions but did not share the cheerful anticipation that colored the talk around him. He was ill at ease, uncannily so. He wrote, “While at table I had a most intense nervous feeling come over me, and I got up and left without finishing my lunch!”

  He went to his stateroom, A-9, to get his coat and hat, and his Medici book, and went back out on deck to read.

  MEDICAL STUDENT Preston Prichard and his roommate, Arthur Gadsden, were very much aware of the ship’s entry into the danger zone. They had become friends during the voyage and talked often, owing to the fact that both had the upper berths in their room. On Friday, Prichard and Gadsden spent part of the morning “talking about Submarines & wondering if we should see one at all, never having the least fear but what we should get away from them,” Gadsden wrote.

  Shortly after noon, Prichard walked to the smoking lounge to join the other men who had gathered there to see the results of the mileage pool and then set off to the second-class dining saloon for lunch. As usual he sat opposite Grace French.

  Today there seemed to be a certain charge between Prichard and Miss French. He wore his green suit—not his best blue—but handsome was handsome, and after six days in the sun and weather Prichard was very handsome indeed. He mentioned to Grace that he had seen a young woman aboard who could be her double, and that he had even gone up to this other woman to start a conversation before realizing his mistake. This was not merely a flirty line meant to ignite conversation. One or two of the other men at the table had encountered the same woman and had done likewise. Prichard “volunteered to point her out for me after lunch,” Grace recalled. “I agreed and went down for my hat and coat.”

  One of the ship’s stewards noted that Prichard left the dining room around 1:20 P.M.

  As Miss French was making her way back up the stairs to meet Prichard, she ran into two shipboard friends, who asked where she was going. “I replied that Mr. Prichard was going to present me to my double and passed on. I then joined him and we walked around laughing at the idea. I said to him, I wonder if I could recognize this girl myself.”

  They joked as they hunted. The time passed happily, and then it was 2:09 P.M. The sun shone, the sea glittered.

  SCHWIEGER ESTIMATED his target’s speed at 22 knots—25 miles an hour—and gauged its range at 700 meters, just under half a mile. If his calculations were correct, the torpedo would strike the ship at an ideal angle of 90 degrees.

  At 2:10 P.M. Schwieger gave the order to fire. The torpedo burst from the submarine in what Schwieger called a “clean bow shot” and soon reached a speed of about 44 miles an hour. At that rate, it would reach the target’s hull in thirty-five seconds.

  With the sea so smooth, the possibility of the torpedo’s track being discovered was high. Each passing second reduced the likelihood that the ship would be able to turn hard enough and fast enough to evade it, but still, for Schwieger and his men, those thirty-five seconds constituted a long interval.

  Schwieger watched through his periscope. He didn’t realize it, yet, but he had erred in his calculation of the target’s speed. In fact, it was moving more slowly than he had gauged—by 4 knots, or roughly 5 miles an hour.

  LUSITANIA

  BEAUTY

  SHORTLY BEFORE TWO O’CLOCK, SCORES OF CREWMEN were gathered in the baggage room at the Lusitania’s bow, on F Deck, half coming on duty, half coming off. The task at hand was to get the thousands of pieces of passenger luggage ready for arrival.

  Seaman Morton spent two hours helping load suitcases and trunks onto the electric elevator that provided the only access to the room. The shifts changed at two o’clock—“four bells”—when Morton was to begin a two-hour stint as a special lookout, to watch for submarines. He was assigned to the forecastle, or fo’c’sle, the portion of the main deck just behind the bow.

  “At five minutes to four bells,” he said, “I went on deck to put my sweater and gear ready for going on the lookout at two o’clock. My place was extra lookout right up in the eyes of the ship on deck; my responsibility being the starboard side of the bow from ahead to the beam.”

  BY NOW the ship had expended about six thousand tons of coal, and the bunkers that ran the length of the hull on both the port and the starboard sides were for the most part empty tunnels, grimed with coal dust and pierced here and there by portals through which men known as trimmers moved the coal to the furnaces.

  On the bridge, Captain Turner ordered the helmsman to hold the ship on its course parallel to shore so that his first officer could continue the four-point bearing. The protective screen of fog had by now wholly dissipated.

  “All lookouts had been warned to keep a sharp lookout and report anything that appeared suspicious,” said Thomas Mahoney, a seaman who was sharing the noon to 2:00 P.M. watch. “At approximately 1:50 p.m. we spotted an object 2 points on the starboard bow, conical in shape.” It looked to him like a buoy. “We reported it to the officer of the watch and it caused a little commotion on the bridge, over what it might be.”

  A seaman named Hugh Johnston, quartermaster, was at this point just taking over the helm, his “trick at the wheel.” The bridge was crowded with officers, who also were changing watch.

  Soon after Johnston took the wheel, he heard the cry that something had been spotted off the starboard bow. A number of officers raised binoculars and speculated that the object might indeed be a buoy, or a porpoise, or a fragment of drifting debris. No one expressed concern. “We carried on,” said Johnston.

  At two o’clock, Seaman Leslie Morton took his position in the forecastle. He stood on the starboard side. Another seaman scanned the waters off the port side. Four other lookouts were stationed elsewhere on the ship, including in the crow’s nest.

  Morton’s brother lay below decks, sleeping, so as to be ready for his own shift later in the day. Half the ship’s crew was still gathered in the luggage bay.

  The ship sliced through the calm like a razor through gelatin.

  Morton was so intent on doing his job well that he started “seeing a dozen things every few minutes.”

  BY TWO O’CLOCK the second-class passengers assigned to the second lunch seating were midway through their meals. First-class passengers rode between decks aboard the ship’s two electric elevators, which were powered by the ship’s dynamo. A group of children was jumping rope on an upper deck with the help of a member of the engineering crew, John Brennan, a trimmer.

  The weather by now was perfect, the day vividly clear—so lovely that families from Queenstown and Kinsale had gathered on the Old Head to picnic in the balmy air and watch the passage of ships. They could just see the Lusitania, about 20 miles off, her funnels pouring smoke into the sky.

  For Morton, in the ship’s “eyes,” the vista off to starboard toward open sea was clear and bright. “At ten minutes past two,” he said, “I looked at my watch and putting it into my pocket, I glanced round the starboard side and, as roughly as I could judge, I saw a big burst of foam about 500 yards away, four points on the starboard bow.” It looked to him like a giant bubble bursting onto the surface.

  An instant later, he saw something moving across the flat plane of the sea, a track, as clear as if it had been made by “an invisible hand with a piece of chalk on a blackboard.”

  He reached for his megaphone.

  CAPTAIN TURNER left the bridge and went below to his quarters. At about 1:30, Quartermaster Johnston, no longer at the wheel, was sent below to give Turner a message that the Old Head of Kinsale was now “10 points on the port bow and 20 miles away.” The ship’s course was taking it gradually closer to the coast.

  Johnston returned to the bridge. Half an hour later, just after two o’clock, he heard the cry, “Here is a torpedo coming.”

  AFTER FINISHING lunch and parting from his friend Lothrop Withington, Charles Lauriat went down to his cabin to get a sweater. He put it on under the jacket of his Kni
ckerbocker suit, then headed back up for “a real walk.” He climbed the main companionway and walked out onto the port side of the ship, with the Irish coast visible in the distance. Here he ran into Elbert Hubbard, the writer, and his wife, Alice. Hubbard joked that he probably would not be welcome in Germany, given a pamphlet he had written, entitled Who Lifted the Lid Off Hell?, in which he laid blame for the war on Kaiser Wilhelm. He had given Lauriat a copy earlier in the voyage. Lauriat described it as “a piece of vitriolic English.”

  On B Deck, starboard side, Theodate Pope stood beside her companion, Edwin Friend, leaning on the rail and admiring the sea, “which was a marvelous blue and very dazzling in the sunlight.” There was so much glare that Theodate wondered aloud, “How could the officers ever see a periscope?”

  Oliver Bernard, the set designer, was standing in the Verandah Cafe leaning “lazily” against a window, looking out at the view. He saw what seemed to be the tail of a fish, well off the starboard side. Next “a streak of froth” began arcing across the surface, toward the ship.

  An American woman came up beside him, and said, “That isn’t a torpedo, is it?”

  “I was too spellbound to answer,” he said. “I felt absolutely sick.”

  Here it was, this thing everyone had feared. “We had all been thinking, dreaming, eating, sleeping ‘submarine’ from the hour we left New York, and yet with the dreaded danger upon us, I could hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes.”

  There was little fear, Bernard said. “I did not think that anybody, even women and children, were so much terrified as they were astounded and stunned by the consciousness that the fears, cherished half in ridicule for five days previous, had at last been realized. The German ‘bluff’ had actually come off.”

  The track continued its approach.

  THAT FIRST TURMOIL, that first bubble of foam, was the expulsion of compressed air from the submarine’s launching tube as the torpedo exited. The torpedo itself was 20 feet long and 20 inches in diameter; its nose, shaped like the top of a corn silo, contained 350 pounds of TNT and an explosive called Hexanite. Though German commanders typically set the depth at 15 feet, this one traveled at 10 feet. It moved at about 35 knots, or 40 miles an hour, powered by compressed air stored in a tank toward its nose, just behind the compartment that contained the explosives. The air rushed against the pistons in its engine, geared to spin two propellers, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, to keep the torpedo from rolling and veering. The air was then exhausted into the sea, where it bubbled to the surface. These bubbles needed a few seconds to rise, which meant the torpedo itself was always well ahead of the track that appeared above.

  As the torpedo advanced, the water rushing past its nose turned a small propeller, which unscrewed a safety device that prevented detonation during storage. This propeller slipped from the nose and fell to the sea bottom, thereby exposing a triggering mechanism that upon impact with a ship’s hull would fire a small charge into the larger body of explosives. A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection.

  The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.”

  THE SMOOTHNESS of the sea presented some passengers with a view of the torpedo that was startling in its clarity.

  Dwight Harris, his Medici book in hand, was walking toward the stern, along the starboard side, when something caught his eye. He wrote, “I saw the torpedo coming!—a white and greenish streak in the water!—I stood transfixed!”

  Passenger James Brooks, a chain salesman who came from Connecticut, was walking along the boat deck, when friends on the next deck up—the Marconi deck—called to him to join them for a round of shuffleboard. These friends were Mr. and Mrs. Montagu Grant, of Chicago. He climbed the stairs, and as he walked toward them across the upper deck he saw a foam trail moving fast across the water.

  “Oh, yes, I saw the torpedo coming, and exclaimed, ‘Torpedo!’ and rushed to the rail just aft of the staircase and stood on one foot and leaned forward, over, to watch the explosion which I expected to see occur on the outside of the ship.”

  Any other man would have found this scene terrifying. Brooks was entranced. He saw the body of the torpedo moving well ahead of the wake, through water he described as being “a beautiful green.” The torpedo “was covered with a silvery phosphorescence, you might term it, which was caused by the air escaping from the motors.”

  He said, “It was a beautiful sight.”

  HAD THERE BEEN more time, had the idea of a torpedo attack against a civilian liner not seemed so incomprehensible, had submarine tactics and evasion stratagems been better understood, there would have been a chance—a tiny one—that Turner could have maneuvered the ship to lessen the damage or even avoid the torpedo altogether. He could have engaged the ship’s reverse turbines, thereby slowing the ship and nullifying the calculations made by the submarine commander as to its range and speed, causing the torpedo to miss. He could also have taken advantage of the Lusitania’s proven agility and ordered a full turn to port or starboard, to dodge the oncoming torpedo or cause it to glance off the hull.

  In just two months, another Cunard captain, Daniel Dow, back at work, would do exactly that, and win a citation from the company’s board. On July 15, 1915, at dusk, a lookout aboard Dow’s Mauretania spotted a periscope about half a mile out. An instant later two torpedoes began racing toward his ship, their tracks clearly visible. He ordered an immediate full turn to starboard, toward the submarine. Both torpedoes missed; the submarine submerged and fled.

  U-20

  “TREFF!”

  SCHWIEGER’S LOG ENTRY FOR 2:10 P.M., MAY 7, BEGAN with the German word Treff, for impact. He wrote, “Torpedo hits starboard side close behind the bridge. An unusually great detonation follows with a very strong explosive cloud (cloud reaches far beyond the forward funnel). The explosion of the torpedo must have been accompanied by a second one (boiler or coal or powder?).”

  By now his pilot, Lanz, was standing next to him at the periscope. Schwieger stepped aside and let Lanz peer through the eyepiece. Lanz could identify ships, even small ones, by their silhouettes and deck configurations. This one was easy. An instant after looking through the eyepiece, Lanz said, “My God, it’s the Lusitania.”

  Schwieger’s log indicates that he only now learned the ship’s true identity, but this seems implausible. The ship’s profile—its size, its lines, its four funnels—made it one of the most distinctive vessels afloat.

  Schwieger again took the periscope. What he saw now shocked even him.

  PART IV

  THE BLACK SOUL

  LUSITANIA

  IMPACT

  AS THE TORPEDO PASSED FROM VIEW BELOW THE EDGE of the deck, there was an interval when nothing happened and one could indulge the notion that it had missed or malfunctioned. “I saw it disappear,” one passenger said, “and for a bare second we all had a kind of hope that maybe it wouldn’t explode.”

  In the next instant, 350 pounds of explosives detonated against the plates of the hull, at a point under the bridge about 10 feet below the waterline. Immediately the payload turned from solid to gas. This “phase change” released heat at a temperature exceeding 5,000 degrees Centigrade, 9,000 Fahrenheit, at immense pressure. As one early-twentieth-century submarine builder put it, “The side of the ship is nothing but tissue paper in the hands of these enormous forces.”

  A geyser of seawater, planking, rope, and shards of steel soared upward to twice the height of the ship. Lifeboat No. 5 “was blown to atoms,” one lookout said. The ship continued forward through the geyser, which almost immediately collapsed back onto the decks. Seawater drenched passengers; debris thudded off the shuffleboard courts. The children jumping rope on A Deck stopped jumping.

  A hole the size of a small house now existed below the waterline. Its shape was more horizontal than vertical, roughly 40 fee
t wide by 15 feet high. The effects of the blast spread well beyond this, however. Thousands of rivets and the steel plates they anchored came loose over an area about fifteen times greater than the hole itself; the glass in nearby portholes fractured. Bulkheads were damaged and watertight doors dislodged. The relatively small doors and chambers of passenger ships did not dispel explosive forces as readily as the open holds of cargo vessels and thus were prone to destruction. The Lusitania’s builders had installed these barriers with collisions and groundings in mind; none had imagined that a torpedo might one day be detonated against the hull from underwater.

  Just inside the hull, at the point of impact, stood the starboard end of a major watertight bulkhead that spanned the width of the hull, one of a dozen such dividers in the ship. This particular bulkhead also formed a wall between the forward-most boiler room—Boiler Room No. 1—and a large coal storage chamber just beyond, toward the bow, called the “cross-bunker,” the only coal bunker in the ship arrayed across the full width of the hull. The rest were the longitudinal bunkers that ran along the hull walls. At this point in the voyage all the bunkers were nearly empty.

  The forward motion of the ship, initially 18 knots, caused “forced flooding,” which drove seawater into the ship at a rate estimated at 100 tons a second. Water surged into the cross-bunker and into Boiler Room No. 1, a cavern that housed two one-ended boilers and two double boilers, and the beginning of a main steam line. Water also flowed into the longitudinal bunkers along the starboard side, nearest the impact zone. As these bunkers filled with water, the ship began to list to starboard. At the same time, the water filling Boiler Room No. 1 and the forward cross-bunker caused the bow to begin sinking. The stern began to rise and the hull to twist.