Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by Erik Larson

  The greatest burden by far was borne by the relatives of the many passengers and crew whose bodies were never found. Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.

  Alice and Elbert Hubbard were never found; nor was Kansas City passenger Theodore Naish. In Queenstown, his wife, Belle, roomed for a time with young Robert Kay, as he recovered from his measles and waited for his grandfather to come and claim him. Joseph Frankum, who had huddled with his family in an unlaunched boat during the Lusitania’s last moments, survived, as did one of his sons, but his wife, his baby daughter, and his four-year-old son were lost. Nellie Huston never got to mail that charming diary-like letter in which she confessed that the size of her derrière impeded her access to her berth. The letter was found in a purse floating on the sea. The three members of the Luck family—thirty-four-year-old Charlotte and her two young sons—disappeared as well. Alfred Vanderbilt was never found, despite a $5,000 reward—a fortune—offered by the Vanderbilt family. Charles Lauriat’s friend and traveling companion, Lothrop Withington, likewise disappeared.

  The absence of so many bodies raised haunting questions for families. Were their loved ones now among the anonymous corpses buried at Queenstown? Were they locked somewhere within the hull, owing to an ill-advised last-minute dash for a personal belonging? Did chivalry do them in, or cowardice? Or did they suffer a fate like that of one unidentified woman, whose body came to rest on Straw Island, off Galway, where she was found by the keeper of the island’s lighthouse? She was wearing her Boddy life jacket correctly and had drifted alone for thirty-six days.

  Mothers lost children and would be left forever to imagine their final moments or to wonder if somehow, miraculously, their babies had actually been saved and were now in the care of another. Norah Bretherton, the Los Angeles woman who had handed her Betty to a stranger, was spared that brand of haunting. Betty was Body No. 156. Her mother buried her in the graveyard at the Ursuline Convent in Cork. Bretherton’s son survived.

  For families at home, waiting for news, the absence of a body left them suspended somewhere between hope and grief. One mother set out to learn as much as possible about her lost boy, Preston Prichard. She was aided by her surviving son, Mostyn, who traveled to Queenstown to search the morgues. “The place is alive with miserable creatures like ourselves,” he wrote. He found no trace of his brother. “It is bewildering to know what to do.”

  Mrs. Prichard wrote to dozens of survivors, and, on the basis of information she received, she wrote to dozens more. She sent a flyer with Preston’s picture and a detailed description. Among those she contacted was Grace French, Prichard’s dining companion, who told Mrs. Prichard that she believed herself to be the last person on the ship to have spoken with him. In one of several letters, French told Mrs. Prichard that she had thought of her son often and of their interrupted excursion to find her double on board. French wrote, “I can see his face so clearly in my mind so sunburned and full of life and ambition.”

  The many replies offered a fresh view of the voyage and of the trials and sorrows of the last day. The writers recalled fleeting glimpses of Prichard, especially his gregariousness and popularity, and offered their own stories. Mostly, though, survivors tried to offer some small bit of consolation, despite having had only glancing contact with Prichard, or none at all. They assured Mrs. Prichard that her son, given his physical prowess, must surely have been helping women and children up to the last moment.

  Theodate Pope, ever true to her spiritualist beliefs, wrote to Mrs. Prichard on February 4, 1916. “I beg of you not to dwell on the thought of what has become of the physical part of the boy you love,” she urged. “Can you not constantly keep in mind that whatever has happened to his body has not in any way affected his spirit and that surely lives and will await reunion with you?”

  A second-class passenger named Ruth M. Wordsworth, of Salisbury, England, sought to address the disparity between how things actually unfolded on the ship and the nightmarish scenes conjured in the minds of next of kin.

  “I know you must be tempted to have most terrible imaginings; may I tell you that although it was very awful, it was not so ghastly as you are sure to imagine it. When the thing really comes, God gives to each the help he needs to live or to die.” She described the quiet and the lack of panic among passengers. “They were calm, many of them quite cheerful, and everyone was trying to do the sensible thing, the men were forgetting themselves, and seeing after the women and children. They could not do much, because the list prevented the launching of most of the boats, but they were doing their best and playing the man.”

  Of the four men in Preston Prichard’s cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard’s body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard’s letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world.

  PART V

  THE SEA OF SECRETS

  LONDON

  BLAME

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT CAME AS A SURPRISE TO CAPTAIN Turner. Even though the cause of the disaster was obvious—an act of war—the Admiralty moved at once to place the blame on him. Anyone privy to the internal communications, or “minutes,” flung between the offices of senior Admiralty officials in the week after the disaster could have had no doubt as to the zeal with which the Admiralty intended to forge a case against Turner. In one, Churchill himself wrote, “We sh’d pursue the Captain without check.”

  Before the effort could get started, however, the coroner in Kinsale, Ireland, John J. Horgan, convened an inquest of his own, much to the Admiralty’s displeasure. Horgan claimed the responsibility fell to him because five of the Lusitania’s dead had been landed in his district. The inquest began the day after the sinking, Saturday, May 8. Horgan called Turner as a witness and after hearing his testimony praised the captain for his courage in staying with the ship until the last moment. At this, Turner began to cry. Horgan, in a later memoir, called the captain “a brave but unlucky man.”

  On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “willful and wholesale murder.”

  Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty, ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, “That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the Lusitania against attack.”

  THE ADMIRALTY was far more prompt in laying out the contours of its strategy for assigning fault to Turner. The day after the disaster, Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, circulated a two-page memorandum, marked “Secret,” in which he charged that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s instructions that called for him to zigzag and to “give prominent headlands a wide berth.” Instead, Webb wrote, Turner had “proceeded along the usual trade route, at a speed approximately three-quarters of what he was able to get out of this vessel. He thus kept his valuable vessel for an unnecessary length of time in the area where she was most liable to attack, inviting disaster.”

  Webb made a formal request for an investigation by Britain’s Wreck Commission, under Lord Mersey, who had led inquiries into the losses of many ships, including the Titanic and the Empress of Ireland.

  On Wednesday, May 12, Webb intensified his attack on Captain Turner. In a new memorandum, he wrote that Turner “appears to have displayed an almost inconceivable negligence, and one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he has been got at by the Germans.” In the left-hand margin, First Sea Lord Fisher, in his wild fulminating hand, jotted, “I hope Captain Turner will be arrested immediately after the inquiry whatever the verdict of finding may be.”

 
The Admiralty took the unprecedented step of insisting that key parts of the planned inquiry, especially the examination of Turner, be held in secret.

  U.S. CONSUL FROST sensed early on that the Admiralty’s soul had hardened against Turner. On Sunday, May 9, Frost paid a call on Admiral Coke, senior naval officer in Queenstown, accompanied by two U.S. military attachés who had just arrived from London to help arrange the return of American dead.

  Admiral Coke openly criticized Turner for sailing too close to shore and too slowly and read aloud the warnings that had been sent to the Lusitania on Friday. But Consul Frost was surprised at how little detail these messages contained. “Bare facts only,” Frost noted, later. “No instructions or interpretation. It is true that Turner should have kept farther out; but to my mind it seemed that the Admiralty had by no means done their full duty by him.”

  One of the American attachés, Capt. W. A. Castle, wrote his own account of the meeting and noted that a particular subject was glaringly absent from the conversation. “I was struck by the fact that the Admiral while seeming to be desirous of justifying the Admiralty in its measures of protection, did not mention the presence of any destroyers or other Naval vessels.” Castle added that during his train trip back to London he had discussed the subject with a fellow passenger, a Royal Navy lieutenant, “who spoke quite frankly, although I suppose of course confidentially, and said that he could not understand nor could his brother officers, why so many torpedo boats of the old type, which could make 25 knots an hour without difficulty, and would be just the thing to protect an incoming steamer, are left at various wharves, instead of being used for this purpose, and said that had they placed one of these to starboard, another to port, and another in front of the Lusitania, she could not have been torpedoed.”

  WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere.

  The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

  In the first message of the series, Schwieger reported: “Have sunk off the South Coast of Ireland, one sailing ship, two steamers, and LUSITANIA. Am steering for the mouth of the Ems.”

  The Admiralty received it at 9:49 A.M.; the decrypted copy was marked “Most Secret.” This message confirmed that the culprit had indeed been U-20, the submarine that Room 40 had been tracking since April 30.

  That afternoon, Room 40 received the intercept of a reply sent to Schwieger by the commander of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which read, “My highest appreciation of Commander and crew for the success they have achieved. Am proud of their achievement and express best wishes for their return.”

  Then came a third message, sent from Schwieger to his base. After detailing the latitude and longitude of his attack on the Lusitania, Schwieger noted that he had sunk the ship “by means of one torpedo.”

  This was a surprise. By now the prevailing view in the world’s press was that the Lusitania had been sunk by two torpedoes and that these accounted for the two major explosions reported by passengers. But now the Room 40 cognoscenti knew without doubt that Schwieger had fired only one torpedo.

  And this, they understood, raised sensitive questions: How could a single torpedo sink a ship the size of the Lusitania? And if there was no second torpedo, what exactly, caused the second explosion?

  They recognized, also, that Schwieger’s message had to be kept secret at all costs, for it was precisely this kind of special knowledge that could tip Germany to the existence of Room 40.

  BY THE TIME the Mersey inquiry began, on June 15, 1915, the British government had undergone one of its periodic upheavals, amid controversy over the shell shortage on the western front and the failure, at great cost in lives and ships, of Churchill’s plan to force the Dardanelles. New men ran the Admiralty. Fisher had resigned, and Churchill had been jettisoned. These changes, however, caused no easing of the campaign against Captain Turner.

  After preliminary public testimony from several witnesses, including Turner, who briefly described his experience in the disaster, Lord Mersey convened the first of the secret sessions and again called Turner to the witness box. The Admiralty’s lead attorney, Sir Edward Carson, attorney general, questioned the captain in harsh fashion, as if the proceeding were a murder trial with Turner the prime suspect. Carson clearly hoped to prove that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s directives, in particular its instructions to keep to a midchannel course.

  Turner testified that by his own standards he was in midchannel. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he passed the Old Head of Kinsale at distances as close as a mile. Indeed, one photograph of the Lusitania shows the ship steaming at full speed past the Old Head at the maritime equivalent of a hair’s breadth. At the time of the attack, the ship by Turner’s reckoning had been a dozen miles off, maybe as many as 15. (Years later a diver would pinpoint the wreck’s location at 11¾ miles from Kinsale Head.)

  Carson also badgered Turner as to why the Lusitania was moving at only 18 knots when it was torpedoed and challenged the wisdom of the captain’s plan to reduce speed in order to arrive at the Mersey Bar off Liverpool at a time when he could sail into the harbor without stopping. Carson argued that if Turner had zigzagged at top speed he could have evaded the submarine and, owing to the time consumed by the frequent course changes, would still have made the bar on time. Carson let pass the fact that although Turner was not deliberately zigzagging, his several changes of course that morning to set up his four-point bearing did describe a zigzag pattern, with fatal result: the last starboard turn put him directly in U-20’s path.

  Turner’s own lawyer, Butler Aspinall, Britain’s leading expert in maritime law, did his best to sculpt Turner’s story into a coherent account of the Lusitania’s last morning and to win for him Lord Mersey’s sympathy. “I mean to say, we have the very great advantage of knowing so much now which was unknown to him then,” Aspinall said; “we are sitting upon the matter in cool judgment, with an opportunity of looking at the charts, and the circumstances under which we are dealing with it were not the circumstances under which the Master would have an opportunity of dealing with it.”

  In all, Lord Mersey heard testimony from thirty-six witnesses, including passengers, crew, and outside experts. At the conclusion of the inquiry, he defied the Admiralty and absolved Turner of any responsibility for the loss of the Lusitania. In his report, Mersey wrote that Turner “exercised his judgment for the best. It was the judgment of a skilled and experienced man, and although others might have acted differently and perhaps more successfully he ought not, in my opinion, to be blamed.” Mersey found Cunard’s closure of the ship’s fourth boiler room to be irrelevant. The resulting reduction in speed, he wrote, “still left the Lusitania a considerably faster ship than any other steamer plying across the Atlantic.” Mersey laid blame entirely on the U-boat commander.

  Turner doubtless was relieved, but, according to his son Norman he also felt he had been unjustly treated. “He was very bitter about the way in which, at the enquiry �
�� it was sought to fix the blame on him for the sinking, and particularly to try to condemn him for being on the course he was.” Lord Mersey seemed to share this sentiment. Soon afterward, he resigned his post as wreck commissioner, calling the inquiry “a damned dirty business.” Cunard retained Turner on its roster of captains.

  At no time during the secret portions of the proceeding did the Admiralty ever reveal what it knew about the travels of U-20. Nor did it disclose the measures taken to protect the HMS Orion and other military vessels. Moreover, the Admiralty made no effort to correct Lord Mersey’s finding that the Lusitania had been struck by two torpedoes—this despite the fact that Room 40 knew full well that Schwieger had fired only one.

  Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

  There is silence on the subject in the records of Room 40 held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom and Churchill College, Cambridge. Nowhere is there even a hint of dismay at missing so clear an opportunity to use the fruits of Room 40’s intelligence to save a thousand lives.