by Erik Larson
As it happened, America joined the war just in time. Germany’s new campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had succeeded to an alarming degree, although this had been kept secret by British officials. An American admiral, William S. Sims, learned the truth when he traveled to England to meet with British naval leaders to plan America’s participation in the war at sea. What Sims discovered shocked him. German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In Queenstown, U.S. consul Frost saw striking corroboration of the new campaign’s effect: in a single twenty-four-hour period, the crews of six torpedoed ships came ashore. Admiral Sims reported to Washington, “Briefly stated, I consider that at the present moment we are losing the war.”
Just ten days later, the U.S. Navy dispatched a squadron of destroyers. They set off from Boston on April 24. Not many of them. Just six. But the significance of their departure was lost on no one.
ON THE MORNING of May 4, 1917, anyone standing atop the Old Head of Kinsale would have seen an extraordinary sight. First there appeared six plumes of dark smoke, far off on the horizon. The day was unusually clear, the sea a deep blue, the hills emerald, very much like a certain day two years earlier. The ships became steadily more distinct. Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower. American flags hung from homes and public buildings. A British destroyer, the Mary Rose, sailed out to meet the inbound warships, and signaled, “Welcome to the American colors.” To which the American commander answered, “Thank you, I am glad of your company.”
On May 8, the destroyers began their first patrols, just a day beyond the two-year anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania.
EPILOGUE
PERSONAL EFFECTS
ONE HOT DAY IN JULY 1916, A HARBOR PILOT WALKED into the ship-news office in Battery Park in Manhattan and invited a group of reporters to accompany him on a brief voyage, by tugboat, up the Hudson River to Yonkers, north of Manhattan, where he was to “fetch out” a ship, that is, guide it downriver to the wider and safer waters of New York Harbor. Ordinarily this was not a voyage the reporters would be inclined to make, but the day was stifling and the pilot said the fresh air would do them all good. The reporters, among them the Evening Mail’s Jack Lawrence, also brought along a good deal of alcohol, or, as Lawrence put it, “liquid sustenance.” As their tugboat approached the Yonkers wharf, the reporters saw that the ship was an old Cunard ocean liner, the Ultonia, docked there to pick up a load of horses for the war. It was a small ship, with one funnel. “She looked so smeared and dirty and utterly woebegone that we hardly recognized her,” Lawrence wrote. The ship’s black hull had been painted gray, in haphazard fashion. “Much of this had chipped off, giving her a peculiar, spotted appearance.”
The day was languid, the river calm, and yet the ship moved with a peculiar side-to-side motion. Lawrence had never seen such a thing and found it “almost uncanny.” This rolling, the pilot explained, was caused by the hundreds of horses within the ship. Sensing movement, all the horses roped to one side of the hull would suddenly rear backward in alarm, causing a slight roll. This in turn would startle the horses anew and cause those on the opposite side to step back. The side-to-side roll became more pronounced with each cycle, to the point where the ship looked as if it were being buffeted by a heavy sea. This, the pilot explained, was called a “horse storm,” and under certain conditions it could bang a ship against its wharf and damage deck rails and boats.
As the tugboat pulled up alongside the Ultonia, the ship’s cargo doors swung open to admit the pilot. The sun blazed. Inside the darkened hold stood one man, shaded by the overhead door. He looked down at the pilot and reporters. He did not smile. Lawrence recognized him at once: Capt. William Thomas Turner. “His old blue uniform was soiled and wrinkled,” Lawrence wrote, but “his cap, bearing the Cunard Line insignia, was still at the familiar jaunty angle. The figure of the man was still erect and commanding.”
The pilot climbed into the ship.
“Glad to see you aboard, sir,” Turner told him. “We’ll get under way immediately. These horses are raising hell.”
Turner had been given command of the ship in November 1915, after its regular captain had fallen ill during a stop in France. He had been the only captain available to replace him. Just before Turner left Liverpool to take over command, Cunard’s chairman Alfred Booth asked him into his office. Booth began to apologize about assigning Turner to such a modest vessel, but the captain stopped him. “I told him there were no regrets on my part,” Turner said. “I would go to sea on a barge if necessary to get afloat again, as I was tired of being idle and on shore while everyone else was away at sea.”
In December 1916, Cunard reassigned Turner and put him in command of the Ivernia, another passenger ship recommissioned for war duty, though this one carried troops, not horses. Turner was not its master for long. On January 1, 1917, while in the Mediterranean off the island of Crete, the ship was torpedoed and sunk, killing 153 soldiers and crew. Turner survived. The ship had been zigzagging at the time of the attack.
Cunard made Turner a relief captain and put him back in charge of the Mauretania, but this was a thin expression of confidence, for the ship was in dry dock.
In 1918, Turner was once again compelled to relive the Lusitania disaster when a federal judge in New York opened a trial to determine whether Cunard was liable for the ship’s loss. The proceeding combined seventy lawsuits filed by American survivors and next of kin. Here too the judge ruled that the sole cause of the disaster was Schwieger’s attack and that he had fired two torpedoes.
The final humiliation for Turner came later, with publication of Winston Churchill’s book, in which Churchill persisted in blaming Turner for the disaster and, despite possessing clear knowledge to the contrary, reasserted that the ship had been hit by two torpedoes.
The old captain—“this great little man,” as his friend George Ball put it—had survived the sinking of the Lusitania with his pride intact; he’d survived the sinking of the Ivernia; but this new affront hurt him. At sixty-four, when Cunard required captains to retire, Turner left the company and traveled to Australia to try to mend things with his estranged family but found that life there did not suit him. He returned to England and retired to his home in Great Crosby, outside Liverpool, to be looked after by his longtime companion, Mabel Every. He kept bees in half a dozen hives that he had built in his yard and harvested the honey they produced. Often in conversation he would absentmindedly pick stingers from his arms and shins.
Turner was said to be a fundamentally happy man who liked a good pipe now and then. He told stories of the sea, but never the one most people wanted to hear. “Capt. Turner felt the loss of the Lusitania very much, and seldom mentioned it to anyone,” wrote Miss Every. It was this silence that told his friends how heavily the disaster weighed on him. In a reply to a sympathetic female friend in Boston, Turner wrote, “I grieve for all the poor innocent people that lost their lives and for those that are left to mourn their dear ones lost.” But that was all he was willing to say on the subject, he told her. “Please excuse me saying more, because I hate to think or speak of it.”
At the same time, he was not haunted by the disaster; nor did it leave him depressed and broken, as popular conception might have held. Wrote George Ball, “He was far too strong a character to brood over a matter that was beyond rectification and allow it to worry him to the point of melancholy�
�a characteristic he never at any time displayed.” Turner himself said, in an interview with the New York Times, “I am satisfied that every precaution was taken, and that nothing was left undone that might have helped to save human lives that day.”
Turner retained his good humor, according to George Ball. “Merriment and humor were always prominently observable in his company and never was he unable to keep all his associates interested and amused.” This became more difficult when, in his seventies, cancer infiltrated his colon. “The poor fellow did suffer great agony in the last year of his life,” Ball wrote.
Turner died on June 24, 1933, at the age of seventy-six. “He died as he had lived,” Ball wrote, “full of courage and spirit and without complaint. So passed to the great beyond one of the hardy and able sailors of the old hard school.”
Turner’s niece, Mercedes Desmore, attended the funeral. The captain was buried at a cemetery in Birkenhead, across the Mersey from the Liverpool docks. His name was engraved at the bottom of the family tombstone, along with a brief reference to the Lusitania.
A new war came, and on September 16, 1941, a Nazi U-boat torpedoed and sank a British ship, the Jedmoor, off the Outer Hebrides, killing thirty-one of its thirty-six crew. Among the lost was a fifty-five-year-old able seaman named Percy Wilfred Turner—Captain Turner’s youngest son.
IN APRIL 1917, Kptlt. Walther Schwieger was given command of a new submarine, U-88, larger than U-20, and with twice the number of torpedoes. A few months later, on July 30, he received the German navy’s highest award, a pretty blue cross with a French name, Pour le Mérite, nicknamed the Blue Max. At the time he was only the eighth U-boat commander to receive one, his reward for having sunk 190,000 gross tons of shipping. The Lusitania alone accounted for 16 percent of the total.
In London, in the Old Admiralty Building, Room 40 tracked Schwieger and his new boat through four cruises, one of which lasted nineteen days. The fourth cruise began on September 5, 1917, and proved to be considerably shorter. Soon after entering the North Sea, Schwieger encountered a British Q-ship, the HMS Stonecrop, one of a class of so-called mystery ships that outwardly looked like vulnerable freighters but were in fact heavily armed. While trying to escape, Schwieger steered his boat into a British minefield. Neither he nor his crew survived, and the submarine was never found. Room 40 recorded the loss with a small notation in red: “Sunk.”
In Denmark, coastal residents continued to visit the shore where his previous boat, U-20, had run aground, and now and then would climb upon the wreckage, until in 1925 the Danish navy demolished the remains with a spectacular explosion. By then, the conning tower, deck gun, and other components had been removed. They reside today in a seaside museum in Thorsminde, Denmark, on an austere stretch of North Sea coastline. Severed from its base and laced with rust, the conning tower sits on the museum’s front lawn with all the majesty of a discarded refrigerator, a forlorn ghost of the terrifying vessel that once hunted the seas and changed history.
CAPT. REGINALD “BLINKER” HALL was knighted in 1918 for his work with Room 40, though the work itself was kept secret for decades. He went on to win election to the House of Commons as a Conservative member and remained active in politics through the 1920s. At one point, during a general strike in 1926, the Conservative party established a temporary newspaper, the British Gazette, and put Hall in charge of personnel. The editor in chief was his old boss, Winston Churchill. Circulation soared to one million copies a day before the strike ended. Hall retired from politics in 1929 and moved to a home in the New Forest, a lovely terrain of pasture and woods in southern England.
He set out to publish a book about Room 40 and his exploits as intelligence chief, but in August 1933 the Admiralty and Foreign Office, sensing a new dark tilt in the world, made clear their displeasure and their wish that the story remain secret. Hall withdrew the manuscript, though his notes and a number of completed chapters reside today in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, England. In one notation Hall exults, “How simple is intelligence!”
Hall believed that new trouble was indeed soon to come in Europe. He visited Germany and Austria in 1934. Ever the intelligence man, he reported his observations about the National Socialist movement to the government. He also described his experience to a friend in America. “All the young are in the net,” he wrote, “anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.” He added, “It will, some time soon, be the duty of HUMAN BEINGS to deal with a mad dog; when that time comes your people will have to take their share.”
When the next war did begin, Hall joined Britain’s Home Guard. He became its chief of intelligence. His health, never good, declined as the war progressed. In July 1943 one of his former code breakers, Claude Serocold, by that point a director of Claridge’s Hotel, put him up in one of the hotel’s suites so that he could spend his last days in comfort. At one point a plumber arrived to deal with a problem in the bathroom. In keeping with the dignified character of the hotel, the plumber was dressed in a black suit. Hall said, “If you’re the undertaker, my man, you’re too early.” He died on October 22, 1943.
AMONG THE PASSENGERS who survived—all of whom received from Cunard a lifetime discount of 25 percent—there were marriages, lifelong friendships forged, and at least two suicides. Rita Jolivet’s sister, Inez, a renowned violinist, was not herself a passenger, but her husband was among the lost. She decided she could not live without him and in late July 1915 shot herself to death. At least two young men who had survived the sinking were subsequently killed in the war.
Margaret Mackworth experienced a complex suite of aftereffects. Her ordeal had the perverse result of eliminating her long-standing fear of water and substituting an exaggerated terror of being trapped in an enclosure under water. This fear came to her primarily when she took the train that passed through the Severn Tunnel, under the Severn River. It was a journey she had to take often, and every time, she wrote, “I insistently pictured the tunnel giving way, the water rushing in, and the passengers being caught and suffocated and drowned like rats in a trap in the little boxes of carriages.”
Overall, though, she believed the disaster had made her a better person. She had a new confidence. “If anyone had asked me whether I should behave as I ought in a shipwreck I should have had the gravest doubts,” she wrote. “And here I had got through this test without disgracing myself.” She also found, to her surprise, that the experience had eliminated a deep horror of death that she had harbored since childhood. “I do not quite understand how or why it did this,” she wrote. “The only explanation I can give is that when I was lying back in that sunlit water I was, and I knew it, very near to death.” The prospect had not frightened her, she wrote: “Rather, somehow, one had a protected feeling, as if it were a kindly thing.”
Her friend and tablemate, Dorothy Conner, went on to join the war effort, working in a canteen in France close to the front. In honor of her help and bravery, the French awarded her the Croix de Guerre.
Young Dwight Harris presented his engagement ring to his betrothed, Miss Aileen Cavendish Foster, and they were married on July 2, 1915, in London. The little boy he saved, Percy Richards, reached the age of forty, but killed himself on June 24, 1949.
George Kessler, the Champagne King, made good on a pledge he had made during his time in the water—that if he survived he would devote himself to the care of victims of the war. He established a foundation to help soldiers and sailors blinded in battle. Helen Keller became a trustee and later gave her name to the organization, which operates today as Helen Keller International.
Five months after the disaster, Charles Lauriat wrote a book about his experience, entitled The Lusitania’s Last Voyage. It became a bestseller. He continued to sell books, manuscripts, and works of art, and in 1922 filed a claim against Germany with the U.S. Mixed Claims Commission for the value of the lost Thackeray drawings and the Dickens Carol. He wan
ted $51,399.31, which included interest; the commission awarded him $10,000. He died on December 28, 1937, at the age of sixty-three. His obituary in the Boston Globe noted the fact that over the years he had made sixty voyages to London and Europe. A succession of new owners built the Lauriat company into an empire of 120 “Lauriat’s” stores, but this expansion came too quickly, at too great a cost, just as bookstores came under pressure from national chains and online sellers. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in 1998 and a year later closed for good.
Belle Naish, the Kansas City passenger who lost her husband, found that long after the disaster she could not look at a clear blue sky without feeling a deep sense of foreboding. Theodate Pope put Mrs. Naish in her will as thanks for that moment on the deck of the rescue ship Julia when Naish realized that Theodate was not in fact dead and called for help.
Theodate’s recovery took time. Her spiritualist friends rallied and arranged for her to stay in a private home in Cork. She arrived with her face still battered and vividly hued, wearing a mélange of clothing that she had selected from a collection donated by Queenstown residents. Her host family placed her in a guest room with white walls, tulips in window boxes, and a lively coal fire. Until this point she had existed in a kind of emotional trance, unable to feel much of anything. But now, suddenly, in this cozy home, she felt safe. “I dropped into a chair and, for the first time, cried my heart out.” She received letters of consolation. Mary Cassatt wrote, “If you were saved it is because you have still something to do in this world.”
To complete her recovery, Theodate moved on to London, to the Hyde Park Hotel. Henry James was a regular visitor. Theodate described herself as being “in such a state of exhaustion and shock” that she would drift off to sleep in his presence, but each time she awoke, he was there, “his folded hands on the top of his cane, so motionless that he looked like a mezzotint.” Though she had adored England on her past visits, she now found it utterly changed. “You can have no idea of the war atmosphere here,” she wrote to her mother. “It is suffocating, it is so—not depressing—but so constantly in the thoughts and on the lips of everyone.” She returned to her beloved house, Hill-Stead. For long afterward she endured severe insomnia, and nightmares in which she searched for her young companion of the Lusitania, Edwin Friend. On the worst nights a cousin would walk her through her house until she had calmed enough to return to bed.
