The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson review – how were 1,198 deaths allowed to happen?

One hundred years after the liner Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine, a new account asks whether it could have been prevented, and offers up some surprises

Richard Davenport-Hines
Thursday 7 May 2015 06.30 BST

On 7 May 1915 the Cunard liner Lusitania, the fastest ship of its day, steaming from New York to Liverpool, was torpedoed by a German submarine 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland, not far from Cobh. It sank in 18 minutes: 1,198 passengers and crew, including three German stowaways and 123 Americans, perished. Only six of 22 lifeboats were launched. Many passengers drowned because they donned their life-jackets incorrectly and could not keep their heads bobbing above water. There were 764 survivors. This unprecedented attack on civilians caused a storm of indignation, particularly in the US, which expected its citizens to be immune from international violence.

Until 1914 the established naval rules provided that warships could stop and search merchant vessels, but must safeguard their crews. Passenger ships were exempt from attack. The sinking of civilian ships without rescuing their voyagers, said Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, leaving them “to perish in open boats or drown amid the waves was in the eyes of all seafaring peoples a grisly act, which hitherto had never been practised except by pirates”.

Both the Royal Navy and the German fleet had envisaged a naval war in which their battleships met in huge showdowns such as the battle of Trafalgar. When instead they found a naval stalemate, British warships blockaded Germany and the Germans resorted to submarine warfare with their fleet of U-boats. The sinking of the Lusitania shocked the world, but it should not have been a surprise. On the morning of the liner’s embarkation, the German embassy in Washington had taken out advertisements in New York newspapers warning that vessels flying the British flag were liable to destruction in the naval war zone, and that their passengers were in jeopardy. The Lusitania’s captain, William Thomas Turner, who thought of his passengers as chattering monkeys, and Cunard’s bullish American managers, however, thought their ship could outrun any submarine.

The Admiralty in London had possessed a German naval codebook since 1914, and its cryptographers in Room 40 were soon breaking the further encryption of intercepted messages. Although the Admiralty knew that Germany’s U20 was prowling the sea route off south-west Ireland used by ships heading for Liverpool, it could issue no warnings to Cunard or the Lusitania about the peril without forfeiting the ultra-secrecy of its code-breaking abilities. U20 first sank the Liverpool schooner, the Earl of Lathom, carrying rocks from Limerick, and soon torpedoed other ships. In Liverpool the alarmed Cunard chairman urged the Admiralty to divert Lusitania to safety at Cobh until the U20 boat threat had receded. A wireless warning from the Admiralty was indeed received on the liner, but it was too terse and muted to convey the full danger. The navy’s failure to provide an armed escort for the liner through the dangerous last stretch of its voyage – despite the fact that its cargo included vital rifle ammunition and artillery shells – receives Larson’s strictures.

On a sunny day of calm seas, shortly after two in the afternoon, U20 fired a torpedo at Lusitania. The liner’s crew and passengers spotted a track advancing towards them across the flat sea, as if an invisible hand was making a straight line with white chalk across a blackboard. A passenger gazing from the window of the veranda cafe saw what seemed to be the tail of a fish raising “a streak of froth” on the starboard side. “We had all been thinking, dreaming, eating, sleeping ‘submarine’ from the hour we left New York,” he said, “and yet with the dreaded danger upon us, I could hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes.” The torpedo blew a hole the size of a house beneath the liner’s waterline. It began to sink immediately amid scenes of turmoil and panic.

Larson speculates that the Admiralty wasn’t more active in protecting the Lusitania as outraging American opinion against Germany would help to draw the US into the European war – but he holds back from making a direct accusation of deliberate endangerment. Perhaps the most astonishing part of this breezy book is the letter that Admiral Lord Fisher, first sea lord at the Admiralty at the time of the incident, sent in 1916 to Admiral von Tirpitz, Germany’s foremost advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare. “Dear old Tirps,” he wrote. “You’re the one German sailor who understands War! Kill your enemy without being killed yourself. I don’t blame you for the submarine business. I’d have done the same myself, only our idiots in England wouldn’t believe it when I told ’em.” He signed off the letter, “Yours till Hell freezes, Fisher.”

Another exceptional image comes from a U-boat commander watching through his periscope the result of torpedoing a ship transporting horses. In the eerie silence that envelops a submerged vessel, the commander witnessed the ship in flames, an overloaded lifeboat rowing away and a panic-stricken dapple-grey horse jumping overboard, landing on the lifeboat and kicking its occupants to death.

This book is at its best when describing the lethal new technology of early submarine warfare. Larson’s vivid evocation of life inside early submarines, the omnipresent danger, the Christmas lunches and dachshund puppies, never flags. He treats the U20’s urbane, witty and joyous captain, Walther Schwieger, and his loyal crew with respect. Readers will feel a shock of disappointment when Larson reveals that in 1917 Schwieger’s new, improved submarine, U88, was ambushed by HMS Stonecroft and herded into a British minefield where it exploded with the loss of all hands.

The most wearisome digressions in Dead Wake concern the protracted wooing from the White House by the widower president, Woodrow Wilson, of a Washington jeweller called Edith Galt. The prominence given to the president’s love life is a contrivance intended to give a human interest angle to Washington’s prevarications over joining in the European war, but it brings a banal, chatty dimension to important events.

Larson is most interested in American passengers (ranging from a Vanderbilt millionaire to a newlywed couple called Shineman from Oil City, Wyoming). He gives surprisingly scant attention to the Canadians, whom he tends to treat as transatlantic British. Some great backstories are missed about non-American passengers, including the Canadian armaments manufacturer Sir Frederick Orr-Lewis, the English art deco designer Oliver Bernard and the redoubtable Margaret Mackworth, Viscountess Rhondda – the suffragette bomb-maker, pioneer female coal-mining executive, who despite being a peer in her own right was excluded from sitting in the House of Lords by sexual chauvinism.

Larson’s approach to history resembles a novelist’s. He paints word-pictures about protagonists, rooms and moods, and propels his narrative forward with dialogue taken from contemporary sources. His artful structure cuts between the liner and the U-boat, the English-speakers and the German, the goodies and the baddies. Chapters switch between New York, Washington, Berlin, London and the open seas. These discontinuities build up suspense, and make for many people’s idea of a rattling read. However, they sometimes complicate and disrupt the narrative, so that readers who want a swift, clear idea of what happened may feel frustrated. Still, there is nothing standoffish about Larson’s book; he makes every reader feel welcome.

Sinking of the Lusitania

Winston Churchill responsible by inaction for tragic sinking of the Lusitania

John Spain @irishcentral July 17,2015 01:05 AM

The centenary of the sinking of the great liner the Lusitania a few miles off the Irish coast in May 1915 is a time of sad reflection for many people here.

I've been reading a new book which vividly brings to life the horror of what happened when the ship was torpedoed and over 1,000 men, women and children perished in the waters within sight of the Old Head of Kinsale in Co. Cork.

The book is "Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania," written by New York Times reporter and narrative historian Erik Larson. It's a remarkable piece of storytelling and I strongly recommend it.

Among the controversial issues raised in the book is the possibility, even the likelihood, that Winston Churchill was largely responsible for the sinking, not by any action of his but by inaction. He knew about the danger and there were a number of actions he should have taken which would have avoided the disaster, yet he deliberately did nothing. But we will come back to that in a moment.

First I should mention Larson's extraordinary ability to bring history alive, an example being the way he describes the horrified fascination of people on board the ship who actually saw the torpedo approaching.

A seaman lookout first spotted "a burst of foam about 500 yards away," then a track moving across the flat plane of the sea as clear as if it had been drawn "by an invisible hand."

It was just after 2 p.m. The sun was shining; the sea was like glass; the Irish coast was visible just over 10 miles away and passengers were strolling on deck after lunch.

Some of them also saw the torpedo approaching. One noticed "a streak of froth" arcing across the surface towards the ship. Another leaned over the rail to watch what would happen when it hit the side. He described the torpedo as "a beautiful sight,'' covered with a silvery phosphorescence as it sped through the green water.

A woman asked, "That isn't a torpedo, is it?" The man bedside her later said, "I was too spellbound to answer. I felt absolutely sick."

It was surreal. The giant steamer was just a few miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, slicing through the perfectly calm water on a beautiful afternoon.

But despite the feeling of unreality this was indeed the very thing that everyone on board had silently feared and joked nervously about since they had left New York five days earlier, on May 1, 1915, bound for Liverpool. What followed was appalling as the ship went down in just 18 minutes and 1,198 people perished.

Three years earlier 1,514 people had died when the Titanic hit an iceberg, and that tragedy has remained in the public imagination ever since. The sinking of the Lusitania, however, has largely been forgotten. Yet the story is just as horrific as that of the Titanic.

And if you're wondering about the title of the book, "Dead Wake," it refers to the visible trail of the torpedo on the surface formed by bubbles of compressed air released from the torpedo engine 10 feet below. The bubbles take several seconds to reach the surface so the wake is “dead” because by the time it forms the torpedo is far ahead of it.

The fact that we know the outcome does not lessen the impact of this book, which at times is as gripping as a thriller. Larson builds the story from several perspectives at the same time, switching between what is going on in different places in short scenes.

It is the story mainly of the hunter and the hunted, the U-boat and the liner. But it is also the wider story of the depressive, lovelorn President Woodrow Wilson, reluctant to enter the war, and the young Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, determined to get America involved.

Early on we meet some passengers, including glamorous types like the multi-millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt, the “Champagne King” George Kessler, and the Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat, who was carrying Charles Dickens's own copy (priceless) of "A Christmas Carol."

Also on board was Dublin art collector Sir Hugh Lane with a large case of paintings rumored to have included works by Rubens, Monet and Rembrandt which was insured for the equivalent of over $90 million today.

In retrospect it may seem foolhardy to have been traveling at the time at all since the Great War had started the year before in 1914. But all the passengers had their way of rationalizing away the danger despite an American newspaper notice that had appeared right beside an ad for the Lusitania's voyage shortly before the ship sailed.

In the notice the German government had warned that the shipping lanes around Britain were now a war zone and that ships were "liable to destruction." German U-boats were known to be active in the area.

Yet few passengers early in 1915 believed that the Germans would actually attack a passenger liner. Even if the Lusitania were attacked, it was twice as fast as a submarine and could outrun any danger, they told each other.

They also believed that a Royal Navy escort would be provided as soon as the Lusitania neared Ireland. Despite all this, nervous chatter about submarines continued among passengers throughout the voyage.

Larson explains the coincidence of circumstances that led to the disaster – why the Lusitania was late leaving New York, why it was sailing parallel to the Irish coast at less than maximum speed, how it accidentally came within range of the submarine, how fog cleared at the crucial time, why the U-boat was there instead of where it was supposed to be near Liverpool.

He is very good at describing the complex workings of the steam driven Lusitania – one of the great "trans-Atlantic greyhounds' – and the limitations of the early submarines like the U-20 which sank it.

The details of the converging voyages of the Lusitania and the U-20 have a horrible fascination because as a reader, even though you know what is coming, you keep hoping that somehow they will miss each other. The sinking and its aftermath are brilliantly described using the accounts of survivors, the U-boat captain's log and recently released documents from the two main inquiries into the disaster.

Because of the ship's rapid listing, only six of the 23 lifeboats were successfully launched, many people were crushed by debris and there was no ship in the area close enough to pick up people in the water in time. Small sailing craft from Kinsale did their best but, partly because of the calm day, they were too slow.

As well as telling a compelling story, Larson also deals with the suspicion that, because there was a second powerful blast inside the ship after the torpedo had exploded, the Lusitania must have been carrying explosives. It was – 170 tons of rifle ammunition and 1,250 cases of artillery shells, as well as 50 barrels each of flammable aluminum and bronze powder – all of which was legal under U.S. neutrality rules at the time.

It may sound like a lot, but it was not a significant amount in terms of war supplies. And it certainly did not provide any retrospective justification for the sinking which claimed over 1,000 civilian lives.

Larson also explains why it is most unlikely that any of this material exploded – the artillery shells were minus their charges, for example – and why the second explosion was caused either by the ignition of coal dust in the ship's vast bunkers, then nearly empty, or cold seawater hitting the superheated boilers and pipes.

But the most interesting part of the book by far is the section in which Larson reveals the workings of the secret Room 40 in an old Admiralty building in central London, the center of a covert operation run by Churchill which was monitoring and decoding German naval radio messages. This clearly shows that Churchill and the very senior people in the Admiralty knew all about U-20 and roughly where it was and the extreme danger it posed to the approaching Lusitania.

Yet nothing was done to protect the liner and its passengers, even though Room 40 knew that 23 British merchant ships had been torpedoed around the coast of Britain and Ireland in the preceding seven days, three of them by the U-20.

At the same time as Lusitania was approaching Ireland several destroyers were being used to protect the pride of the British navy, the battleship Orion, which had just left port. Other destroyers which could have protected the Lusitania were tied up in British and Irish ports.

Given all that Room 20 knew about submarine activity in the area at the time, the Lusitania should have been diverted to the safer North Channel route (around the top of Ireland). It also should have been given a naval escort as it approached from the Atlantic.

Neither was done and this looks very suspicious, given earlier remarks made by Churchill implying that it would take a major disaster to get America into the war. The sinking of the Lusitania, with many Americans on board, provided such a disaster.

If the sinking of the Lusitania was, as it appears, a result of deliberate and calculated inaction by Churchill, it surely must rank among the greatest sins of omission ever committed.

La «ciudad subterránea» ideada por los británicos para resistir una invasión nazi

Gran Bretaña abrió este lunes al público un gigantesco refugio antiaéreo excavado en el acantilado de Dover

Link a la foto y al artículo AQUI

Hace más de 75 años que, con más fe que capacidad, un grupo de ingenieros ingleses construyó un gigantesco refugio subterráneo en los acantilados de Dover (al sur de Gran Bretaña) para alojar a los casi 200 soldados que debían hacerse cargo de un grupo de cañones ubicado en esa zona. Su trabajo era vital pues el gobierno sabía que, en el caso de que Adolf Hitler invadiese las islas, lo haría a través de ese punto por ser el más cercano a la Europa continental. Por ello, los combatientes responsables de aquella batería debían mantenerse con vida y resistir los bombardeos navales y aéreos enviados por el régimen nazi costase lo que costase.

De esta forma, y con este objetivo, nació el complejo de «Fan Bay Deep Shelter», una «ciudad subterránea» formada por túneles excavados a más de 20 metros bajo tierra (23, concretamente) y cuyo objetivo no era otro que evitar que los artilleros fallecieran antes las bombas de la «Luftwaffe» (la fuerza aérea germana). Hasta ahora, el lugar había permanecido olvidado en la Historia.

Así lo atestiguaba el que estuviera lleno de mugre y suciedad y cerrado al público. Sin embargo, su existencia ha vuelto a salir a la luz este lunes después de que, tras meses de rehabilitación, el grupo «National Trust» (encargada de salvar el patrimonio nacional británico) haya informado de que se reabre al público para que todo aquel interesado pueda disfrutarlo en primera persona.

CHURCHILL Y LOS TÚNELES DE DOVER

Tal y como explica la página Web creada para informar de esta curiosa «atracción turística», la construcción de «Fan Bay» comenzó el 20 de noviembre de 1940 de manos de la 172ª Compañía de Construcción de Túneles de los Reales Ingenieros del ejército británico. La zona, un gigantesco acantilado sobre el que era idóneo ubicar una batería de cañones, fue inspeccionada por el mismísimo Churchill, quien apremió a los obreros para que terminasen aquella obra de ingeniería cuanto antes.

Realmente era necesario, pues hasta entonces los nazis campaban a sus anchas por el Canal de la Mancha sin recibir ni un solo tiro desde la costa. «Insisto en que hay que proteger las posiciones de artillería ubicadas en la parte superior del acantilado de Dover. Deben resistir cualquier ataque al que estén expuestas. Tenemos que luchar por el mando del estrecho con artillería. Para el 10 de diciembre, la batería y el refugio contarán con cuatro oficiales y 118 hombres», dijo por entonces el británico.

Al parecer, los ánimos del Premier funcionaron, pues los militares tardaron escasamente 100 días en partir la montaña y levantar un complejo que contaba con cinco gigantescas salas, un hospital, un almacén, un generador de energía y hasta varios «cuartos de baño». Todo, en 1.100 metros cuadrados a los que se accedía tras bajar 125 escalones y pasar por unas resistentes puertas blindadas. El 28 de febrero se dio por terminado y el propio Churchill lo revisó en junio de 1941.

SU VIDA TRAS LA GUERRA

Una vez que finalizó la Segunda Guerra Mundial, este refugio fue cerrado en 1950 y, 20 años después, se tapió con escombros para evitar que los curiosos accediesen a su interior y pudiera ocurrir alguna desgracia. Sin embargo, después de permanecer cerrado durante más de 40 años, hoy se abrirá al público después de un trabajo de restauración de 18 meses y 3.000 horas de trabajo.

Además de limpiar y eliminar las 100 toneladas de deshechos que había en su interior, los voluntarios que han trabajado en el proyecto han reforzado los puntos más débiles con pilares de acero y se han asegurado de que no exista ningún peligro para los futuros visitantes. Los encargados de adecentarlo han sido 50 trabajadores de la organización «National Trust», además de dos arqueólogos, dos ingenieros de minas y un geólogo.

Ahora, y a cambio de un módico precio (unos 15 euros para los adultos y la mitad para los niños) aquellos que lo deseen podrán disfrutar de un recorrido de 45 minutos -antorcha en mano- a través de esta ciudad subterránea que, en su momento, albergó hasta 185 combatientes de la 203ª batería de costa. Unos soldados que, al vivir allí durante meses, dejaron su marca personal en la zona.

Así pues, abundan desde las pintadas realizadas por los soldados, hasta algún que otro consejo grabado en los cuartos de baño (el más destacado es que afirma que, si se acaba el papel, lo mejor es restregarse por el suelo para acabar limpio). Un pequeño trozo de historia que ha permanecido cerrado al mundo durante 40 años y está igual que el día en que lo habitaban aquellos que luchaban contra el nazismo.
«Esta pieza re-descubierto de patrimonio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial es un hallazgo verdaderamente notable. No ha habido acceso del público a los túneles durante más de 40 años, por lo que permanecen tal y como eran cuando fueron abandonados. Hemos llevado a cabo una amplia labor de conservación para preservar tanto la descomposición natural, como el auténtico ambiente del lugar», explica Jon Barker, uno de los organizadores del proyecto.

Cinco cosas curiosas que ver en «Fan Bay Deep Shelter»
M.P.V.MADRID

1-Pintadas originales realizadas por los soldados que, durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, se refugiaron en el lugar. Entre ellas destacan frases militares, dibujos grabados en la roca e insultos contra los nazis.

2-Los trozos de alambre que los combatientes trenzaban para hacer las veces de perchas.

3-Una «quiniela» recuperada del interior del búnker. Está fechada el 20 de febrero de 1943 y registra el resultado de 14 partidos de fútbol de la época.

4-Aguja e hilo de color caqui. Fue hallado sobre una litera.

5-Varias cintas de munición del calibre 30, un tipo de cartucho utilizado por las ametralladoras pesadas aliadas.