Authors: Erik Larson
“Tubists” took the messages from the vacuum canisters and passed them on to the code breakers. The tubists were officers who had been injured badly enough in the war that they could no longer fight. This cadre included a one-legged man named Haggard and a one-eyed British officer named Edward Molyneux, who would go on to become an acclaimed designer of clothing in Paris.
The most tedious part of the job was writing the complete text of each message into a daily log. Churchill insisted that every intercept be recorded, no matter how routine. As the number of intercepts multiplied, this task became
“soul destroying,” according to one Room 40 member; the log “became an object of hatred.” But Churchill paid close attention. In March 1915, for example, he scrawled on one of Hope’s decrypts,
“Watch this carefully.”
The group learned over time that even a seemingly innocuous change in the character of routine messages could signal an important new action by the German navy. Wrote Commander Hope,
“Any messages which were not according to routine, were to be looked on with great suspicion, and in this way we were able to build up a large number of signs and portents.” The British wireless operators who listened in on German communications came to know just by the sound of a transmission whether it came from a submarine. They found that U-boats first took a few moments to tune their systems and then began each transmission with a kind of electrical throat-clearing, five Morse signals: dash dash dot dash dash.
“The final note,” Commander Hope said, “is high-pitched … and has a wailing or whining character when sending.”
Thanks to captured charts, Room 40 also knew that the German navy had divided the seas around England into a grid to better direct the travels of surface ships and submarines. The North Sea
had been broken into squares six miles on a side, with each square assigned a number, according to Hope. “
Whenever any of their vessels was at sea, she was continually signaling her position by saying what square she was in.” By plotting these on a chart, Hope wrote, Room 40 learned which routes German ships and U-boats followed. Some squares were consistently empty: “It was only reasonable to suppose that these blank spaces were mined areas.”
Over time, thanks to Room 40’s intercepts and information gleaned from interrogations of captured submariners, both Room 40 and Capt. Blinker Hall’s intelligence division developed
a sense of the flesh-and-blood men who commanded Germany’s U-boats. A few, like Kapitänleutnant Weddigen, the man who sank the cruisers
Aboukir
,
Cressy
, and
Hogue
, were daring and pushed their crews to the limit. A captain of this kind was called a
Draufganger
, or dashing commander. Another commander, Claus Rücker, was said to be “a bully and a coward.” In contrast, Walther Schwieger was described in several intelligence reports as a good-natured soul who was well liked by his crew and peers, “a very popular and pleasant officer,” as one report put it.
Some U-boat captains were cold-blooded killers, like Schwieger’s friend Max Valentiner. “He is said to be the most powerfully built officer in the German Navy,” a British interrogator reported, and “one of the most ruthless submarine commanders.” But another captain, Robert Moraht, saved lives “whenever possible.” After his boat was sunk and he and four members of his crew were captured, interrogators learned through him and the others that the life of a U-boat commander was not all discomfort. Moraht woke each day at 10:00
A
.
M
., and climbed to the deck “for a short stroll.” He ate lunch by himself and afterward read in his cabin, “always keeping a stock of good books on board.” At 4:00 he had tea, and at 7:00, supper, “after which he remained in the wardroom, talking, playing games, or listening to the gramophone.” He went to bed at 11:00
P
.
M
. “He made a habit of drinking a glass of wine just before turning in.”
Room 40 and Hall’s division also gained insight into the finer points of U-boat culture. They learned, for example, that U-boat
commanders did not care about the
number
of ships they sank but rather their tonnage, because tonnage was what their superiors looked to when deciding to award honors. They learned, too, that the German navy had its own tradition of assigning nicknames. One very tall commander was nicknamed Seestiefel, or sea boot. Another had a reputation for smelling bad and thus was nicknamed Hein Schniefelig, or stinky person. A third was said to be “very childish and good-natured” and was commonly called Das Kind, the child.
The U-boat commanders had one thing in common, however. When it came to wireless, all were talkative, as Room 40 and Blinker Hall were delighted to learn.
They used their wireless systems incessantly. In the course of the war, Room 40 would receive twenty thousand intercepted messages that had been sent by U-boats. This “
extreme garrulity,” as Room 40’s Clarke put it, allowed the group to keep close watch over U-boat travels, all duly recorded in a ledger kept by Commander Hope.
In January 1915, Room 40 was able to pinpoint the first time a U-boat traveled as far as the Irish Sea, the body of water that separates England and Ireland. The group even identified the particular zone to which the U-boat’s captain had been ordered—a square of sea near Liverpool. On that occasion, the value of the intelligence was immediately apparent, and the Admiralty acted at once. It sent a warning to the home fleet, identifying the source of its information only as a “reliable authority.” Destroyers converged on the U-boat’s patrol zone from north and south. Two large Cunard liners, the
Ausonia
and
Transylvania
, were en route to Liverpool at the time, carrying naval gun barrels made by Bethlehem Steel. The
Transylvania
, then under the command of Captain Turner, also carried passengers, among them forty-nine Americans. The Admiralty ordered both ships to change course immediately and speed as fast as possible to Queenstown, on the south coast of Ireland, and wait there until destroyers could arrive to escort them to Liverpool. Upon arriving safely, Turner expressed his relief at having evaded attack. “
I fooled ’em that time,” he said.
Room 40 had long followed Kptlt. Walther Schwieger’s U-20
and kept a running record of his patrols: when he left, which route he took, where he was headed, and what he was supposed to do once he got there. In early March 1915, Commander Hope monitored a voyage Schwieger made to the Irish Sea that coincided with a disturbing message broadcast from a German naval transmitter located at Norddeich, on Germany’s North Sea coast just below Holland.
Addressed to all German warships and submarines, the message made specific reference to the
Lusitania
, announcing that the ship was en route to Liverpool and would arrive on March 4 or 5. The meaning was obvious: the German navy considered the
Lusitania
fair game.
The Admiralty found the message disconcerting enough that it dispatched two destroyers to rendezvous with the ship and escort it to port. One destroyer sent an uncoded message asking the ship’s then captain, Daniel Dow, to report his position in order to arrange the meeting. Dow refused to give it, fearing that a U-boat had sent the message. The rendezvous never came off, but Dow succeeded in reaching Liverpool on his own. It was soon after this that he asked to be relieved, and Captain Turner took his place.
As that spring of 1915 advanced, the code solvers in Room 40 honed their skills, delighted and a bit astonished by the fact that the German navy still did not revise its codebooks. The Mystery remained secure and continued to yield revelations about the travels of German U-boats.
T
OWARD THE
end of April, as Captain Turner readied the
Lusitania
for its May 1 departure, Room 40 learned of a new surge of U-boat activity. Intercepts showed that on Friday, April 30, four U-boats left their bases. In response, war-staff chief Dummy Oliver sent an urgent, ultrasecret message to Jellicoe at Scapa Flow. “
Four submarines sailed yesterday from Heligoland,” the message read. It identified their expected destinations. “They appear to be making good 12½ knots. Do not divulge exact source of information in any steps you take.” Within hours, Room 40 got word that two more U-boats also had departed, these from a base at
Emden, on Germany’s North Sea coast. One of these was Schwieger’s U-20. Considering that the German navy typically had only an average of two U-boats in the North Sea or the Atlantic at any one time, this was an extraordinary development.
Room 40’s code breakers found it a simple matter to follow U-20 through the first day or so of its voyage: Schwieger’s wireless man repeated the boat’s position fourteen times in twenty-four hours.
Room 40 did not have to look far to find the reason for this new and dangerous assault by Germany’s U-boats. As it happened, it was the German navy’s response to a ruse concocted by intelligence chief Blinker Hall himself, in the application of what he described as one of the first principles of the profession, “
that of mystifying and misleading the enemy.”
B
Y
S
ATURDAY
, M
AY
1,
THE HEAT WAVE HAD DISSIPATED
. The morning was cold, the sky pewter. The temperature made it easier for passengers arriving at Cunard’s Pier 54 to transport their belongings, for now they could simply wear their heavy coats, rather than bearing them draped over their arms along with all the other things they carried, their canes, umbrellas, valises, parcels, books, and babies, all in evidence on the sidewalk outside the terminal, as a long black line of taximeter cabs emerged from Eleventh Avenue and pulled close to the curb. Large bags traveled on the floor beside the drivers and were hauled from the cabs by squat, strong-looking men in open jackets and bully caps.
All these things were captured on film by a motion-picture camera stationed just outside the entrance to the terminal. Passengers crossed its plane of view: men in topcoats, fedoras, and snap-brim caps; women with large hats mounded with sewn-on flowers; toddlers bundled as if for the Arctic, one with a knit cap pulled low over the ears. Now and then a face appeared in startling closeup, with that look travelers have always had over time, stern, concentrating, trying to pay the cabbie, hold the cane and gloves—the empty glove fingers flexing like a cow’s udder—and still keep track of the suitcase and trunk receding into the Cunard terminal.
At the far side of the building, the
Lusitania
’s hull rose high above the wharf in a black wall of steel and rivets. The ship seemed
as indestructible as anything that could be imagined, even for an age that imagined well and placed so much trust in immensity and invention.
The furnaces in its boiler rooms flared as firemen raised steam for departure; its funnels exhausted braids of gray smoke into the mist above.
A
S ALWAYS
there were passengers who had achieved fame, and their arrival created a stir among the thousands of well-wishers, kin, and spectators now gathered along the wharf to see the ship off. Cunard had built grandstands to honor the custom, and these were full as always; they afforded a view not just of the ship but of a portion of Lower Manhattan and the wharves and vessels jutting from the shore on both sides of the Hudson. Just north stood the piers of the White Star Line, which three years earlier, almost to the month, were to have received the
Titanic
. Among the spectators the attention given to the
Lusitania
and its passengers was more acute than usual, given the German warning published in the city’s papers that morning.
Here came Charles Frohman, the theater impresario, who had made Ethel Barrymore a star and had brought the play
Peter Pan
to America, for which he dressed Maude Adams in a woodsy tunic with a broad collar, and in so doing forever engraved a particular image of the boy in the world’s imagination. Frohman also produced the stage show
Sherlock Holmes
, with William Gillette as its namesake hero, with deerstalker cap and meerschaum pipe. Frohman, wearing a blue double-breasted suit, walked with a marked limp and used a cane. A friend of his also came aboard, Marguerite Lucile Jolivet, twenty-five years old, known universally by her stage and film name, Rita Jolivet. Though she had already performed in Shakespearean plays in London, including a turn as Juliet, and had appeared in several silent films made in Italy, she was still only a fledgling star, but Frohman liked her, and his interest virtually assured her a vibrant career. She was traveling now to Europe to act in several more Italian films.
Another arrival was George Kessler, a wealthy wine importer known the world over as the “Champagne King.” Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst, he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as “freak dinners”—perhaps most notably the “Gondola Party” he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel’s courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake—five feet tall—brought in on the back of a baby elephant.
By far the most glamorous passenger was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son and primary heir of the late Cornelius, whose death in 1899 had left Alfred a rich man. Something of a rake, Alfred was tall and lean, with dark eyes and hair, and a taste for expensive suits. He was a welcome presence on board, especially among the women, despite the fact that he was married and carried with him a history of scandal. His first wife, Ellen French, had divorced him in 1908, charging him, as the
New York Times
put it, with “
misconducting himself with an unknown woman” in his private railcar. The woman turned out to be Mary Ruiz, wife of a Cuban diplomat. The scandal drove Ruiz to commit suicide. Vanderbilt remarried, this time wedding Margaret Emerson, heiress to a trove of money that owed its existence to America’s awful diet and its gastric consequences, the Bromo-Seltzer fortune. She was not on board. Vanderbilt was also a member of what a Minnesota newspaper called the “
Just Missed It” club, a fortunate group whose roster included Theodore Dreiser, Guglielmo Marconi, and J. P. Morgan, all of whom had planned to sail on the
Titanic
but for one reason or another had changed their minds. Needless to say, Vanderbilt traveled in style, booking one of the
Lusitania
’s “Parlor Suites.” He lodged his valet two doors down the corridor, in an interior room with neither porthole nor bath. Vanderbilt paid for both tickets in cash, $1,001.50, equivalent to over $22,000 in today’s dollars.