Authors: Erik Larson
The Admiralty issued its most comprehensive set of instructions in February 1915, in a secret memorandum that captains were to store “
in a place where it can be destroyed at a moment’s notice.” The document revealed a mixture of naïveté and sophistication about the nature of the submarine threat. It called the deck gun of a submarine “an inferior weapon” and stated, “Gun-fire from most submarines is not dangerous.” The instructions also advised that if a vessel got hit with a torpedo, there was no need to worry: “There will generally be ample time for the crew to escape in the boats, if the latter are kept ready for service.” The memorandum
evaded entirely the matter of
passengers
and how they might fare under the same circumstances.
But it also embodied a realistic appraisal of the vulnerabilities of U-boats and urged captains to exploit these at every opportunity. “If a submarine comes up suddenly close ahead of you with obvious hostile intention, steer straight for her at your utmost speed, altering course as necessary to keep her ahead.” In short, the Admiralty was asking merchant captains to transform their ships into offensive weapons and ram their attackers.
This was an effective maneuver given the inherent fragility of submarines, as would be proved a month later when the HMS
Dreadnought
rammed and sank Kapitänleutnant Weddigen’s U-29, thereby avenging the dead crews of the
Aboukir
, the
Cressy
, and the
Hogue
. The memorandum recommended that British ships disguise themselves as neutrals whenever possible and fly false colors. “
It is not in any way dishonorable. Owners and masters will therefore be within their rights if they use every device to mislead the enemy and induce him to confuse British vessels with neutrals.”
The memorandum also included a strict order, the codified effect of the
Aboukir
disaster: “
No ocean-going British merchant vessel is permitted to go to the assistance of a ship which has been torpedoed by a submarine.”
T
HE
A
DMIRALTY
later claimed that Turner possessed still another advisory, dated April 16, which reported, “
War experience has shown that fast steamers can considerably reduce the chance of successful surprise submarine attack by zigzagging that is to say altering the course at short and regular intervals say in ten minutes to half an hour.” The memo noted that this tactic was used by warships in waters likely to be patrolled by submarines.
The Admiralty may have erred, however, in presuming Turner really did have this particular memo among his papers at the time the ship sailed from New York. (
Cunard’s lawyers later would hedge the point with a heroic bit of legal prose in which they stated that while Cunard believed such a notice had been given to the captain,
the company had no knowledge of what the delivered memo actually said.) Whether such a communiqué had in fact been delivered to Turner became a matter of debate. The Admiralty’s Board of Trade had indeed crafted a statement on zigzagging, but one prominent naval historian asserted that the advisory was not approved by First Lord Churchill until April 25 and was not actually distributed to captains and shipping companies until May 13, long after the
Lusitania
’s May 1 departure.
Even had this memo been in Turner’s possession, it probably would have made
little impression. For one thing, the memo did not order captains to zigzag; it merely described the practice. For another, zigzagging at the time was a proposition that merchant captains considered worthy of ridicule, and that none was likely to endorse, especially not the master of a grand ocean liner. The idea of subjecting passengers, many of them prominent souls in first class, to the hard and irregular turns of a zigzag course was beyond contemplation.
N
OW
,
IN
open seas, the
Lusitania
maintained an average speed of 21 knots, 6 knots faster than the maximum speed a U-boat could attain while surfaced and more than twice what it could achieve while fully submerged.
This was also faster than any other civilian ship still in service. On Sunday afternoon the
Lusitania
quickly overtook and passed the American liner
New York
, with the Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry aboard.
T
HAT
S
UNDAY
, Dwight Harris, the New Yorker traveling to England to get married, planned what he would do if in fact the
Lusitania
were torpedoed. He wrote, “
I took a look around and decided that if anything did happen in the ‘War Zone’ I would go to the bow if possible.” First, however, he planned to grab the custom life belt he had bought at Wanamaker’s in New York.
T
HE
G
ERMAN WIRELESS MESSAGES INTERCEPTED BY
R
OOM
40 caused deep anxiety within the Admiralty. But it was not the
Lusitania
the Admiralty was concerned about. It was the HMS
Orion
, one of Britain’s largest and most powerful battleships, a “superdreadnought.” The ship had undergone a refitting in Devonport, on England’s southwest coast, and was now ready to sail north to rejoin the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.
On Sunday, May 2, Admiralty Chief of Staff “Dummy” Oliver sent a note to First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, in which he recommended that the
Orion
’s departure be postponed. “
There will be less moon & less risk every night now that we wait,” he wrote.
Fisher agreed, and at 1:20
P
.
M
. Oliver sent a telegram to the commander in chief of the fleet, Admiral Jellicoe, ordering him to hold the
Orion
in Devonport a while longer. That same afternoon the Admiralty also urged Jellicoe, “
in view of the submarine menace West of the West Coast of Ireland,” to take precautions to protect lesser ships, such as colliers and tenders.
Over the next several days,
Oliver would send explicit warnings to two other warships, HMS
Gloucester
and HMS
Duke of Edinburgh
, and would direct a third, HMS
Jupiter
, to take a newly opened route, the so-called North Channel, deemed far safer than alternative paths. The Admiralty had closed the route previously because of German mines but had
declared it clear on April 15 and
promptly made it available to navy ships but not merchant vessels. The route passed between Scotland and Ireland, through waters bracketed by friendly shores and heavily patrolled by the Royal Navy.
Despite the North Channel’s safety,
Admiral Oliver issued orders to have the
Jupiter
escorted by destroyers.
T
HAT
S
UNDAY
there was more news of the North Channel. Adm. Richard Webb, head of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, which in wartime held dominion over all British merchant shipping, received notice that the new route would now in fact be open to
all
vessels, merchant and military alike. This meant that civilian freighters and liners sailing to Liverpool could henceforth avoid the Western Approaches altogether and sail instead over the top of Ireland, then turn right and go
south
to Liverpool.
Admiral Webb did not transmit this new information to Cunard or to the
Lusitania
.
Through much of Sunday,
the Admiralty also tracked the progress of the wounded American tanker
Gulflight
, under tow and escorted by the navy. At 4:05 that afternoon the ship was reported making “good progress.” Two hours later it arrived at St. Mary’s Island in the Scillies, with its foredeck nearly submerged, its propeller visible at the stern.
I
N
Q
UEENSTOWN
, I
RELAND
, America’s local consul opened a newspaper and read for the first time about the warning the German Embassy had published in American newspapers the previous day.
The consul was Wesley Frost, now just beginning his second year of service in Queenstown. The town was still a major port, although Cunard’s largest liners no longer stopped there, having “touched bottom” in its harbor once too often. Although Frost knew the
Lusitania
was at this moment on its way to Liverpool, he felt no particular concern. “
The reference to the
Lusitania
was obvious enough,” he recalled later, “but personally it never entered
my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpability of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for an intelligent people to take upon themselves.”
T
HAT SAME
S
UNDAY
, well to the south in London, U.S. ambassador Walter Page, Frost’s chief, took a few moments to write a letter to his son, Arthur, an editor at the New York publishing company that the ambassador and his partner, Frank Doubleday, had founded in 1899.
Page was an Anglophile through and through. His dispatches consistently favored Britain and time and again struck President Wilson as being decidedly un-neutral.
In fact, Wilson had by now lost confidence in Page, though the ambassador did not yet seem to know it. The president had left enough hints, however, often failing to respond to Page’s communiqués. The presence of Colonel House in London as Wilson’s personal emissary should, by itself, have been evidence enough of Page’s diminished influence, but the ambassador still seemed not to grasp just how little Wilson cared for him and the information he supplied.
Page wrote often to his son and now, in his Sunday letter, told him of his concern that America might be drawn into the war. Later this letter would seem prescient to an uncanny degree.
“
The blowing up of a liner with American passengers may be the prelude,” the ambassador wrote. “I almost expect such a thing.”
He added, “If a British liner full of Americans be blown up, what will Uncle Sam do? What’s going to happen?”
A
T
12:30
P
.
M
. S
UNDAY
,
FINDING HIMSELF BRACKETED
by patrol boats and destroyers, Schwieger ordered another fast dive. The line of vessels ahead seemed to be an antisubmarine cordon, with Fair Isle at the top and North Ronaldsay in the Orkneys at the bottom. Schwieger suspected the cordon might be a permanent presence in these waters. If so, he wrote in his log, by way of warning other captains, “it would not seem advisable to pass this line during the day, especially when visibility is very good.”
U-20 traveled submerged for the next four hours. At 4:30
P
.
M
., Schwieger ascended to periscope depth and immediately spotted a patrol boat off to starboard. He dove back to cruising depth.
So much underwater travel was taxing for his crew. The atmosphere grew close and warm. But it was especially taxing for the submarine’s batteries. Even moving at a mere 5 knots, a boat of U-20’s class could cover a maximum of only 80 nautical miles before the batteries failed.
Schwieger kept the boat submerged for another two and a half hours. He noted in his log that his batteries were making a crackling noise. By this point U-20 had traveled 50 nautical miles on electric power.
At 7:00
P
.
M
. Schwieger again tried his periscope and to his relief saw no imminent threat. “Emerged,” he wrote, “and steered
towards the open sea in order to get away from the patrol boats whose smoke is still visible astern.”
In an addendum to his log, he noted that if still more destroyers had been posted beyond this Fair Isle–Ronaldsay line, thus forcing his boat to stay submerged even longer, “our situation could have been critical as our battery was pretty nearly gone.” These were deep waters—too deep for U-20 to hide on the bottom. Had the batteries failed here, Schwieger would have had no choice but to come to the surface and run until his diesel engines succeeded in recharging the system. But destroyers, capable of moving at speeds more than twice U-20’s maximum, would have had no difficulty overtaking him and would have begun firing long before.
Once safely out to sea and past the northern lip of Scotland, Schwieger set a course that would take him down the west flank of the Outer Hebrides, a bulwark of islands situated off Scotland’s northwest coast. His patrol zone off Liverpool was still a three-day voyage away.
The heave of the sea had lessened, producing swells of only 3 feet. Schwieger kept the boat on the surface. At 9:30
P
.
M
. he signed his log to close the third day of his patrol.
Three days out, and he had sunk nothing—had not even fired his deck gun.
L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, Schwieger was summoned into the shelter atop the conning tower. A lookout had spotted a potential target. In his log Schwieger described it as a “huge neutral steamer, its name lighted.” He judged it to be a Danish passenger liner out of Copenhagen, bound for Montreal. To determine this, Schwieger may have relied on his “War Pilot,” a merchant officer named Lanz, who served aboard U-20 to help identify ships. Between Lanz’s expertise and an immense book carried aboard every submarine that provided silhouettes and descriptions of nearly all ships afloat, Schwieger could be reasonably certain of the identities of any large vessel that came into view.
Though it’s clear Schwieger considered the Danish ship a potential
target, he made no attempt to attack. The ship was too far ahead and moving too fast; he estimated its speed to be at least 12 knots. “An attack on this ship impossible,” he wrote in his log.
This entry revealed much about Schwieger. It showed that he would have been more than willing to attack if circumstances had been better, even though he recognized the ship was neutral—and not just neutral but heading
away
from Britain and thus unlikely to be carrying any contraband for Germany’s enemies. The entry revealed as well that he had no misgivings about torpedoing a liner full of civilians.