Authors: Erik Larson
An instant later, he saw something moving across the flat plane of the sea, a track, as clear as if it had been made by “an invisible hand with a piece of chalk on a blackboard.”
He reached for his megaphone.
C
APTAIN
T
URNER
left the bridge and went below to his quarters. At about 1:30, Quartermaster Johnston, no longer at the wheel, was sent below to give Turner a message that the Old Head of Kinsale was now “
10 points on the port bow and 20 miles away.” The ship’s course was taking it gradually closer to the coast.
Johnston returned to the bridge. Half an hour later, just after two o’clock, he heard the cry, “
Here is a torpedo coming.”
A
FTER FINISHING
lunch and parting from his friend Lothrop Withington, Charles Lauriat went down to his cabin to get a sweater. He put it on under the jacket of his Knickerbocker suit, then headed back up for
“a
real walk
.” He climbed the main companionway and walked out onto the port side of the ship, with the Irish coast visible in the distance. Here he ran into Elbert Hubbard,
the writer, and his wife, Alice. Hubbard joked that he probably would not be welcome in Germany, given a pamphlet he had written, entitled
Who Lifted the Lid Off Hell?
, in which he laid blame for the war on Kaiser Wilhelm. He had given Lauriat a copy earlier in the voyage. Lauriat described it as “
a piece of vitriolic English.”
On B Deck, starboard side, Theodate Pope stood beside her companion, Edwin Friend, leaning on the rail and admiring the sea, “
which was a marvelous blue and very dazzling in the sunlight.” There was so much glare that Theodate wondered aloud, “How could the officers ever
see
a periscope?”
Oliver Bernard, the set designer, was standing in the Verandah Cafe leaning “lazily” against a window, looking out at the view. He saw what seemed to be the tail of a fish, well off the starboard side. Next “
a streak of froth” began arcing across the surface, toward the ship.
An American woman came up beside him, and said, “
That isn’t a torpedo, is it?”
“I was too spellbound to answer,” he said. “I felt absolutely sick.”
Here it was, this thing everyone had feared. “We had all been thinking, dreaming, eating, sleeping ‘submarine’ from the hour we left New York, and yet with the dreaded danger upon us, I could hardly believe the evidence of my own eyes.”
There was little fear, Bernard said. “
I did not think that anybody, even women and children, were so much terrified as they were astounded and stunned by the consciousness that the fears, cherished half in ridicule for five days previous, had at last been realized. The German ‘bluff’ had actually come off.”
The track continued its approach.
T
HAT FIRST TURMOIL
, that first bubble of foam, was the expulsion of compressed air from the submarine’s launching tube as the torpedo exited. The torpedo itself was 20 feet long and 20 inches in diameter; its nose, shaped like the top of a corn silo, contained 350 pounds of TNT and an explosive called Hexanite. Though
German commanders typically set the depth at 15 feet, this one traveled at 10 feet. It moved at about 35 knots, or 40 miles an hour, powered by compressed air stored in a tank toward its nose, just behind the compartment that contained the explosives. The air rushed against the pistons in its engine, geared to spin two propellers, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise, to keep the torpedo from rolling and veering. The air was then exhausted into the sea, where it bubbled to the surface. These bubbles needed a few seconds to rise, which meant the torpedo itself was always well ahead of the track that appeared above.
As the torpedo advanced, the water rushing past its nose turned a small propeller, which unscrewed a safety device that prevented detonation during storage. This propeller slipped from the nose and fell to the sea bottom, thereby exposing a triggering mechanism that upon impact with a ship’s hull would fire a small charge into the larger body of explosives. A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection.
The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.”
T
HE SMOOTHNESS
of the sea presented some passengers with a view of the torpedo that was startling in its clarity.
Dwight Harris, his Medici book in hand, was walking toward the stern, along the starboard side, when something caught his eye. He wrote, “
I saw the torpedo coming!—a white and greenish streak in the water!—I stood transfixed!”
Passenger James Brooks, a chain salesman who came from Connecticut, was walking along the boat deck, when friends on the next deck up—the Marconi deck—called to him to join them for a round of shuffleboard. These friends were Mr. and Mrs. Montagu Grant, of Chicago. He climbed the stairs, and as he walked toward them across the upper deck he saw a foam trail moving fast across the water.
“Oh, yes, I saw the torpedo coming, and exclaimed, ‘Torpedo!’
and rushed to the rail just aft of the staircase and stood on one foot and leaned forward, over, to watch the explosion which I expected to see occur on the outside of the ship.”
Any other man would have found this scene terrifying. Brooks was entranced. He saw the body of the torpedo moving well ahead of the wake, through water he described as being “a beautiful green.” The torpedo “was covered with a silvery phosphorescence, you might term it, which was caused by the air escaping from the motors.”
He said, “
It was a beautiful sight.”
H
AD THERE BEEN
more time, had the idea of a torpedo attack against a civilian liner not seemed so incomprehensible, had submarine tactics and evasion stratagems been better understood, there would have been a chance—a tiny one—that Turner could have maneuvered the ship to lessen the damage or even avoid the torpedo altogether. He could have engaged the ship’s reverse turbines, thereby slowing the ship and nullifying the calculations made by the submarine commander as to its range and speed, causing the torpedo to miss. He could also have taken advantage of the
Lusitania
’s proven agility and ordered a full turn to port or starboard, to dodge the oncoming torpedo or cause it to glance off the hull.
In just two months, another Cunard captain, Daniel Dow, back at work, would do exactly that, and win a citation from the company’s board. On July 15, 1915, at dusk, a lookout aboard Dow’s
Mauretania
spotted a periscope about half a mile out. An instant later two torpedoes began racing toward his ship, their tracks clearly visible. He ordered an immediate full turn to starboard,
toward
the submarine. Both torpedoes missed; the submarine submerged and fled.
S
CHWIEGER
’
S LOG ENTRY FOR
2:10
P
.
M
., M
AY
7,
BEGAN
with the German word
Treff
, for impact. He wrote, “
Torpedo hits starboard side close behind the bridge. An unusually great detonation follows with a very strong explosive cloud (cloud reaches far beyond the forward funnel). The explosion of the torpedo must have been accompanied by a second one (boiler or coal or powder?).”
By now his pilot, Lanz, was standing next to him at the periscope. Schwieger stepped aside and let Lanz peer through the eyepiece. Lanz could identify ships, even small ones, by their silhouettes and deck configurations. This one was easy. An instant after looking through the eyepiece, Lanz said, “My God, it’s the
Lusitania
.”
Schwieger’s log indicates that he only now learned the ship’s true identity, but this seems implausible. The ship’s profile—its size, its lines, its four funnels—made it one of the most distinctive vessels afloat.
Schwieger again took the periscope. What he saw now shocked even him.
A
S THE TORPEDO PASSED FROM VIEW BELOW THE EDGE
of the deck, there was an interval when nothing happened and one could indulge the notion that it had missed or malfunctioned. “
I saw it disappear,” one passenger said, “and for a bare second we all had a kind of hope that maybe it wouldn’t explode.”
In the next instant, 350 pounds of explosives detonated against the plates of the hull, at a point under the bridge about 10 feet below the waterline. Immediately the payload turned from solid to gas. This “phase change” released heat at a temperature exceeding 5,000 degrees Centigrade, 9,000 Fahrenheit, at immense pressure. As one early-twentieth-century submarine builder put it, “
The side of the ship is nothing but tissue paper in the hands of these enormous forces.”
A geyser of seawater, planking, rope, and shards of steel soared upward to twice the height of the ship. Lifeboat No. 5 “
was blown to atoms,” one lookout said. The ship continued forward through the geyser, which almost immediately collapsed back onto the decks. Seawater drenched passengers; debris thudded off the shuffleboard courts. The children jumping rope on A Deck stopped jumping.
A hole the size of a small house now existed below the waterline. Its shape was more horizontal than vertical, roughly 40 feet
wide by 15 feet high. The effects of the blast spread well beyond this, however. Thousands of rivets and the steel plates they anchored came loose over an area about fifteen times greater than the hole itself; the glass in nearby portholes fractured. Bulkheads were damaged and watertight doors dislodged. The relatively small doors and chambers of passenger ships did not dispel explosive forces as readily as the open holds of cargo vessels and thus were prone to destruction. The
Lusitania
’s builders had installed these barriers with collisions and groundings in mind; none had imagined that a torpedo might one day be detonated against the hull from underwater.
Just inside the hull, at the point of impact, stood the starboard end of a major watertight bulkhead that spanned the width of the hull, one of a dozen such dividers in the ship. This particular bulkhead also formed a wall between the forward-most boiler room—Boiler Room No. 1—and a large coal storage chamber just beyond, toward the bow, called the “cross-bunker,” the only coal bunker in the ship arrayed across the full width of the hull. The rest were the longitudinal bunkers that ran along the hull walls. At this point in the voyage all the bunkers were nearly empty.
The forward motion of the ship, initially 18 knots, caused “
forced flooding,” which drove seawater into the ship at a rate estimated at 100 tons a second. Water surged into the cross-bunker and into Boiler Room No. 1, a cavern that housed two one-ended boilers and two double boilers, and the beginning of a main steam line. Water also flowed into the longitudinal bunkers along the starboard side, nearest the impact zone. As these bunkers filled with water, the ship began to list to starboard. At the same time, the water filling Boiler Room No. 1 and the forward cross-bunker caused the bow to begin sinking. The stern began to rise and the hull to twist.
C
APTAIN
T
URNER
was standing on A Deck, just outside the entry to his rooms, when he heard the lookout’s cry that a torpedo was
coming. He saw the track and watched it pass below the starboard rail. There was a brief silence, and then a column of water and wreckage erupted from the sea. The shock of the explosion and the sudden list to starboard threw Turner off balance.
With debris and seawater falling behind him, Turner ran up the stairway to the bridge.
H
OW PASSENGERS
experienced the blast depended on where they were situated when it happened. The ship was so long—nearly 800 feet—and so elastic that those standing or seated toward the stern, in the second-class smoking and dining rooms and the Verandah Cafe, or on the stern “counter,” where the deck swept out over the rudder, felt it as a dull thud. Oliver Bernard recalled thinking, “
Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Those closest to the bridge felt the impact in a manner more vivid and tactile. “
Water, bits of coal, splinters of wood, etc., coming down on our heads!” recalled Dwight Harris. “I flattened up against the side of the ship, but got soaked!”
Preston Prichard and Grace French were happily searching for her “double” when they heard the explosion and felt the ship lurch to starboard. “
The ship listed so much that we all scrambled down the deck and for a moment everything was in confusion,” she recalled. “When I came to myself again, I glanced around but could find no trace of Mr. Prichard. He seemed to have disappeared.”
Too frightened to go to her own cabin, Miss French set off to look for a life jacket on deck, apparently unaware that all jackets were stored in passengers’ rooms.
Out came the watches. William McMillan Adams, nineteen years old and always handy with a timepiece, put the moment of impact at 2:05. “
I timed everything,” he said, later. When asked why, he replied, “I just did it; I don’t know why.”
Charles Lauriat checked his stem-winding wristwatch and pegged the impact at 9:08
A
.
M
., Boston time, or 2:08
P
.
M
. Greenwich Mean Time. Others put the time at 2:10; this would later become the agreed-upon benchmark.
Within seconds Lauriat felt the ship roll to the right and tilt toward the bow. “
You could feel the two separate motions very distinctly,” Lauriat wrote. “It seemed as if she were going down at once, but then she stopped suddenly as if the sea had met the water-tight bulkheads and she seemed to right herself and even raise her bow a little. This gave me a feeling of security, and I at first thought she would stay afloat.”
Moments later a second explosion occurred. (The ever-precise William McMillan Adams timed this at thirty seconds after the first.) Its character was different. Where the first had been a single, sharp detonation, this one, Lauriat said, was “very muffled.” A shudder traveled the length of the ship and seemed to rise from deep within the hull, “
more like an explosion of a boiler, I should think,” said Lauriat. He was unable to identify the location with any precision. The sound was not “distinct enough,” he said.