Authors: Erik Larson
Then came a third message, sent from Schwieger to his base. After detailing the latitude and longitude of his attack on the
Lusitania
, Schwieger noted that he had sunk the ship “
by means of one torpedo.”
This was a surprise. By now the prevailing view in the world’s press was that the
Lusitania
had been sunk by
two
torpedoes and that these accounted for the two major explosions reported by passengers. But now the Room 40 cognoscenti knew without doubt that Schwieger had fired only one torpedo.
And this, they understood, raised sensitive questions: How could a single torpedo sink a ship the size of the
Lusitania
? And
if there was no second torpedo, what exactly, caused the second explosion?
They recognized, also, that Schwieger’s message had to be kept secret at all costs, for it was precisely this kind of special knowledge that could tip Germany to the existence of Room 40.
B
Y THE TIME
the Mersey inquiry began, on June 15, 1915, the British government had undergone one of its periodic upheavals, amid controversy over the shell shortage on the western front and the failure, at great cost in lives and ships, of Churchill’s plan to force the Dardanelles. New men ran the Admiralty. Fisher had resigned, and Churchill had been jettisoned. These changes, however, caused no easing of the campaign against Captain Turner.
After preliminary public testimony from several witnesses, including Turner, who briefly described his experience in the disaster, Lord Mersey convened the first of the secret sessions and again called Turner to the witness box. The Admiralty’s lead attorney, Sir Edward Carson, attorney general, questioned the captain in harsh fashion, as if the proceeding were a murder trial with Turner the prime suspect. Carson clearly hoped to prove that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s directives, in particular its instructions to keep to a midchannel course.
Turner testified that by his own standards he
was
in midchannel. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he passed the Old Head of Kinsale at distances as close as a mile. Indeed, one photograph of the
Lusitania
shows the ship steaming at full speed past the Old Head at the maritime equivalent of a hair’s breadth. At the time of the attack, the ship by Turner’s reckoning had been a dozen miles off, maybe as many as 15. (Years later a diver would pinpoint the wreck’s location at 11¾ miles from Kinsale Head.)
Carson also badgered Turner as to why the
Lusitania
was moving at only 18 knots when it was torpedoed and challenged the wisdom of the captain’s plan to reduce speed in order to arrive at the Mersey Bar off Liverpool at a time when he could sail
into the harbor without stopping. Carson argued that if Turner had zigzagged at top speed he could have evaded the submarine and, owing to the time consumed by the frequent course changes, would still have made the bar on time.
Carson let pass the fact that although Turner was not deliberately zigzagging, his several changes of course that morning to set up his four-point bearing did describe a zigzag pattern, with fatal result: the last starboard turn put him directly in U-20’s path.
Turner’s own lawyer, Butler Aspinall, Britain’s leading expert in maritime law, did his best to sculpt Turner’s story into a coherent account of the
Lusitania
’s last morning and to win for him Lord Mersey’s sympathy. “
I mean to say, we have the very great advantage of knowing so much now which was unknown to him then,” Aspinall said; “we are sitting upon the matter in cool judgment, with an opportunity of looking at the charts, and the circumstances under which we are dealing with it were not the circumstances under which the Master would have an opportunity of dealing with it.”
In all, Lord Mersey heard testimony from thirty-six witnesses, including passengers, crew, and outside experts. At the conclusion of the inquiry, he defied the Admiralty and absolved Turner of any responsibility for the loss of the
Lusitania
. In his report, Mersey wrote that Turner “
exercised his judgment for the best. It was the judgment of a skilled and experienced man, and although others might have acted differently and perhaps more successfully he ought not, in my opinion, to be blamed.” Mersey found Cunard’s closure of the ship’s fourth boiler room to be irrelevant. The resulting reduction in speed, he wrote, “
still left the
Lusitania
a considerably faster ship than any other steamer plying across the Atlantic.” Mersey laid blame entirely on the U-boat commander.
Turner doubtless was relieved, but, according to his son Norman he also felt he had been unjustly treated. “
He was very bitter about the way in which, at the enquiry … it was sought to fix the blame on him for the sinking, and particularly to try to condemn him for being on the course he was.” Lord Mersey seemed to share this sentiment. Soon afterward, he resigned his post as wreck commissioner,
calling the inquiry “
a damned dirty business.” Cunard retained Turner on its roster of captains.
At no time during the secret portions of the proceeding did the Admiralty ever reveal what it knew about the travels of U-20. Nor did it disclose the measures taken to protect the HMS
Orion
and other military vessels. Moreover, the Admiralty made no effort to correct Lord Mersey’s finding that the
Lusitania
had been struck by two torpedoes—this despite the fact that Room 40 knew full well that Schwieger had fired only one.
Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the
Lusitania
wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed,
these
are the great lingering questions of the
Lusitania
affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS
Orion
; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the
Lusitania
’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why
was
the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?
There is silence on the subject in the records of Room 40 held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom and Churchill College, Cambridge. Nowhere is there even a hint of dismay at missing so clear an opportunity to use the fruits of Room 40’s intelligence to save a thousand lives.
The question perplexed at least one prominent naval historian, the late Patrick Beesly, who, during World War II, was himself an officer in British naval intelligence. Britain’s secrecy laws prevented him from writing about the subject until the 1970s and 1980s, when he published several books, including one about Room 40, said to be a quasi-official account. There he addressed
the controversy only obliquely, stating that if no deliberate plan existed to put the
Lusitania
in danger, “
one is left only with an unforgivable cock-up as an explanation.”
However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. “
As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy,” he said, “I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship.” But, he said, “on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the
Lusitania
in order to involve the United States in the war.” So much was done for the
Orion
and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the
Lusitania
. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, “If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances?”
The absence of an escort also surprised Cunard’s lawyers. In a lengthy confidential memorandum on the Mersey inquiry, written to help a New York attorney defend the company against dozens of American liability claims, Cunard’s London firm wrote, “
With regard to the question of convoy, Sir Alfred Booth hoped and expected that the Admiralty would send destroyers to meet & convoy the vessel. There were destroyers at Queenstown and no explanation has been given as to why there was no convoy except Mr. Winston Churchill’s statement that it was impossible for the Admiralty to convoy Merchant ships.” The memo left unsaid the fact that the Admiralty earlier in the year had in fact made provision to escort merchant ships.
It was a question that also troubled passengers and crew and the citizens of Queenstown. Third Officer Albert Bestic wrote, later, that in light of the German warning in New York and the Admiralty’s awareness of new submarine activity, some sort of protective force should have been dispatched. “
Even one destroyer encircling the liner as she entered the danger zone would have minimized
the danger, if indeed have not rendered the
Lusitania
immune from attack with a resulting loss of lives.” One of Cunard’s most prominent captains, James Bisset, who had served under Turner and was captain of the HMS
Caronia
when it met the
Lusitania
off New York shortly after departure, wrote in a memoir, “
The neglect to provide naval escort for her in the narrow waters as she approached her destination was all the more remarkable as no less than twenty-three British merchant vessels had been torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats near the coasts of Britain and Ireland in the preceding seven days.”
As to whether an escort really could have prevented the disaster, Turner himself was ambivalent. “It might,” he said, during his testimony at the Kinsale coroner’s inquest, “
but it is one of those things one never knows. The submarine would have probably torpedoed both of us.”
A
NOTHER MYSTERY
centered on the second explosion within the
Lusitania
. Its cause would be debated for a century to come, with dark talk of exploding munitions and a secret cargo of explosive materials. There may indeed have been a hidden cache of explosives aboard, but if so, it did not cause the second explosion or contribute to the speed at which the ship sank. The myriad accounts left by survivors fail to describe the kind of vivid cataclysm such an explosion would produce. The rifle ammunition was not likely to have been the culprit either.
Testing done several years earlier had determined that such ammunition did not explode en masse when exposed to fire, and this prompted the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor to approve the shipping of such cargoes aboard passenger vessels.
A more plausible theory held that when the torpedo exploded, the concussion shook the ship with such violence that the nearly empty coal bunkers became clouded with explosive coal dust, which then ignited. There is evidence that such a cloud did arise. One fireman, who had been standing in the center of a stokehold, reported hearing the crash of the torpedo and suddenly finding
himself engulfed in dust. But this cloud apparently did not ignite: the fireman survived. Here too, survivors’ accounts don’t depict the kind of fiery convulsion such an ignition would have produced.
Subsequent investigation by forensic engineers concluded that the environment in which the ship’s coal was stored was too damp, in part from condensation on the hull, to foster the ideal conditions necessary for detonation.
What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line, carrying steam under extreme pressure.
This was Turner’s theory from the beginning. The fracture could have been caused by the direct force of the initial explosion, or by cold seawater entering Boiler Room No. 1 and coming into contact with the superheated pipe or its surrounding fixtures, causing a potentially explosive condition known as thermal shock. The fact is, immediately after the torpedo exploded, steam pressure within the ship plummeted. An engineer in the starboard high-pressure turbine room reported that pressure in the main line dropped “
to 50 pounds in a few seconds,” roughly a quarter of what it should have been.
I
N THE END
, Schwieger’s attack on the
Lusitania
succeeded because of a chance confluence of forces. Even the tiniest alteration in a single vector could have saved the ship.
Had Captain Turner not had to wait the extra two hours for the transfer of passengers from the
Cameronia
, he likely would have passed Schwieger in the fog, when U-20 was submerged and on its way home. For that matter, even the brief delay caused by the last-minute disembarkation of Turner’s niece could have placed the ship in harm’s way. More importantly, had Turner not been compelled to shut down the fourth boiler room to save money, he could have sped across the Atlantic at 25 knots, covering an additional 110 miles a day, and been safely to Liverpool before Schwieger even entered the Celtic Sea.
Fog was an important factor too. Had it persisted just a
half hour longer, neither vessel would have seen the other, and Schwieger would have continued on his way.
Then there was the almost miraculous fact that Schwieger’s attack even succeeded. Had Captain Turner not made that final turn to starboard, Schwieger would have had no hope of catching up. What’s more, the torpedo actually worked. Defying his own experience and the 60 percent failure rate calculated by the German navy, it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Not only that, it struck precisely the right place in the
Lusitania
’s hull to guarantee disaster, by allowing seawater to fill the starboard longitudinal bunkers and thereby produce a fatal list. No one familiar with ship construction and torpedo dynamics would have guessed that a single torpedo could sink a ship as big as the
Lusitania
, let alone do so in just eighteen minutes. Schwieger’s earlier attack on the
Candidate
required a torpedo and multiple shells from his deck gun; his attack later that same day on the
Centurion
required
two
torpedoes. And almost exactly a year later, on May 8, 1916, he would need three torpedoes to sink the White Star liner
Cymric
, which even then stayed afloat for another twenty-eight hours. All three ships were a fraction of the
Lusitania
’s size.