Authors: Greg King
Turner seemed curiously uninterested in the question. He didn’t request an escort and left it up to the Admiralty. “It’s their business, not mine,” he declared.
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Albert Bestic,
Lusitania
’s junior third officer, thought that it was “a pity” that “no protecting escort was sent,” saying, “Even one destroyer encircling the liner as she entered the danger zone would have minimized the danger.”
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Providing an escort for a merchant vessel or passenger liner immediately stripped the ship of its protected status under the Cruiser Rules. Any vessel accompanied by such an armed escort could be freely, and legally, attacked under international law.
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Yet the Admiralty had done it before. The nearest destroyers that could match
Lusitania
’s speed were bottled up a hundred miles away at Milford Haven on the western coast of Wales. They had just returned to port and were now refueling to escort troop transports and freighters carrying valuable war matériel. Rear Admiral Horace Hood had a ramshackle collection of fishing smacks, torpedo boats, and obsolete cruisers in his Queenstown Coast Patrol; these were deemed too old and too slow to provide adequate protection.
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In the end, and even in the face of the German notice and the sinking of three vessels in
Lusitania
’s direct navigational path, the Admiralty did nothing.
Without an escort, it was up to Captain Turner to employ all measures at his disposal to safeguard
Lusitania
; in this respect, he failed miserably. He pored over the latest messages from the Admiralty in London. He’d had two rather ominous warnings the previous evening, sent by the Admiralty to all British ships after the sinking of the
Earl of Lathom
off the Old Head of Kinsale. The first, received just before eight, read: “Submarines active off South Coast of Ireland.” Turner acknowledged receipt. Just thirty minutes later, a second message arrived: “Between South Foreland and Folkestone keep within two miles of shore and pass between the two light vessels. Take Liverpool pilot at bar. Avoid headlands; pass harbors at full speed; steer mid-channel course. Submarines off Fastnet.” Curiously, neither message mentioned the three British ships that had been sunk in the area within the last twenty-four hours.
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Cunard was not allowed to contact
Lusitania
directly, but on the morning of May 7, Alfred Booth, its chairman, asked an Admiralty official in Liverpool to warn Turner of the danger.
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After a brief query from Vice Admiral Sir Charles Coke in Queenstown to ascertain which version of the Merchant Vessel Code
Lusitania
was using, Turner received two messages. The first, just before noon, read: “Submarines active in southern part of Irish Channel, last heard of twenty miles south of Coningbeg Light Vessel.”
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A second message followed at 12:40: “Submarines five miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10
AM
.”
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Cape Clear was now behind him; if the submarine in this last message was indeed heading west, Turner believed that the danger was behind him. But Turner couldn’t be sure of this, nor how many submarines might be lurking off the Irish coast. These warnings, coupled with the previous evening’s messages, should have spurred him to alarmed action. Instead, he stumbled through that morning and early afternoon with a series of incredible, ultimately fatal decisions that ignored nearly every instruction he had received. The Admiralty had advised Turner to steer a mid-channel navigational course; instead, he steamed
Lusitania
less than fifteen miles off the Irish coast. Nor did he have a sense of urgency: even when the fog cleared, he kept
Lusitania
at a steady 18 knots—3 less than she was capable of doing with one boiler room shut down.
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He later excused this lack of speed by saying that he had wanted to arrive outside Liverpool for early the following morning, at a time when darkness would lend him cover from any waiting submarine and the high tide would allow him to continue to port without having to stop and pick up a pilot.
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Yet such diversionary tactics—had he followed other orders—would have proved unnecessary.
One of these other orders that Turner admitted to receiving and ignoring involved the tactic of steering his ship on an evasive course, or zigzagging, when traveling through waters known to be active with submarines.
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Turner later professed confusion over the instructions, complaining that no one had explained the action to him.
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While the maneuver wasn’t yet routinely deployed by merchant vessels, it also wasn’t unknown: six months earlier, the captain of
Olympic
had zigzagged to evade a submarine attack.
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But Turner clearly didn’t understand: he later insisted that he thought he should zigzag only
after
he spotted a submarine—by which time evasive action would be too late.
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Zigzagging would have made it extremely difficult for a slower U-boat to get into position to launch a successful attack; it would also have allowed
Lusitania
to travel at full speed and still arrive in Liverpool when Turner wanted.
Inexplicably, Turner—the weathered old sea captain, who had plied this route at the helm of numerous Cunard vessels—had become lost earlier that morning. Fog obscured Fastnet Rock, a navigational landmark off the southwestern tip of Ireland, and Turner continually misidentified familiar headlands when they came into view. Only at 1:40
P.M.,
after spotting the banded lighthouse atop the Old Head of Kinsale, did he know exactly where he was—just outside the entrance track to Queenstown harbor.
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The Admiralty had advised Turner to avoid headlands; he ignored the warning. A few minutes after spotting the Old Head of Kinsale, Turner actually ordered
Lusitania
swung inland, toward the familiar headland: she was so close to shore that passengers came out on deck to get better looks at the houses and trees.
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Many passengers noticed the sharp turn. Charles Jeffery “observed by the vessel’s wake that she had made a sudden alteration in course.”
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Carl Foss had been standing on the port side of the deck, enjoying the sunshine, when he was sure that he spotted a submarine roughly a mile in the distance. “I called the attention of other passengers on deck to the submarine,” he recalled, “got my glasses from the Smoking Room to look at her, and also handed them to one of the sailors to examine the war craft, after which it dived below.” Within a few minutes, Foss noted,
Lusitania
turned: he was sure that “the Captain on the bridge had also seen the submarine and had altered his course to avoid risk of being torpedoed.”
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No submarine, though, had been reported to the bridge. Turner now made two last, critically fatal decisions. The Admiralty had instructed him to pass harbors at full speed; as
Lusitania
steamed toward the approach to Queenstown harbor, Turner kept her at 18 knots.
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And then, traveling through waters where submarines were reportedly lurking, he decided he wanted to take a four-point navigational bearing—an unnecessary and foolhardy measure that slowed
Lusitania
and kept her on a straight line as she steamed through the war zone.
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There was no Admiralty escort, but another vessel did shadow Turner as he edged
Lusitania
along the Irish coast. At 1:20 that Friday afternoon, Walther Schwieger was suddenly called to the conning tower of U-20 as she rode the blue waters off Ireland. With the earlier fog, he had abandoned hopes of catching and sinking any other vessels; now, something had been spotted some ten miles in the distance. Schwieger peered through binoculars and aimed at the mass of smoke against the blue sky. At first, he thought that the distant image on the horizon must belong to several vessels, for he saw “a forest of masts and stacks.” As the image steamed closer and came into focus, he saw that it was “a great steamer.”
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At 1:25 he ordered U-20 to dive; hatches thudded shut and were sealed, the warning siren rang, and a hiss rumbled through the submarine as water filled her diving tanks. Within a few seconds, the sunshine of the surface had disappeared.
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Schwieger ordered his crew to make for the possible target at his top underwater speed of 9 knots as he followed her progress through the periscope. She flew no flags, and her funnels were painted a dark charcoal color. Schwieger called on his pilot, Rudolf Lanz, a man, he said, who knew “all English ships from their structure, and can also state at once at what speed they usually run.”
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They were still too far away to read any name, but a quick scan through his manuals would have revealed that the distant, four-stacked profile must belong to one of a handful of ships:
Lusitania, Mauretania, Aquitania,
or
Olympic
. All were British liners, and the first two were listed in official British registries as auxiliary cruisers of the Royal Navy. Yet only one,
Lusitania,
was known to be sailing through these waters, keeping to its announced route and timetable. Although Schwieger never admitted it, he must have realized that his target was the Cunard liner.
Walther Schwieger now faced a momentous decision as he watched this approaching prize. Such liners could be converted to troop transports to help the Allied war effort; they regularly carried munitions through the war zone meant to kill German soldiers. Surfacing and firing a warning shot from his deck gun risked his submarine and the lives of his crew. Schwieger knew that British merchant vessels had been ordered to ram any U-boats; according to Churchill’s boasts in Parliament and various newspaper accounts, many of these vessels, including liners, were armed with large guns capable of destroying his submarine.
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In the end, the Admiralty’s slow erosion of the Cruiser Rules left an efficient and loyal officer of the German Imperial Navy like Schwieger with only one option: to strike without warning.
Still, the ship was steaming away from Schwieger, in a line parallel to the Irish coast. Although only two miles now separated the vessels, Schwieger thought that pursuit was futile. The steamer, he estimated, must be going some 22 knots. “I had no hope now, even if we hurried at our best speed, of getting near enough to attack her,” he recalled. But then the liner made another turn, as Turner set her on a straight course to take his four-point bearing. “She was coming directly at us,” Schwieger said. “She could not have steered a more perfect course if she had deliberately tried to give us a dead shot.”
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Seconds ticked by as Schwieger waited until he was positioned to strike the vessel amidships. His war diary records the grim details: at 2:10
P.M.,
when he was some four hundred yards away, he gave the order to fire. U-20 shuddered as a gyroscopic torpedo, loaded with its lethal warhead of over three hundred pounds of explosive, burst out of its forward tube and flew at some 38 knots roughly ten feet below the surface. Now Schwieger could only watch as the trail of foam streaked toward the unsuspecting vessel’s starboard side.
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“The sea,” Oliver Bernard remembered, “was like an opaque sheet of polished indigo, absolutely still, and the horizon undisturbed by sail or smoke of any other vessels as far as the eye could reach.”
Lusitania
was going so slow that he thought she had actually stopped. The idea irritated him; everything, he mused, seemed so futile. It wasn’t just the ship’s lack of progress but life in general. If only he could believe in God or an eternal life, he thought, he would feel better. But as he stood on deck, he couldn’t shake the feeling that “life is not really worth living.”
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“A flicker of sunlight” interrupted Bernard’s ruminations: at first, he thought it was a porpoise.
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For a few seconds, he watched “spellbound” as the “long, white streak of foam” cut through the dark water toward the ship.
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It wasn’t a porpoise: he instinctively knew what he had seen, and he closed his eyes in dread resignation. In a few seconds the torpedo struck. “The impact was terrific,” he recalled, “I could feel the ship reel, as if struck by a huge hammer.” Almost immediately, “a terrific explosion” threw “a great column of coal dust, water, and debris” over the deck. “It reminded me of the picture showing mine explosions in the trenches at the Front.”
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Looking forward, he saw black smoke near the first funnel mingled with steam from the ship’s ventilators and coal “as if from a volcanic eruption.”
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