Authors: Greg King
Just behind Bernard, Harold Boulton sat in the Veranda Café, enjoying coffee and a cigarette as he chatted with a friend. In 1907, the Veranda Café had been an innovation, designed to resemble “a particularly charming corner in your favorite country club, or an enclosed veranda in your Oyster Bay house.”
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Large windows to port and starboard gave views of the ocean, while the entire aft wall could be opened to the deck in warm weather. Wicker chairs and tables, potted palms, hanging plants, walls of white trellis covered in ivy, and a large skylight gave the room a pleasant, airy atmosphere.
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A skylight meant to wash the room with light now seemed a dangerously fragile barrier as “a huge quantity of dirty water and wreckage” came crashing down from the explosion. Boulton was thunderstruck: just a few seconds before, his companion had declared, “The Germans would not dare to torpedo us!” He had scarcely finished speaking when Boulton heard a “terrific explosion, followed almost simultaneously by another. The noise was deafening. The whole ship seemed to be lifted up.” Another sound soon replaced that caused by the falling wreckage: Boulton heard “the screams of the Second Class passengers below.”
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Angela and Michael Papadopoulos had also been enjoying coffee in the Veranda Café when the impact came. “Immediately” after the first explosion, Angela heard a second, “and debris began to rain down all around us.” Her husband, already nervous, jumped up in panic as
Lusitania
took a dramatic lurch to the starboard side, but Angela had the presence of mind to rush to their cabin for lifebelts. “I cannot say how I dared to retrieve them,” she wrote.
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“Like the boom of a cannon,” was how passenger Isaac Lehmann remembered the explosion. “They have got us at last!” he shouted, and rushed from the Smoking Room out onto the deck. Peering over the water, he was sure that he saw the wake of another torpedo, heading for the ship.
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In a few seconds,
Lusitania
again shuddered and rocked beneath his feet. He thought that the two explosions, separated by perhaps “less than a minute,” sounded quite different, and differed in intensity; the second, he said, shook the liner “like a leaf.”
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Charles Jeffery likened the impact to how “a train might shake if the locomotive was suddenly stopped.” He thought
Lusitania
had probably struck a mine or run aground: “It never occurred to me that something so horrible would be done as to torpedo this defenseless ship,” he later mused.
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The last, long afternoon aboard
Lusitania
was playing itself out in genteel fashion for passengers gathered in her First Class Lounge when the explosions interrupted coffee and convivial conversation. It was, said Laura Ryerson, “a jarring noise, not loud”; the impact rattled the delicate china cups and saucers atop tables.
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Frederick Orr-Lewis, drinking coffee with Lady Allan and her daughters, Frances Stephens, and Dorothy Braithwaite, remembered that the sound came “like a bolt from the blue.”
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Robert Holt, sitting nearby reading a novel, heard “a dull crash. Immediately the
Lusitania
leaned over on its right side.” As people fled the Lounge for the decks, he said, there was “no panic, but a lot of confusion.”
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Robinson Pirie, “stretched out on a couch in the Lounge,” felt the ship “tremble, and the listing was so quick that I had to get out by grasping the arms of chairs and tables. The room was full, most of the inmates thrown down or stumbling to the low side.”
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Mary and Ogden Hammond, celebrating their eighth wedding anniversary, felt
Lusitania
tremble “violently” with two explosions, separated by perhaps thirty seconds.
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Rushing out onto the deck, they heard an officer shouting, “Go back, no danger!”
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The Hammonds were sure he was wrong: the list was so bad that it was difficult to stand, and Ogden, at least, feared the worst. “I started to return to my stateroom on D Deck to get lifebelts,” he recalled, “but my wife refused to let me leave her.”
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William Adams, a nineteen-year-old First Class passenger hoping to join the fighting in Europe, said, “The ship shook very violently. For all I knew, she might have gone ashore, it was so violent.” He heard debris crashing down above the Lounge, and ran out of the room. Like Lehmann, he, too, thought he saw the wake of another torpedo. In a few seconds, there was another “loud explosion” and a geyser of water raining down on the deck.
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Jessie Taft Smith had been composing a letter in
Lusitania
’s Reading and Writing Room when the ship “seemed to lift” and shudder beneath her. She made her way into the corridor toward her cabin to fetch her lifebelt: “I was told not to hurry as there was no danger,” she remembered.
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Having practiced donning her lifebelt, she made quick work of it and set off for the deck—forgetting her husband’s mechanical plans that had brought her to this voyage; passing down the corridors, she was sure that “many people were caught in their staterooms. Evidently they shared my feelings that if struck, the ship would stay up for a long time.” The list made it difficult to walk; she fell against one man, who seemed more interested in berating her than in assisting her. With a quick apology, she got up and hurried to the deck.
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“We had all imagined that the attempt would be made in the Irish Sea during our last night,” Margaret Mackworth recalled. As she walked out of the Dining Saloon with her father, David Thomas glibly commented, “I think we might stay up on deck tonight, to see if we get our thrill.” Neither felt much like climbing four flights of the Grand Staircase and headed for one of the elevators; just as they approached, Margaret heard “a dull, thud-like, not very loud, but unmistakable explosion.” Almost instinctively, they stepped away from the elevator; “somehow,” she remembered, “the stairs seemed safer.”
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Curious, David Thomas ran to look out of a porthole, but his daughter decided not to linger. “I had days before made up my mind,” she recalled, “that if anything happened one’s instinct would be to make straight for the boat deck.” Instead, she went to her cabin to collect lifebelts. “As I ran up the stairs, the boat was already heeling over.”
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As she went, she thought to herself, “I wonder I’m not more frightened?” The journey to her B Deck cabin, clutching the rail to avoid falling and the increasing chaos she saw, changed her mind: “I’m beginning to get frightened,” she mused, “but I mustn’t let myself.” In the corridor, she collided with a stewardess, and “wasted a minute or so making polite apologies” before the ridiculousness of the scene and a sense of panic set in. She managed to retrieve lifebelts but, by the time she came out on deck, Margaret’s father had disappeared.
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Passengers had taken to the decks to enjoy the sunshine and views of the Irish coast. “Look, there’s a torpedo!” Thomas Home heard someone shout. “I saw an amber colored streak heading straight toward us,” he recalled, “and only turned to run when the water thrown by the force of the explosion was high overhead.” He was too late: “water mixed with ashes and cinders and wreckage caught me. I was struck by it above the heel of my left foot, cutting through my boot and injuring the back tendons.” In “considerable pain,” he limped toward the port side of the ship.
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Michael Byrne had been smoking one of his three hundred cigars as he strolled the deck; stopping just before the starboard wing bridge, he looked out over the water and spotted “what I thought was a porpoise, but not seeing the usual jump of the fish, I knew it was a submarine. It disappeared and in about two minutes I saw the torpedo coming towards our ship, leaving a streak of white foam in its wake.” The noise of the impact, he said, was “like a million ton hammer hitting a steel boiler, a hundred feet high and a hundred yards in length.” The subsequent explosion seemed to lift “the bows of the ship out of the water. Everything amidships seemed to part and give way up to the superstructure of the boat deck where I was standing.”
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James Brooks of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was on his way to Europe as a representative of the Weed Chain Company.
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To this point, he thought, the trip had been “as pleasant as one could hope.”
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Shortly after he sailed, a friend asked his wife, Ruth, in New York, “Is Jay crazy? Didn’t he see the notice in the papers this morning?” She’d admitted they had not seen the German warning; immediately, her thoughts turned uneasily to their four young sons.
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Now on deck, the forty-one-year-old Brooks saw two friends, who called over and asked if he wanted to join them in a game of shuffleboard. “I offered to watch rather than break the twosome,” he recalled. As he stood, he happened to look out and spotted a torpedo. He ran to the railing, “expecting to see the infernal machine strike near the front stack.” He watched as it “cut through the bow of the starboard side, just like you push your finger through tissue paper. In a second, hell broke loose.”
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A “dull explosion” shuddered through the liner; a plume of debris, water, and coal mushroomed over the deck just behind the bridge; afraid of injury, Brooks rushed toward shelter but the water knocked him to the deck. As he got to his feet and ran along the deck, “almost immediately” there was a second, “rumbling” explosion, “entirely different from the first,” and clouds of steam and dust erupted from the vents.
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James Houghton had been in his cabin when the explosions came. Rushing out onto the tilting deck, he heard an officer shout that they had been torpedoed.
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He found Marie Depage standing with his Harvard friend Richard Freeman by the railing. Both, Houghton recalled, were “covered with spray and soot.” Freeman “was immensely pleased” at having seen the torpedo, “and was laughing and joking about it and recounting the experience to anybody who asked about it.”
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Seeing that Marie Depage had no lifebelt, Houghton took off his and placed it around her shoulders.
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After winning the ship’s pool, George Kessler was enjoying a cigar as he waited for Edgar Gorer to finish his walk and join him for a late luncheon. To Kessler’s “astonishment,” he saw “the wash of a torpedo, indicated by a snake-like churn of the surface of the water,” followed by a “thud” that shook the vessel. Within seconds, confused passengers swarmed over the deck in shock. Most, he thought, “were wondering what was the matter, few really believing what it proved to be.”
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Further along the deck, Charles Lauriat was chatting with Elbert and Alice Hubbard. They spoke about the trip and about Hubbard’s “unlikely” hopes of landing an interview with the Kaiser in
Who Lifted the Lid off Hell?
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As soon as he said this, there was “a heavy, rather muffled sound” and the ship “trembled” beneath them. Lauriat saw “a shower of coal and steam and some debris hurled into the air between the second and third funnels.” A second explosion quickly followed: “the sound was quite different,” Lauriat recalled. As
Lusitania
listed toward starboard, Lauriat suggested that the Hubbards go to their staterooms to fetch lifebelts. But Hubbard “stayed by the rail, affectionately holding his arm around his wife’s waist, and both seemed unable to act.”
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Lauriat peered over the side of the ship. “I don’t like the looks of this,” he told the couple. “She is listing too much. You stay right here until I get back in about five minutes. I am going down to my stateroom after some life preservers.”
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Walking the deck with Edwin Friend, Theodate Pope noted that
Lusitania
was going so slow that she thought the engines had stopped. Looking out across the water, “a marvelous blue and very dazzling in the sunlight,” she said, “How could the officers ever see a periscope there?” Suddenly, the impact came; she likened the sound to “an arrow, entering the canvas and straw of a target, magnified a thousand times,” rapidly followed by another “dull” explosion from somewhere below. “By Jove, they’ve got us!” Friend cried out, slamming his fist against his hand. They ran into a small corridor just outside the Smoking Room to escape the water and debris raining down on the deck; as they entered,
Lusitania
lurched to starboard, hurling them against the wall. Stepping back out into the sunlit afternoon, Theodate saw that “the deck suddenly looked very strange, crowded with people,” including two women who “were crying in a pitifully weak way.” As they made their way through “the crush of people coming and going,” Theodate saw Marie Depage. Her eyes, she recalled, “were wide and startled, but brave.” When Theodate finally found her maid, she could only say, “Oh, Robinson!”
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