Authors: Greg King
No one heard Morton’s warning: a critical thirty seconds passed before Thomas Quinn, high up in the crow’s nest, grabbed his voice tube and reported to the bridge.
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“There’s a torpedo coming, Sir!” Captain Turner heard Second Officer Percy Hefford shout; almost immediately,
Lusitania
shuddered from the explosion.
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As “smoke and steam” rose over the ship, Turner felt a second explosion; this, he thought, “may possibly have been internal.”
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Watching through his periscope, Schwieger saw his torpedo hit the “starboard side, right behind the bridge.”
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With massive force, the projectile pierced the hull, buckling steel plates and loosening rivets as it exploded, leaving an ugly, yawning hole of perhaps ten feet by twenty feet and shooting a geyser of water and debris into the sky. As
Lusitania
moved forward, the debris rained back down with such force that it tore Lifeboat No. 5, hanging over the starboard side, from its davits and sent it crashing into the sea.
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Precisely where the torpedo hit has always been a subject of some controversy. From Schwieger’s account, it seems to have struck
Lusitania
somewhere below the bridge, at a critical point where bulkheads separated Boiler Room No. 1 from a transverse forward cross bunker and a longitudinal bunker used for reserve coal along the ship’s starboard side. The sea rapidly flooded through the hull; bunkers meant to shield the ship’s machinery from possible damage now concentrated the flooding on the starboard side, causing an almost immediate list of some 15 degrees, a situation exacerbated by
Lusitania
’s great height. The sea streamed through open watertight doors, flooding into the forward bunker and cargo holds and pulling
Lusitania
down by the bow; it swept aft, almost immediately spilling into the forward boiler room. The ship’s continued progress through the sea forced even more water into the breach and added to the rapid flooding, as did numerous portholes that had been left open.
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Schwieger clearly saw the two explosions, “rather a small detonation, and instantly afterward a much heavier one.”
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He described this as “unusually heavy,” with a cloud of debris reaching back “far beyond the first funnel.” Steam, coal dust, and more debris shot through the ship’s ventilators and over the decks; Schwieger thought that coal or a boiler might have exploded. The ship, he recorded, “heels over to starboard very quickly.” The list was so bad that Schwieger thought the vessel might capsize at any moment.
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The second explosion only added to an already fatal situation. Whatever the cause, it likely opened even more of the hull to the sea. In eighteen minutes
Lusitania
would be gone, as water flooded through the forward part of the ship and began to pull her down by the bow. It also left
Lusitania
’s steam lines, which controlled her rudder and regulated pressure from the boiler rooms to the turbines, fatally compromised.
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13
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This Captain Turner learned soon enough. “Come at once, big list off south head, Old Kinsale,” read the emergency signal tapped out in
Lusitania
’s Marconi Room at 2:11
P.M.
Stations all along the Irish coast immediately picked up the SOS, as the plea was repeated again and again.
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Queenstown was some twenty miles away, past the Old Head of Kinsale and around a headland; it was unlikely that the ship could survive such a journey. The Irish coast, though, was close; hoping to beach the ship, Turner ordered Quartermaster Hugh Johnston to swing
Lusitania
toward land. Johnston put the wheel hard over, and
Lusitania
began to turn, but within seconds the hydraulic steering gear suddenly seized up.
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Turner then ordered the engines reversed, but this proved impossible: with the explosions,
Lusitania
’s steam pressure fell from 190 to 50 pounds per square inch.
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Moving inexorably forward, unable to stop or turn,
Lusitania
now began to trace a slow, ever-widening arc through the serene water as passengers swarmed her decks.
Lusitania
had no public address system, and the shouted instructions from a few officers could barely be heard above the roar of escaping steam and panicked cries. Oliver Bernard saw a “frantic rush” of stricken passengers. “Where is my husband?” someone shouted, “Where is my child?”
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Almost immediately, “the noise of hundreds of trampling and rushing feet” drowned out the cries.
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Coming out on deck, Thomas Slidell noticed “how few Saloon passengers” he saw there. “Somehow, it seemed that when it came to the rough and tumble flight, they were too slow to realize the danger.”
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George Kessler found the Boat Deck “crowded with passengers, milling about and wondering what was the matter” in the first minute after the attack.
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After initial confusion, the passengers, according to Captain Turner, seemed “almost calm.”
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People, Michael Byrne thought, “seemed transfixed where they stood.”
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“There was no great excitement, in the real sense of the word,” Oliver Bernard recalled. “Most of the women tried hard to keep cool.”
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James Brooks spotted “a few isolated cases” of “hysteria on the part of the women,” but otherwise thought that there was little sense of panic.
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Cellist Handel Hawkins also noticed that “some of the women and children were crying and screaming. But there was no panic. I do not think that the people realized that the ship was going down.”
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Most people were too shocked to panic. For all the talk of submarines, no one had really imagined that
Lusitania
would be attacked, at least not without any warning. A “strange silence,” Albert Bestic said, seemed to hover over the deck. “Small, insignificant sounds, such as the whimper of a child, the cry of a seagull, or the bang of a door assumed alarming proportions.”
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Charles Lauriat saw the “infinite confusion,” as “there seemed no one to take command of any one boat.”
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“Surely she cannot sink,” passengers assured each other as Leslie Morton ran past them on the deck. He said nothing, but feeling the slant of the deck beneath his feet, he thought
Lusitania
“was doomed.”
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Frederick Orr-Lewis, meanwhile, had marshaled Lady Allan and her daughters, Frances Stephens, and Dorothy Braithwaite out onto the port side of the deck.
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Slingsby quickly found his master, bringing with him Lady Allan’s two maids, Annie Walker and Emily Davis. Marguerite Allan seemed acutely aware of the peril: Slingsby saw her standing at the railing, crying and tightly hugging her daughters. “Don’t cry Mama!” one of them shouted. “It’s all right now, George has found us and he will know what to do!” Seeing that Lady Allan had no lifebelt, Slingsby placed his own around her shoulders and ran off to find more.
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Robert Holt soon joined them; Anna Allan, he saw, “gave a woman her lifebelt, and I tied it upon her.” Then, realizing that Anna needed one, Holt ran off to find another lifebelt.
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Things along the port side deck looked bleak: gazing down the ship, Orr-Lewis saw no lifeboats being launched and decided to run across to starboard; as he set off, the ship “gave such a terrible lurch that I came back.”
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Oliver Bernard found Leslie Mason “panic stricken” standing outside the Veranda Café and assured her, “It’s all right now, we go ashore directly so don’t worry.” But Leslie could not find her husband, Stewart. “Where’s my husband?” she cried out over and over again, until Bernard thought that she was hysterical. He grabbed her by the shoulders and roughly shook her. “Pull yourself together and listen to what I’m saying now!” he demanded. “Stay right here, don’t move from this spot, and your husband will find you here, surely, as they will be lowering the boats from this side. Do you hear?” When she nodded, he continued: “I’ll find some lifebelts in case we need them.” Bernard ran below to his cabin, falling as he descended the listing staircase; by the time he returned with lifebelts, Leslie had disappeared.
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Lifebelts, in fact, became a prized commodity. Unable or unwilling to retrieve them from their own cabins, many passengers simply pilfered lifebelts from other staterooms; those who did reach their cabins often found the doors open and their own lifebelts gone. With the ship listing so perilously, Carl Foss “did not dare” go below to his cabin for a lifebelt. Yet he saw “stewards and crew, busy putting on lifebelts.” According to Foss, they “seemed to be more interested in caring for themselves,” and made “no effort to assist the passengers who were frantically looking for lifebelts.”
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James Brooks spotted “about fifteen” members of the crew standing idly by, arms folded, and all wearing lifebelts. Brooks didn’t have a lifebelt and wanted one: the seaman he spoke with said he didn’t know if there were any more to be had, nor did he offer his. “There had been no effort by the crew,” Brooks said, “to distribute life preservers,” and he could find none on deck.
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Witnessing such scenes, Annie Adams later insisted that the behavior of the seamen and stokers “was too terrible for words. I myself saw many instances of their bestiality.”
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Oliver Bernard came up on deck wearing a lifebelt only to be accosted by a hysterical woman. “Where did you get that, where did you get that?” she screamed at him. Rather than explain, he simply took off his own lifebelt and gave it to her.
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Even those passengers who managed to find lifebelts, Charles Lauriat saw, had often put them on incorrectly. Never having been shown how to use them, and with the crew offering no help, they had thrust heads through armholes, put them on upside down, or tried to wear them around their waists rather than their shoulders. Lauriat calmly tried to straighten out as many as he could.
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Robert Timmis reached the deck with his friend Ralph Moodie; as he looked out over the railing, he saw that the ship was “still moving forward.” A woman from Second Class spotted his lifebelt and pleaded with him for it; “I was a strong swimmer in those days,” Timmis recalled, “so I gave her mine.” Another woman, without a lifebelt, held a baby in her arms; Moodie took his off and adjusted it around them.
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Thomas Home found himself comforting hysterical mothers separated from their children and wives separated from their husbands. One woman, without a lifebelt, could not find her baby; “I told her it would be all right, and gave her my belt,” telling her, “You are all right, go and look for your baby.”
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Lauriat had struggled to reach his stateroom. Making his way down the corridor, he “realized how acute was the list of the ship,” he recalled later. Lauriat had an inside stateroom; with the electricity out, he found the cabin in complete darkness. He groped through the inky space, finding a box of matches and managing to put on a lifebelt; he also retrieved some papers and photographs of his baby—“they were my mascot,” he later wrote.
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As he went, he saw numerous portholes open, threatening to spill water into the ship. By the time he returned to the Boat Deck, walking with one foot against the floor and the other against the wall owing to the list, Elbert and Alice Hubbard had disappeared.
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Several passengers saw them standing calmly on deck, holding hands, before walking, almost casually, toward the Grand Staircase. After that, no one ever saw them again. Many thought that they had gone into a nearby cabin to die together, rather than be separated in the water when the ship sank.
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As he roamed the decks, Lauriat spotted an elderly woman, her daughter, and three children—foreign passengers from Third Class—sitting calmly on a collapsible boat, awaiting instructions. They begged for his help in a language Lauriat took for Italian; Lauriat put two lifebelts on the women, and another on a child. It was, Lauriat said, “one of the most pathetic things I remember.”
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