Authors: Greg King
And the worst was playing out. From his periscope aboard U-20, Schwieger could see that he’d inflicted devastatingly fatal damage. He called Rudolf Lanz, his pilot, over to look through the periscope. Until this moment, supposedly, no one aboard the U-20 conclusively knew the identity of the ship they had torpedoed. Lanz peered into the tube, gazed on the scene, and pulled back. “My God,” he allegedly shouted, “it’s the
Lusitania
!”
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For a few minutes, Schwieger seemed transfixed. “Great confusion ensues on board,” the entry in his war diary read. “The boats are made clear, and some of them are lowered to the water. In doing so, great confusion must have reigned; some boats, full to capacity, are lowered, rushed from above, touch the water with either stem or stern first, and founder immediately.”
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What went through Schwieger’s mind as he watched the tragic scene he had caused? He supposedly once commented that seeing the people struggling in the water “had no more effect on him than if they were a lot of sheep.”
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More sympathetically, he is said to have told a fellow U-boat commander, “It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen.” Schwieger was stunned at how rapidly the ship was sinking. He spoke of the “terrible panic” as “desperate people ran helplessly up and down the decks.” It “was too horrible to watch.” There was nothing he could do: if he surfaced and made for the survivors, he could only pick up a few, and he still had no idea if the vessel was armed and would fire on him. He was also sure that at any moment rescue ships would appear—ships that would not hesitate to attack him.
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“It would have been impossible for me, anyhow,” his log tersely noted, “to fire a second torpedo into this crowd of people struggling to save their lives.”
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Some five minutes after the torpedo struck,
Lusitania
suddenly righted herself: water flooding through her hull had finally reached compartments along the port side, and she began to settle back from her starboard list.
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People thought that the worst was over: word passed along the crowded decks that the ship was safe. Staff Captain Anderson, Ogden Hammond recalled, “advised us not to be alarmed.”
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A murmur of relief swept through the crowd: disaster had been avoided.
“Don’t lower the boats!” Harold Boulton heard Captain Turner shout. “Don’t lower the boats! The ship cannot sink, she’s all right, she cannot sink! Will the gentlemen kindly assist me in getting the women out of the boats and off the upper deck?”
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Boulton had just helped Frederic Lassetter’s mother, Elisabeth, into a boat; now, he steadied her as she climbed back out.
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“What do you wish us to do?” a woman called up to Turner.
“Stay where you are, Madame,” Turner answered, “she’s all right.”
“Where do you get your information?” she asked.
“From the engine room, Madame,” Turner shot back in “a rather severe and commanding voice.”
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A seaman assured Annie Adams, “We’re resting on the bottom. We cannot sink.”
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Ogden Hammond heard an officer yell, “There is no danger! Go back! Keep off the deck!”
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Margaret Mackworth, still waiting with Dorothy Conner for Howard Fisher to return with lifebelts, greeted the news with a relieved sigh. “Well, you’ve had your thrill all right!” she joked to Dorothy. “I never want another,” Dorothy answered.
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A woman on deck, Belle Naish saw, had on “a heavy fur coat that reached to the floor. She had put her life preserver over this.” “Madame, you must get out of that coat,” Theodore warned her. “The fur will sink you.” She did so, and he helped her with the lifebelt; another woman, “glassy-eyed, mouth hanging open, and emitting queer sounds,” dragged her lifebelt behind her along the deck. “The ship had tipped so far we couldn’t keep our footing without taking hold of something,” Belle recalled. They watched in horror as a lifeboat spilled passengers into the sea. “I turned faint,” Belle said, “and asked Mr. Naish to pinch me, to help me back to consciousness.” They made no attempt to board a lifeboat after what they had seen; Theodore promised Belle that he would not force her into one unless there was also room for him. Soon, a seaman came by, assuring them, “She’s steady, she’ll float for an hour.” A few nearby passengers, relieved, sat down on some deck chairs and started to whistle and cheer. Looking down the sloping deck at the ever-rising water, though, Belle knew that
Lusitania
would sink.
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Soon enough,
Lusitania
began to list again starboard, now at an even more acute angle, and Annie and Henry Adams had to hold on to the railing to avoid plunging down the length of the deck.
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The situation grew worse with each passing minute. By now, Oliver Bernard saw, the deck “was crowded with people frantic to get away.” A stoker “was reeling about as if drunk, his face a black and scarlet smear, the crown of his head torn open like a spongy, bloody pudding.”
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A sailor turned his ax on a nervous passenger, hacking away at the unfortunate man’s back when he tried to enter a lifeboat.
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And now, from somewhere within the ship, smoke began billowing along corridors as a fire raged below.
* * *
Ten minutes after the torpedo’s impact, the sea was already lapping around
Lusitania
’s bow and whatever calm had once prevailed on the decks had given way to panic as the situation began to fall apart. Phoebe Amory said, “The screams of the women and children were terrible to hear” as she jumped across the gap between railing and lifeboat. She saw wives “torn from their husbands,” and children “separated from their parents,” being “handed from man to man and on into the boats.” Women, Phoebe insisted, were “fainting and falling to the deck, only to be carried overboard by their own weight.” Hurled against the liner’s side, her lifeboat overturned its occupants into the water.
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“By this time,” Michael Byrne recalled, “the people were nearly stark mad, and screaming at the top of their lungs.”
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Passengers continued to rove over the deck in confusion, reminding Margaret Mackworth of “a swarm of bees, who do not know where the queen has gone.”
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Her father, unable to find her, described the last few minutes aboard
Lusitania
as ones of “panic and tumult. Excited men and terrified women ran shouting about the decks. Lost children cried shrilly. Officers and seamen rushed among the panic-stricken passengers, shouting orders and helping the women and children into lifeboats. Women clung desperately to their husbands or knelt on the deck and prayed.”
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“The atmosphere was electric,” Albert Bestic said. “Prayers and increasing cries of terror now took the place of that fearsome stillness.”
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As he tried to lower the lifeboats, Leslie Morton heard cries, turmoil, shouts, and sobs—“a horrible and bizarre orchestra of death.”
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Ogden and Mary Hammond, having failed to find any lifebelts, wandered aft and entered Lifeboat No. 20 on the port side; it wasn’t even half full. Just as it was being lowered, one of the sailors “lost his head” and let the falls slip from his hands.
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The bow plunged forward; Hammond grabbed for the rope and tried to stop the downward momentum, but it tore his hands “to shreds.” The boat plummeted sideways, spilling the passengers some sixty feet into the water below.
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Trixie Witherbee made it into a lifeboat with her young son, Alfred Jr., but it, too, overturned while being lowered, separating mother and son in the sea.
Armed with his revolver, Isaac Lehmann came back up on deck. He saw James McCubbin,
Lusitania
’s purser, who assured him “there was not a chance” that the liner would sink. Although Lehmann now had one of the prized lifebelts, McCubbin ridiculed him for having it on, and insisted that he should remain calm. Lehmann saw fifty or more worried passengers sitting in Lifeboat No. 18 on the port side near the First Class Smoking Room. Several seamen stood idly by, making no effort to lower the boat. Lehmann glanced down the deck; even from here, he could see water just beginning to spill over
Lusitania
’s bow. Convinced that the end was near, he shouted, “Who has got charge of this boat?” A seaman armed with an ax pushed forward, saying that the captain had ordered that no more boats should be lowered. Lehmann waved his gun in the air, shouting, “To hell with the Captain! Don’t you see the boat is sinking? And the first man that disobeys my orders to launch the boat I shoot to kill!” No one challenged him, and the boat was loaded with some sixty people. Just at that moment,
Lusitania
“gave an awful lurch, as if foundering,” and the lifeboat swung inward when the lines were slack.
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Robinson Pirie saw the grotesque scene; according to Lehmann, between thirty and forty people, standing on the deck, were crushed against the Smoking Room wall, injured “so badly that they could not move.”
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It was now difficult to stand; George Kessler saw groups of people stumble and fall against the railings.
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Oliver Bernard spotted Alfred Vanderbilt idly standing near the entrance to the First Class Lounge, “as if waiting for the next race at Ascot.”
Vanderbilt grinned, “as if amused by the excitement.”
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Bernard described him as “absolutely unperturbed. He stood there, the personification of sportsmanlike coolness.”
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Vanderbilt could not swim, yet he made no effort to save himself. Thomas Slidell saw him place his own lifebelt around an elderly woman just before the ship sank.
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“He forgot everything in the fact that he could be of service to this old woman,” Slidell said later. “His own life, position, and wealth did not count. He did what he knew to be his duty.”
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“Did he wish to give it up,” pondered one of Vanderbilt’s society friends, “to someone else, or was he glad that fate had taken out of his hands the predicament of living, that daily, self-made fabrication of occupations and pleasures, that dreary, desperate difficulty of touching reality at any point, which has wearied so many of the very rich into forms of unconsciousness a good deal less clean than death?”
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Oliver Bernard wandered amidships and found himself at the Marconi House near the third funnel; here, he quietly began taking off his clothing in anticipation of jumping. Removing his jacket, waistcoat, collar, and tie, he carefully folded them and put them in a neat stack at the base of the funnel. “So this is the end,” he thought to himself. All of life’s “struggles, petty attainments, the substance of things hoped for,” now seemed “insignificant.” His entire life, he mused, had “amounted to just nothing.” He looked in on the Marconi operators as they pounded out their frantic calls for help. One of
Lusitania
’s crew tried to assure Bernard that the ship would not sink, but it was obvious that the liner was doomed.
He was offered a chair on which to try to float off the liner. “That doesn’t interest me much,” Bernard said. “I can’t swim a yard, and that’s not enough.” He let go of the chair: it went hurtling down the sloping starboard deck and splashed into the sea.
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Marie Depage stood with James Houghton and his friend Richard Freeman. She was, Houghton recalled, an example of “superb coolness” as the liner sank.
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The surrounding passengers, though, were now panicked: “Women were terror-stricken,” Houghton said, “and commenced to cry piteously,” and “children were clinging to their parents.”
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Houghton saw Freeman “dash away every few minutes when he saw some place where he could be useful. I saw him helping lower one of the boats, and later I saw him upon the top deck disentangling ropes.” Spotting a woman nearby standing as if in a daze, Freeman walked up to her and asked, “Haven’t you a lifebelt?” When she answered no, he took off his and tied it around her neck; when she objected, Freeman laughed her concerns off, as Houghton recalled, “saying that he was a good swimmer and the belt was in his way.” The two old college chums “joked for a moment or two” as they stood on deck, a way, Houghton recalled, to “cheer up those about us and relieve our own feelings.” As they stood together, Marie noticed that Freeman had a handkerchief wrapped around his palm, covering a small wound he had received when debris had rained down on the deck. Although he protested, she examined the little injury and bound her own handkerchief around his hand, “scolding him all the while for being so careless.” “I suppose,” Houghton recalled, “under ordinary circumstances, nobody would have paid any attention to it, but as it was, it gave us all something else to think about.” Freeman soon wandered off to assist others, leaving Houghton and Depage at the railing, watching as
Lusitania
increased her list and the final moments approached. When the water was nearly level with her deck, Houghton and Depage jumped into the sea.
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