Authors: Greg King
The Board of Trade inquiry into the sinking lasted a mere three days, with two additional sessions a few weeks later. The first session began at Westminster Central Hall in London, under the direction of John Bigham, Lord Mersey. Three years earlier, Mersey had conducted the Board of Trade investigation into the sinking of
Titanic
. He had found that neither Captain Smith, who had raced his ship through a dark night despite ice warnings, nor the White Star Line was in any way responsible for the tragedy. Mersey could now be relied upon to be similarly sympathetic to Cunard and the Admiralty, especially during a time of war. The implicit goal was to conceal unfavorable evidence while absolving officials of any responsibility and assigning the entire blame to Germany. As such, the outcome was cynically predetermined.
No one knew what had caused the massive second explosion; persistent fears that arms and ammunition aboard
Lusitania
were responsible meant that any such hint had to be strenuously denied. There was, Mersey emphatically declared, “no explosion of any part of the cargo.”
(
30
)
But how to account for the second explosion? Five days after the sinking, Admiralty intelligence intercepted a wireless message in which Schwieger reported having used only one torpedo; this information was passed on to First Sea Lord Fisher, First Lord Winston Churchill, Chief of War Staff Rear Admiral James Harrison Oliver, and Director of Intelligence Captain Reginald Hall, who promptly suppressed it.
(
31
)
Numerous people aboard
Lusitania
spoke of a second torpedo; the inquiry seized on their accounts, insisting that this had caused the second explosion. Those who insisted otherwise were ignored; in at least one instance, Cunard and the Admiralty briefed a witness before testimony, insisting that he refer to two torpedoes.
(
32
)
Even Captain Turner played along. At the Kinsale inquest, he had said that a single torpedo struck the ship; now he added a second for his appearance before Lord Mersey.
(
33
)
Two of the sessions were held behind closed doors, during which Captain Turner was relentlessly grilled over his actions. The Admiralty clearly believed that he had been negligent, ignoring warnings and instructions to zigzag; to keep
Lusitania
away from headlands; and to maintain full speed. In advance of the hearing, Captain Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, prepared a memorandum in which he outlined Turner’s failures. Turner, Webb reported, had “acted directly contrary to the written general instructions received from the Admiralty.” In disregarding warnings and orders, Turner had displayed “an almost inconceivable negligence” in operating his ship.
(
34
)
At the Admiralty, both Lord Fisher and Winston Churchill heartily agreed that Turner should be made an example of and arrested no matter the outcome of the Mersey Inquiry.
(
35
)
The captain, as his own lawyer reluctantly admitted, was “undoubtedly a bad witness” during the inquiry, unable to explain or justify his actions.
(
36
)
Yet the Admiralty was pursuing a foolish policy: if Turner was indeed found negligent, then survivors could sue Cunard for having employed him. Mersey, aware of the precariously balanced situation—and not wanting to weaken the propaganda case against Germany—finally shut down this line of investigation. It was, wrote historians Bailey and Ryan, “war, and no time for Britons to be bickering with one another when the real culprit, as seemed obvious, was a ruthless Germany. The British could hardly strengthen their case before the world against Hunnish barbarity and win the maximum sympathy of neutral nations if they blamed themselves.”
(
37
)
Mersey’s eventual verdict was indeed a whitewash and almost unbelievable in its assertions. Only 39 percent of the passengers had survived, compared to 42 percent of the crew.
(
38
)
Yet Mersey ignored this uncomfortable fact, transforming inept members of the crew into heroic figures of self-sacrifice. They had, he declared, “behaved well throughout and worked with skill and judgment.”
(
39
)
Instead, Mersey blamed “the well-meant but probably disastrous attempts of the frightened passengers” in loading and assisting in lowering the lifeboats, declaring that they “did more harm than good.”
(
40
)
Incredibly, he insisted that
Lusitania
’s slow speed had absolutely nothing to do with her having been torpedoed; that all of the portholes had been closed, contrary to what numerous passengers recalled; that lifebelts had been plentiful, again contrary to what many passengers saw; and that the evacuation had been calm and orderly. With a fair dose of class bias, he blamed Third Class passengers for the final moments of panic.
(
41
)
He also dismissed accounts of faulty lifeboats with rusty oarlocks and ribs, insisting that any such damage had occurred during the eighteen minutes of the sinking. Turner, Cunard, and the Admiralty were absolved of any negligence. Instead, Mersey declared, “the whole blame for the cruel destruction of life in this catastrophe must rest solely with those who plotted and those who committed the crime,” the U-boat captain and his German masters.
(
42
)
This political charade so upset Mersey that he supposedly later referred to it as “a damned, dirty business.”
(
43
)
When the report was published, an angry Charles Lauriat protested, “with every spark of manhood,” assertions that the crew had been disciplined and that it had been panicked passengers who caused lifeboats to upend and crash into the sea. It was the passengers, thought Charles Lauriat, who made “heroic efforts” to load and launch the lifeboats, while most of the crew didn’t know how to operate them. “It doesn’t seem to me,” he wrote, “that this Court of Inquiry has stood up to its business like the historic Briton who isn’t afraid to take his medicine, and place blame where it should be placed; rather, it has hidden behind the act itself.”
(
44
)
Three years after the sinking, a group of American survivors lodged suit against Cunard for negligence, seeking compensation for lost possessions, medical expenses, and injuries.
(
45
)
Captain Turner was deposed in London, and again altered parts of his earlier testimony. The case was heard in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before Judge Julius Mayer; in 1912, Mayer—like Mersey—had presided over American claims of negligence lodged against the White Star Line in the
Titanic
disaster. And, like Mersey, he had ignored evidence of Captain Smith’s recklessness that fatal night, finding that there was no legal basis for any lawsuits alleging negligence. This amenable attitude appealed to Cunard, and Mayer soon proved them correct in their choice to let a judge, rather than a jury, litigate the issue. Mayer deemed any discussion of
Lusitania
’s lethal cargo irrelevant and refused to hear evidence on the question. He lifted most of his opinions on Captain Turner, the crew, the Admiralty, and Cunard straight from Mersey’s published report. No official in charge of the ship would ever be made to answer for what had happened to
Lusitania.
(
46
)
* * *
Shipwrecks have an undeniable allure, embodying tragedy and human drama played out upon an artful and artificial stage.
Some, like
Titanic,
have come to represent the passing of an age or been portrayed as grand morality tales, replete with virtuous heroes and selfless survivors. Others linger in the collective imagination because of misconception and myth. People still harbor the erroneous belief that
Lusitania
’s sinking directly drew America into World War I: in fact, nearly two years passed before President Wilson finally asked Congress to declare war on Germany.
The most persistent of all
Lusitania
lore, though, speaks to a cynical darkness, embracing tales of conspiracy and cover-up in an effort to explain the tragedy, to shroud her last voyage in an air of political pretense and Machiavellian machination that led to her deliberate sacrifice off the Irish coast. Within days of the tragedy, people wondered whether something more nefarious than German torpedoes had been at work that fateful day; even after a century, the question lingers: did the British Admiralty deliberately expose
Lusitania
to danger in the hope of embroiling America in the ongoing war?
* * *
The circumstantial case seems uncomfortably strong. In September of 1914, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill supposedly referred to
Lusitania
as “live bait.”
(
47
)
More specifically, three months before the tragedy, he wrote: “It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.… For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better, and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.”
(
48
)
An unusually strong aura of potential danger surrounded this particular voyage. Numerous passengers received warnings not to sail aboard
Lusitania
; the German embassy placed its notice in New York newspapers, practically signaling intent if the opportunity came. Room 40, the Admiralty’s naval intelligence division, knew that at least one U-boat was active off the Irish coast, operating along the same route
Lusitania
would travel; three British vessels had been torpedoed in these waters in the space of twenty-four hours.
(
49
)
Yet when it came to protecting
Lusitania,
little was done. There was no escort; the Admiralty’s warnings to Turner that submarines were active along his route seem to have been the extent of their precautionary measures. Adding to the intrigue, certain official files on
Lusitania
and her last voyage remain classified; others appear to have been lost.
(
50
)
Author Colin Simpson posited a rather contradictory, two-pronged hypothesis of deliberate destruction in his 1972 book on the sinking. On the one hand, he insisted that
Lusitania
was likely loaded with disguised munitions desperately needed in the British war effort. On the other hand, he then suggested that Churchill and the Admiralty deliberately placed the ship—and its important cargo—in harm’s way, in the hope that her torpedoing would draw America into the war.
(
51
)
Historian Patrick Beesly, himself a former Royal Navy intelligence officer, seemed to agree in large part with Simpson’s general theory. “I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion,” Beesly wrote, “that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the
Lusitania
at risk, in the hopes that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war.”
(
52
)
Without question, an attack on
Lusitania
would provoke sentiment and arouse indignation; it would also offer Great Britain a valuable propaganda tool in the ongoing war—one that might help sway American opinion. A direct conspiracy, in which Churchill somehow engineered a deadly encounter between
Lusitania
and U-20, though, would have relied on a set of variables beyond the Admiralty’s control. By the time intercepted transmissions from U-20 were decoded, they were already hours out of date: steering
Lusitania
into her path with any degree of certainty would have been impossible. Nor could the Admiralty know that Turner would ignore his orders about speed, his navigational course, and zigzagging the
Lusitania
. In short, the logistics of such an operation are staggeringly unlikely.
It is equally difficult to believe that Churchill was so naive as to think the automatic American response to any such sinking would be a declaration of war against Germany. He certainly wrote of attracting “neutral shipping” to Britain’s shores and using any attendant incidents to diplomatic advantage; but
Lusitania
wasn’t “neutral shipping”—she was a British ship, under control of the Admiralty. More to the point, Churchill must have realized that American entrance into the war in the late spring of 1915 would have proved disastrous for Great Britain. Suffering from shortages, Britain was heavily reliant on the purchase of munitions from friendly American companies: had America gone to war over the sinking of
Lusitania,
those munitions would have gone to American, not British, troops.
* * *
If there wasn’t a conspiracy of commission, what of a conspiracy of omission? Is it possible that the Admiralty, aware of the possible danger, simply left
Lusitania
to chance her fate on what turned out to be her final voyage? Such a theory isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility; perhaps someone envisioned a chance encounter, a terrible meeting at sea during which
Lusitania
might be torpedoed and badly damaged. But even this lacks compelling evidence. What can be said is that, once
Lusitania
sank, embarrassed bureaucrats who had done nothing moved swiftly to conceal the incompetence of an Admiralty that neglected to provide an escort and a captain who ignored warnings and steered his ship into a U-boat’s path. Churchill had paid little attention to
Lusitania,
consumed as he was with the ongoing Dardanelles campaign; the Admiralty had been remiss in diligently safeguarding the liner; and perhaps more important, no one knew what had caused the second explosion. The Germans claimed that an immense cache of contraband munitions had led to
Lusitania
’s quick end: even the suggestion that this might be true could alter public opinion. And so evidence was suppressed—not to conceal a conspiracy but rather to hide an astonishingly lethal lack of diligence on officialdom’s part when it came to the lives of those aboard
Lusitania
.