Authors: Greg King
Such a scenario also casts doubt on the persistent myth that
Lusitania
’s munitions exploded, which has fueled the fires of conspiracy for years.
That she was carrying munitions is beyond doubt: they are carefully detailed in her longer manifest, filed with the Port of New York a few days after she sailed—ammunition, shrapnel shells, fuses, and aluminum powder. This cargo wasn’t a secret: New York newspapers published both manifests the day after the disaster.
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Colin Simpson wrote mysteriously of “a strange and possibly sinister mixture of goods” aboard
Lusitania,
suggesting that she carried gun cotton and other explosives disguised as furs, tubs of butter, and several thousand boxes of cheese.
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A 2008 expedition to the ship revealed that rifle ammunition was located in an area where no munitions were supposedly stored on the last voyage.
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Allegations about additional concealed munitions, never substantiated, matter only if they caused a second explosion that lethally damaged the ship and significantly added to her rapid sinking. The ruins of
Lusitania
herself help resolve the issue. As with tales of conspiracy and cover-up, rumors of secret explorations of the wreck have contributed to the aura of mysterious intrigue. Stories that the Admiralty dove on the ship to retrieve, or conceal, munitions or guns on the liner have persisted for decades.
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In the 1960s, American Navy diver John Light began visiting the wreck. Although conditions were difficult and visibility was poor, Light thought that, contrary to accounts by survivors, the second, internal explosion had blown off the bow; he also believed that he saw a gun still mounted on the deck. He attributed steel cables across the wreck to remnants of an earlier salvage operation; a large, rectangular hole cut into the hull, he theorized, had been made when a mounted gun had been retrieved.
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Light had the good fortune of diving a ship that was still in relatively good condition, recognizable and not yet disintegrated. Things had deteriorated badly by the summer of 1993, when Robert Ballard—the man who had located the wreck of
Titanic
—investigated
Lusitania
. The ship rests on her starboard side, thus concealing the location of the torpedo strike, as well as any other damage. But Ballard was sure of one thing: the second explosion hadn’t come from munitions. He found that, contrary to what Light believed,
Lusitania
’s bow had not been blown off: in fact, it was the most recognizable part of the ruined ship. Had the munitions stored there exploded, the bow should have been all but obliterated.
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To account for the second explosion, Ballard proposed that the torpedo managed to spark loose coal dust in the bunkers.
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Another historian has suggested that the torpedo might have ignited the aluminum powder
Lusitania
carried, to devastating effect.
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Subsequent tests conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have challenged these theories: the coal dust would likely have been damp from contact with the steel hull, making ignition implausible. As for the aluminum powder, it indeed has highly explosive properties; had it ignited, though, the presumably devastating explosion should have significantly damaged
Lusitania
’s bow—damage no expedition to the wreck has yet found.
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A century after the tragedy, a consensus of informed opinion favors a failure in
Lusitania
’s steam plant as the likely cause of the second explosion. On
Lusitania,
inflexible lines carried high-pressure steam from boilers to turbines. Cold water rushing in from the sea might well have caused them to fracture to devastating impact. The steam lines clearly failed, and failed quickly: less than a minute after the second explosion,
Lusitania
’s steam pressure dropped so much that she could no longer be steered, leaving her adrift in the Irish Sea.
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There is, though, one last, possible explanation for the second explosion. Leslie Morton was positive that he saw two torpedoes—and numerous survivors agreed. Human memory is fallibly fragile, especially at times of unexpected trauma. Yet several passengers like Isaac Lehmann, William Adams, and George Slingsby told remarkably consistent stories, independent of each other, revealing a telling sequence of events after the first explosion. Between thirty and sixty seconds elapsed; they rushed to portholes or to the railing in time to spot a second torpedo coming at the ship; only after this did they hear and feel the second explosion.
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At the same time, glass in the First Class Dining Saloon’s portholes shattered over tables, and heavy debris rained down on the roof of the Veranda Café—some four hundred feet aft of where Schwieger said his torpedo struck.
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Historians have largely dismissed the idea of a second torpedo based on Schwieger’s war diary. This would indeed seemingly end the issue, yet the diary’s integrity is not above suspicion: the original was destroyed, and only a typed copy survives.
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The entry concerning
Lusitania
’s sinking contains a number of questionable claims and demonstrable errors: that the liner turned toward Queenstown before being hit, when in fact it turned in the opposite direction; that Schwieger had no idea as to the ship’s identity before firing his torpedo; that
Lusitania
stopped immediately after the torpedo hit, when in fact she was unable to stop; and that her superstructure and bridge were “torn asunder.”
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Then there is the claim that, before
Lusitania
sank, U-20 “dived to a depth of twenty-four meters and ran out to sea.”
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Many survivors recalled that a submarine surfaced after the sinking, and that several members of its crew surveyed the scene.
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Finally, Schwieger wrote that it “would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire a second torpedo into this crowd of people struggling to save their lives.”
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The sentiment, recorded historians Bailey and Ryan, is “quite out of keeping with the tone and substance of what preceded and followed. Nowhere else in his diary of this voyage do we find evidence of the slightest regard for humanity after he repeatedly fired torpedoes without warning.”
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It is, of course, possible that Schwieger was traumatized by the chaos he had unleashed. Considerable evidence, though, suggests that German officials altered the diary sometime after Schwieger’s death in 1917: not only is the formatting peculiar but the entry for May 7—when
Lusitania
was sunk—is the only page lacking Schwieger’s signature attesting to its accuracy.
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Why would the diary have been altered? Germany faced international condemnation over the sinking: adding doubt about the torpedoed vessel’s identity until it was too late and a declaration of sympathy for the victims may have been an attempt to alleviate moral guilt.
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Yet if such alterations took place, what better reason could there be than to remove mention of a second torpedo fired at the unarmed passenger liner? Why else insert a line specifically refuting the idea?
The U-20 ordinarily carried six torpedoes: uniquely on this voyage—according to the diary—she carried seven. On May 5, Schwieger used four: one missed a passing Norwegian-flagged vessel; one hit
Candidate
; and it took two torpedoes to sink the
Centurion
.
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According to a 1933 German source, Schwieger had orders to save two torpedoes for his return voyage; Bailey and Ryan asserted that the actual order was “to save one for the journey home.” After firing at
Lusitania,
the diary records, torpedoes were left only in the rear tubes: the time needed to turn his submarine around to take another shot exceeds that between the first and second explosions. Yet if the diary was indeed rewritten, the integrity of the entire document is compromised. While not supporting the second-torpedo scenario, Bailey and Ryan suggested that Schwieger “could have failed to mention the use of a second torpedo, and then have accounted for this extra one by listing it among the several misses on this cruise, both earlier and later.”
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To Schwieger,
Lusitania
was a large and prized target. On May 3, a torpedo had jammed in the tube when Schwieger tried to fire on a Danish vessel; on May 5, it had taken two torpedoes to sink the much smaller
Centurion
. Even a damaged
Lusitania,
if it was indeed armed, Schwieger may have thought, would pose a threat. He would also have known that roughly 60 percent of all torpedoes fired either failed to eject from their tubes, missed their target due to erratic steering mechanisms, or failed to explode on impact.
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Given these circumstances, would Schwieger really have been so reluctant to fire a second torpedo? He had only one chance to take his shot: two torpedoes fired in quick succession would increase the odds that at least one made it to the target. The potential success far outweighed the risk.
If the diary was indeed altered, as historians have suggested, it would have been because Schwieger—and his superiors—had every reason to erase a second torpedo. After the fact, and in the face of universal condemnation, admission that Schwieger had fired a second torpedo would only have made him appear cold-blooded and bent on the deaths of all aboard. Covering up a second torpedo would also serve a dual purpose: to attribute the second explosion to illegal munitions aboard the ship and embarrass Great Britain in the ongoing propaganda war.
Of necessity, a second torpedo would demand that no one aboard U-20 that day ever admitted the truth: conspiracies are notoriously difficult to keep secret. Yet who would want to claim a second torpedo fired on an unarmed passenger liner that went to the bottom of the Irish Sea with such devastating loss of life? Perhaps the idea is implausible, but implausible is not the same as impossible, and the evidence suggesting a second torpedo as the cause of the second explosion cannot be entirely dismissed.
Lusitania
herself hides her secrets: if a second torpedo struck her, the proof has long since been buried beneath the wreckage of collapsed decks and in an impenetrable hull whose starboard side has not been seen since May 7, 1915.
Something certainly caused the second explosion aboard
Lusitania,
but the reason and the damage will always be matters of speculation. A massive explosion of some contraband that tore open the ship’s hull lingers as such an attractive theory because it helps make sense of the apparently inexplicable speed at which
Lusitania
sunk. Yet while the second explosion may have contributed to the ship’s sinking, it probably only accelerated the inevitable.
Lusitania
’s swift end is not without parallel: in 1914, a collier rammed
Empress of Ireland
in the St. Lawrence River, causing the liner to sink in just fourteen minutes. The death of White Star’s
Britannic,
operating as a hospital ship, was equally rapid: fifteen minutes after striking a German mine, she had disappeared beneath the Aegean Sea.
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The irony is that Schwieger didn’t need to fire a second torpedo: the first caused fatal damage to the ship. Hitting at the precise spot it did, coupled with the rapid asymmetrical flooding,
Lusitania
’s continued progress, which forced even more water into her hull, and the sea pouring through open portholes, was enough to send the liner to the bottom of the Irish Sea.
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The effect was lethal and catastrophic, resulting in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people; even Schwieger later professed shock at the destruction he had caused. The man who, recalled one of his friends, described the sinking of
Lusitania
as “the most terrible sight” he had ever witnessed, a scene “too horrible” for him to watch, only learned just how many had died when he arrived back in Germany. A friend said he was “appalled to discover the anger of outraged humanity that his act had aroused, and horrified at the thought that he was held up all over the world as an object of odium and loathing.”
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