Authors: Greg King
With the world in an uproar, Schwieger found himself summoned to Berlin. Despite public pronouncements that the sinking had been justified, authorities in Berlin were now on the defensive; there were rumors that Kaiser Wilhelm II personally berated him, while Admiral Tirpitz recalled that he was treated “very ungraciously” by military officials.
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After the sinking, Schwieger seemed “so haggard and so silent and so different,” said his fiancée.
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Yet soon he was back at sea aboard U-20, sinking more ships. In September, he torpedoed the Allan Line’s
Hesperian
off the Irish coast, again without warning. Thirty-two of the 1,100 aboard died when one of the lifeboats overturned during evacuation. Also aboard was a coffin holding the remains of
Lusitania
passenger Frances Stephens, who now fell victim to Schwieger a second time when the vessel sank the following day.
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This time, Schwieger was ordered to apologize for having violated German assurances that no further passenger liners would be attacked without warning. On May 8, 1916—one day after the first anniversary of
Lusitania
’s sinking—Schwieger’s torpedoes struck another liner, White Star’s
Cymric
. This time, the vessel was being used as a troop transport, and although five aboard perished, Schwieger suffered no serious repercussions.
In November 1916, U-20 ran aground off the Danish coast and had to be abandoned; today, its salvaged conning tower and deck gun are on display at the Strandingsmuseum in Thorsminde in West Jutland.
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Schwieger was then given command of a larger boat, U-88. The following year, he received the ironically named
Pour le Mérite
in recognition of his gallantry and service in sinking nearly 200,000 tons of Allied shipping.
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That fall, he took U-88 on a mission into the North Sea and, on September 5, 1917, Schwieger’s luck ran out when he struck a mine. There were no survivors: Schwieger was just thirty-two.
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What might Schwieger have said had he survived? How would he justify his actions that sunny day in May? Popular sentiment at the time of the tragedy roundly condemned his actions. Even today, an apparently dispassionate historian can refer to his action as “willful murder.”
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By law, Schwieger was expected to surface and fire a warning shot, demanding that
Lusitania
stop and allow her cargo to be searched. The commander knew that many British merchant vessels were armed with guns that could tear the hull of his submarine to pieces. Then there were the specific points under which
Lusitania
operated, which not only violated the Cruiser Rules but also made them obsolete that May 7. She was regularly transporting contraband, even by the British definition of the term; she operated under the sole control of the Admiralty; and she could also, should the need arise, be converted into an armed auxiliary cruiser to join the war.
Lusitania
was disguised, her funnels cloaked in gray, and she flew no flags. She was a non-neutral vessel in a declared war zone, with instructions to evade capture and even to ram a challenging submarine. Had Schwieger surfaced and fired a warning shot across
Lusitania
’s bow, does history really think that Captain Turner would have stopped the vessel and allowed a search, as demanded by the Cruiser Rules? The Admiralty’s steady erosion of the established rules of naval warfare all but ensured that, sooner or later, some unarmed passenger vessel would be torpedoed with devastating loss of life. In creating the very set of circumstances that led to
Lusitania
’s destruction, the Admiralty, too, must share a significant portion of the blame.
This was the legal justification, but what of the moral case? Schwieger’s responsibility was to his submarine and to his crew: surfacing and challenging
Lusitania,
he might reasonably have believed, would have put them in danger of being fired upon or rammed. Schwieger was under orders to sink troop transports, merchant ships, and warships. It was only chance that brought
Lusitania
into his path, but once the opportunity presented itself, the dutiful Schwieger had little recourse but to act; if he failed to do so, his inaction would certainly become known as soon as the submarine returned to its base.
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He had no reason to think
Lusitania
would sink so quickly, and with such devastating loss of life. In his mind, he probably took the only action that he deemed available to him at the time: however callous the rationalizations might sound, the war made such an action almost inevitable.
Yet however legitimate Schwieger’s actions, it is undeniable that in torpedoing
Lusitania
he made a grave mistake, if not from a legal perspective than certainly from humanitarian, political, and diplomatic ones. The attendant outcry over
Lusitania
’s sinking offered the world a vivid exhibition of the very worst excesses of German warfare, painting the dreaded “Huns” as barbaric murderers of innocent women and children. In this sense, as historians Bailey and Ryan wrote, Germany gained a temporary victory that was “worse than a defeat.”
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Churchill aptly summed it up when he wrote, “The poor babies who perished in the ocean struck a blow at the German power more deadly than could have been achieved by the sacrifice of a hundred thousand fighting men.”
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It was just after dawn when the first trains carrying
Lusitania
survivors began arriving in London on Sunday, May 9. “Bedraggled and weary,” reported the
New York Times,
many still wore the “ill-fitting clothes” they had been given at Queenstown.
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Crossing from Ireland to Wales had, for some, been yet another ordeal. “Every throb of the engines went through the pit of my stomach,” recalled Charles Lauriat. He saw that nearly all of the dazed survivors kept their lifebelts on throughout the voyage.
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Stepping out of the train from Wales at London’s Euston Station at seven that morning, Lauriat was “almost mobbed” by a mass of reporters. Even more upsetting was the rush of wide-eyed others, shouting, begging, pleading with Lauriat for word of friends and relatives who had been aboard
Lusitania
. Once safely whisked away to a friend’s country house, Lauriat sat down and began to write a detailed account of his experiences, published later that year as
The Lusitania’s Last Voyage
. Lauriat cast a critical eye over everyone involved with the disaster. “I did not think any human being with a drop of red blood in his veins, called a man, could issue an order to sink a passenger steamer without at least giving the women and children a chance to get away,” he wrote.
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Yet he also heaped scorn on
Lusitania
’s captain and crew, and on the efforts by the British government to absolve Turner and his men, as well as Cunard and the Admiralty, of any responsibility in the tragedy. Lauriat eventually returned to his family’s book business in Boston, and died in 1937.
Lauriat recovered quickly from the disaster, but many other survivors faced long years of suspicion, guilt, anxiety, and pain from the injuries they had suffered. Those survivors who had boarded
Lusitania
to join the Great War, see loved ones before they went off to fight, visit wounded relatives, or throw themselves into relief work, had now personally experienced the horrors of the conflict. Mary Ryerson, declared one Toronto newspaper, “died as much for the British Empire as her noble son died fighting in Flanders.” For several years after the disaster, her daughter, Laura, suffered from depression, nightmares, and anxiety—the after-effects of the sinking that modern psychology would term post-traumatic stress disorder.
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She died in 1943. Nor was Jessie Taft Smith ever able to completely recover from the trauma: in 1916, she suffered a nervous breakdown and, although she recovered, was never again the same. She died in 1928.
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James Dunsmuir’s parents, too, suffered through the loss of their son. His father sat for hours in his baronial study, endlessly listening to a gramophone recording of “Oh, Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” And recurring nightmares plagued his mother, Laura: her son, trapped behind a window, desperately pounding on the glass and attempting to escape as water overwhelmed him.
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As both of her parents had perished in the sinking, young Virginia Loney—who, said family friend Henry James, had “almost as tragically survived” the tragedy—inherited a substantial fortune.
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After several weeks resting at her parents’ country house in Northampton, she returned to New York aboard the American liner
St. Paul
. Standing on the liner’s deck, passengers spotted a distant periscope. “No, no!” Virginia cried out. “I can’t stand it again!” The danger passed, and Virginia landed in New York looking, said a newspaper, “none the worse for her experience.”
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In 1918, at the age of seventeen, she married a naval aviator; after five years of marriage and two children, the couple divorced. Virginia soon remarried, and spent much of life among the fashionable elements of café and jet-set society before her death in 1975.
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For months following the sinking, Ian Holbourn would wake up screaming, “shrieking that the boat had overturned,” as his wife remembered.
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The night before the disaster, Marion had what she took to be a strange vision: “a large vessel sinking, with a big list.” She shook off the sense of impending doom, only to learn the following evening that
Lusitania
had been torpedoed. Not knowing what else to do, she packed a small suitcase with her husband’s clothing, assuming that if he had survived he would be in need. Just after eight on Saturday morning, Marion finally received a cable from her husband and told their eldest sons. The sinking, she assured her eldest son, Hylas, would put the whole world in an uproar; the boy then ran up and down the streets, yelling, “The whole world is in an uproar! The
Lusitania
’s down, and my Daddy’s saved!”
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Having reunited with Avis Dolphin in Queenstown the morning after the sinking, Holbourn escorted her by ferry and train to her grandfather’s house in Worcester.
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Marion, clutching her carefully packed suitcase, met his train at Birmingham. Holbourn had Avis on one arm, and a pair of damp trousers folded over the other. “Oh, then you’ve been in the water!” his wife said cheerfully. “Where did you expect me to be?” he answered. They took Avis to her grandfather, a man “with a long white beard” who looked like “an Old Testament prophet,” before finally returning to their own home.
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Holbourn and Avis would remain in close contact for the rest of his life. A year after the disaster, Holbourn kept his shipboard promise, writing
The Child of the Moat: A Book for Girls
and dedicating it to Avis. Set during the Reformation, it told of Aline, a young orphaned Scottish girl and her adventures, which included dressing as a boy to fight in a battle and marrying her love, a Scotsman named Ian.
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After finishing her education, Avis moved to Edinburgh, where she frequently saw the Holbourns; it was at their house that she met correspondent Thomas Foley, whom she married in 1926. Ian Holbourn died in 1933. Avis survived him by sixty-three years, dying in 1996 in Wales at the age of ninety-two. “As a Quaker,” she wrote, she denounced “all acts of war.” The sinking of
Lusitania
had been a tragedy, but she thought that “the bombing of civilians” during World War II “was just as horrible.”
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Ogden Hammond returned to his three children in New Jersey. He married again, and became the American ambassador to Spain under President Calvin Coolidge. He died in 1956 as his daughter Millicent was making a substantial name for herself. After having married and divorced, Millicent Fenwick threw herself into social causes, campaigning for the civil rights movement and becoming involved, like her father, in New Jersey state politics. An aristocratic, authoritarian figure deeply involved in the social struggles of the time, in 1975 she was elected to the United States Congress. Millicent Fenwick died in 1992.