Authors: Greg King
The Great War, most people had optimistically believed, would be over by Christmas. Naive enthusiasm characterized its first months: the brightest young men of their generation enlisted amid patriotic calls to arms, cheered by frenzied crowds toward miserable deaths in muddy wastelands. Yet the war did not end: Russian efforts in the east and French resistance along the Marne confused the carefully wrought plans of German generals. A deadly game of stalemate descended over trenches scarring the continent from Belgium to East Prussia; ugly barbed wire stretched for hundreds of miles, weaving through field and forest as artillery whizzed through the air and the desolate scenes rang with the incessant rattle of machine guns. Even civilians far away from the front lived in fear as airplanes buzzed the skies and zeppelins dropped bombs on the unsuspecting. By the spring of 1915, over three million soldiers lay dead.
The British Admiralty had subsidized
Lusitania
and
Mauretania
on the understanding that, in the event of war, they could be requisitioned and converted to troop transports or armed auxiliary merchant cruisers. Admiral Sir John “Jackie” Fisher, who ruled the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, and First Lord Winston Churchill, representing the cabinet, heartily disliked each other, but they did agree on one thing:
Lusitania
was unfit for war service. She was simply too large and it took too much coal to maintain her record speeds. Although still classed as a reserve merchant cruiser by the British Royal Navy, and listed as such in the latest editions of
Jane’s Fighting Ships
and
Brassey’s Naval Annual,
Lusitania
returned to regular service.
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Cunard later insisted that it operated
Lusitania
“as a public service” during the war, and that the company did so without expecting any profit.
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To save money, it shut down one of her boiler rooms, reducing her top speed from 26 to 21 knots.
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This wasn’t a secret: before leaving New York on Saturday, Captain Turner told reporters that she would be operating “under three sections of boilers, and will average about 22 knots if the weather is fine.”
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Yet Cunard didn’t advertise the fact, and many passengers heard contrary information. “When buying my ticket,” said Michael Byrne, “I was told that the
Lusitania
would make 25 or 28 knots an hour when we would sight the Irish coast.”
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Even as Turner stood on the liner talking about his slower speed, Cunard agent Charles Sumner on the pier below him was spewing disinformation, perhaps to assuage nervous passengers.
Lusitania,
he assured everyone, would be safe from any submarine, as she would run at a speed of 25 knots.
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Lusitania
might be Cunard’s liner, but as soon as she was three miles off the British or American coasts, she fell under Admiralty jurisdiction. “Not only has the Admiralty assumed charge of our line,” Charles Stead, advertising manager for Cunard, later said, “but it has made this control so absolute that we have even been unable to reach our own vessels by wireless for any purpose.”
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All communication went through the Admiralty—suggestions, warnings, and instructions on how to navigate
Lusitania
through the waters off the Irish coast.
And those waters represented a potentially lethal threat. For eight months, Great Britain and Germany had escalated the war at sea. Britain had always prided herself on her naval superiority; the Kaiser’s new fleet of
Unterseeboote,
or U-boats, offered a surprisingly deadly challenge. Few had initially regarded them as a serious threat. Lord Fisher had tried to warn his Admiralty colleagues, but to no avail: U-boats were largely untested, their capabilities crude, and their effectiveness in doubt. The very idea of prowling about beneath the water, attacking and destroying without direct confrontation, somehow seemed
so
ungentlemanly. Having dismissed the threat, Great Britain was now learning that these U-boats could be fearsome, deadly hunters. In a letter to his German counterpart, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, an exasperated Lord Fisher assured him, “I don’t blame you for this submarine business. I’d have done it myself.”
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At first, the war at sea followed a gentlemanly set of informal regulations known as the Cruiser Rules, codified by The Hague Conventions in 1899 and 1907. An armed ship or U-boat encountering an enemy merchant vessel was expected to give warning either by a shot across the bow or by semaphore flags. The challenged ship was to stop and allow a search of its cargo; if no contraband was discovered, she could proceed. If she was found to be carrying munitions or war matériel, her crew and any passengers were to be allowed sufficient time to abandon ship before she was sunk. Merchant vessels were also obliged to follow certain rules: they were not to display false or neutral flags; they were not allowed to actively resist search or sinking; they were not allowed to flee from a challenge; and they were not allowed a military or an armed escort. Any of these actions meant that the challenged vessel lost its immunity and was not subject to warning before destruction.
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Such niceties may seem absurd in a time of war, yet in the first months of the conflict, as one author noted, with “typically Teutonic passion for legality” U-boats diligently followed the Cruiser Rules when they encountered enemy vessels, surfacing, firing warning shots, and allowing ample time for passengers and crew to abandon ship before sinking it.
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Then, in January 1915, the Admiralty made a momentous, and ultimately fatal, decision.
That month, the Admiralty issued secret orders that not only violated the Cruiser Rules but also ensured that Germany would respond in kind. In addition to disguising a vessel’s name and company colors on her funnels, British ships were advised that flying the false flags of neutral countries would confuse the enemy; “it is not in any way dishonorable,” instructions insisted. If possible, merchant ships should fire on suspected enemy submarines, even if they had not yet signaled intent or challenged the vessel. Captains were not to stop if challenged by a submarine; any captain who disobeyed would be court-martialed. Instead, they were to evade submarines by any means necessary, including firing upon them or ramming them at top speed without warning.
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Britain, it was said, not only “ruled the waves, but waived the rules.”
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These orders seem logical, especially in a time of war, yet they clearly violated the Cruiser Rules. With them, the Admiralty arguably abandoned any expectation that Germany would follow rules that the British themselves willfully ignored. U-boats could no longer safely surface and fire a warning shot for fear of being rammed or fired upon. A neutral flag was no longer a guarantee of neutrality. It was no longer possible for a U-boat to give warning: to do so risked destruction of vessel and crew.
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Later, Winston Churchill admitted as much, writing that, by forcing U-boats to operate in this way, Great Britain guaranteed that there was a “greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships, and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.”
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Germany learned of these instructions a few days after they were issued, when it captured a British vessel and found the communiqué.
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The previous autumn, Great Britain had declared the entire North Sea a war zone and mined the approaches; in the spring of 1915, she declared all foodstuffs to be contraband; nearly 750,000 Germans eventually perished in this attempt to starve their country into submission.
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On February 4, 1915, the German government answered with its own declaration:
The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be a war zone. From February 18 onward, every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. Neutral vessels will also run a risk in the war zone because, in view of the hazards of sea warfare and the British authorization of January 31 of the misuse of neutral flags, it may not always be possible to prevent attacks on enemy ships without harming neutral ships.
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In response, President Woodrow Wilson warned that there would be “strict accountability” if a German submarine destroyed an “American vessel or the lives of American citizens.”
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An air of tension now surrounded
Lusitania
’s crossings—something only heightened by the German notice in New York City newspapers that first Saturday in May. Responsibility for this ship, her cargo, and the lives of 1,965 passengers and crew rested heavily on Captain William Turner’s stout shoulders. Just a few months earlier, Cunard had picked him to helm
Lusitania
in the aftermath of an international incident. In February, returning to Great Britain from New York,
Lusitania
had followed Admiralty instructions and flown a false flag—in this case, the Stars and Stripes. Germany immediately protested, and President Wilson was himself none too pleased at this breach of maritime law. Daniel Dow,
Lusitania
’s captain, first suggested that he had been entitled to fly the American flag because his ship carried mail from that country; when this didn’t convince, he insisted that Americans on the vessel had begged him to fly the flag for their own safety.
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The resulting controversy proved too much for the nervous Dow, and Cunard tapped Turner to take command.
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Turner loved the sea: it was in his blood. His father was a naval captain from Liverpool, but he wanted his son to be “respectable,” and pushed for him to enter the Church. “How the old boy ever got such a notion,” Turner’s son Norman later said, “is beyond understanding, as anyone less likely to become a parson than my father would be hard to imagine.” Declaring that he would never become “a devil dodger,” the boy ran away to sea when he was thirteen.
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The first ship on which Turner served foundered off the Irish coast. Despite this misfortune, Turner remained at sea. He joined Cunard in 1878 as fourth officer aboard
Cherbourg
; when
Cherbourg
accidentally collided with a smaller vessel Turner dove into the water and rescued two of the flailing crew members. On another occasion, Turner was swept overboard and literally fought back swarming sharks by punching them. That he was personally courageous no one doubted; in 1883, he also rescued a young boy who had fallen into the Mersey River, for which he received a medal for valor.
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In 1883 Turner wed his cousin Alice, who gave him two sons, Percy in 1885, and Norman in 1893, but the marriage eventually proved a failure. In 1903, Alice left, taking their two sons with her. Turner hired a young woman, Mabel Every, as his housekeeper, and the two soon became inseparable. Turner settled into a happy domestic routine, tending to his small garden and playing with his dog and cat. He was, Norman recalled, “a connoisseur of good food and wine, with a preference for German food,” and enjoyed smoking his favorite pipe.
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Turner gradually rose through the ranks, receiving command of Cunard’s liners
Carpathia
in 1904,
Caronia
in 1908, and
Lusitania
in 1910. Unlike other lines, Cunard tended to move its captains from one ship to another, and by 1913 Turner was at the helm of
Mauretania
. After being promoted to the rank of commander in the Royal Naval Reserve, Turner was given the new
Aquitania
when she made her maiden voyage to New York in 1914. A stint aboard the liner
Transylvania
followed, and in the spring of 1915 Turner was asked to replace the nervous Captain Dow aboard
Lusitania
.
A captain was expected not merely to safely navigate his ship but also to act as Cunard’s official representative and host. It was his job to know his most important passengers, to pore over
Who’s Who,
Burke’s Peerage,
society
Blue Books,
and the European
Almanach de Gotha
listing royalty and aristocrats. The most privileged passengers always demanded extraordinary consideration, from seating at the Captain’s Table to special tours of the vessel. A captain, wrote one historian, had “to adjust disputes, pacify angry women, comfort frightened ones, and judge correctly just when to send one whose conduct is questionable to her room for the rest of the passage. He must know when to forbid the bartender to serve more liquor to a passenger who is drinking too much, and just when to post the notice in the smoking room that gamblers are on board. Passengers must not be antagonized unless they antagonize others more valuable to the company than themselves.”
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