A Higher Form of Killing (23 page)

On entering the war zone, in line with Admiralty guidance Turner had ordered the
Lusitania
’s portholes and all watertight doors not necessary for the operation of the ship to be closed. He sent stewards to check the portholes were indeed shut in all the suites and cabins but some passengers later opened theirs again. The hydraulically operated doors in the engine rooms had to be left open to allow the ship to function but could be quickly closed from the bridge in an emergency. As also suggested by the Admiralty, Turner had doubled the lookouts and posted two quartermasters on either side of the bridge “to look out for submarines.” He had also ordered the engine room to be ready “to give her full speed” and “to keep the highest steam they could possibly get” on the nineteen operational boilers; however, he did not order the six boilers in the fourth engine room to be fired.

As the morning drew on, tension among the crew mounted. The ship’s carpenter noticed how the chief engineer, though off duty, was watching through his binoculars “for ships or anything like that in the water” while Quartermaster Hugh Johnston, at the wheel, overheard officers discussing the danger: “You could catch words about the submarines and they were in the vicinity and all this stuff you know . . . Oh we knew there were submarines around.” Meanwhile in Liverpool, company chairman Alfred Booth was also growing anxious, having just learned of the sinking of the Harrison Line’s
Candidate
and
Centurion
. Having hitherto placed his faith in “the Admiralty and . . . Captain Turner’s discretion” he decided he had to ensure that Turner was warned that “submarines were on his track.” Since the Admiralty had forbidden Cunard to communicate direct with the
Lusitania
, Booth asked the senior naval officer in Liverpool, Admiral Stileman, to send a wireless message to the ship, and Stileman assured him he would see what he could do.

However, the minds of senior members of the Admiralty were not on the
Lusitania
. On May 5 Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty and its overall head, had gone to Paris to join in the continuing negotiations with Italy, which had broken off diplomatic relations with Germany and Austro-Hungary the previous day, about its possible entry into the war on the Allied side. He was then intending to travel to Sir John French’s headquarters on the western front. Churchill had left his immediate subordinate First Sea Lord Admiral Jacky Fisher, the navy’s professional chief, in charge in London but their relationship was almost at breaking point because of their disagreement about the wisdom and conduct of the Dardanelles campaign. By March 22 the attempt by a fleet of twelve British and four French battleships, supported by cruisers, destroyers, and minesweepers, to force the Dardanelles had failed. On April 25 Allied troops had landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula but were being prevented by strong Turkish opposition from pushing inland. Several large naval ships had been lost in the course of the two operations and Churchill was arguing, against Fisher’s wishes, for their replacement and the fleet’s reinforcement. By early May the seventy-four-year-old admiral appeared to his staff to be both exhausted and in a high state of nervous tension.

Nevertheless, the
Lusitania
had not been forgotten in London’s diplomatic circles. At ten
A.M.
on May 7 President Wilson’s envoy and friend Colonel House, back in London, called on Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey. The two had been intending to spend the morning at the botanical gardens at Kew, but then House had been invited to see the king at eleven thirty which meant their visit to the gardens had to be curtailed. On their way, House and Sir Edward discussed how America could best assist the Allies if it came into the war and also “spoke of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk.” House told Grey that “if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would, in itself, probably carry us into the war.” Later that morning at Buckingham Palace, House and the king also “fell to talking, strangely enough, of the probability of Germany sinking a trans-Atlantic liner and of the consequences of that act” and the king remarked, “Suppose they should sink the
Lusitania
with American passengers aboard?”

Aboard the
Lusitania
, just before midday and with crew and passengers already starting to prepare for arrival in Liverpool the next morning, Turner made out the hazy smudge of land off his port bow. He decided it must be Brow Head, a promontory on the western tip of Ireland fifteen miles northwest of the Fastnet Rock, which fog had prevented him from seeing. He was surprised—by his calculations the
Lusitania
should have passed Fastnet well to seaward and should now be heading up the east coast toward Queenstown.

At around twelve forty
P.M.
, he received a further coded warning: “Submarines 5 miles south of Cape Clear proceeding west when sighted at ten
A.M.
”

Turner knew that if the land spied at noon had indeed been Brow Head, then the U-boats should now be many miles astern of his ship. However, shortly after one
P.M.
, a further promontory came in view which Turner thought must be Galley Head. Yet Galley Head was forty miles from Brow Head—a distance he could not possibly have sailed in an hour. Therefore, a perplexed Turner realized he must have identified one of the two landmarks wrongly.

Then at around one forty
P.M.
the unmistakable sight of the 256-feet-high Old Head of Kinsale topped by its lighthouse appeared and Turner at last knew for certain where he was. Concerned that the fog might close in again, he decided to fix his exact position by ordering his officers to take a four-point bearing on the Old Head. The process would take forty minutes and require the ship to sail a straight course at a constant speed. At one fifty
P.M.
with the
Lusitania
steaming at eighteen knots and holding a steady course some twelve miles from land, his officers began to take the bearing.

Turner’s maneuverings had delivered the
Lusitania
to the submerged
U-20
, only some eleven miles away and racing to get into position to attack. Earlier that morning as the fog had dispersed, the
U-20
’s
lookouts had sighted a small vessel approaching slowly from the Irish coast. Fearing it was a naval patrol vessel—it was in fact a trawler—Schwieger had given the order to dive. However, shortly before midday the
U-20
crew had heard what sounded like the chugging of powerful engines. Schwieger brought the submarine high enough for his pilot to see through the periscope what ship was passing. Lanz identified her correctly as an elderly English warship—the cruiser
Juno
, hurrying back to Queenstown after receiving U-boat warnings. Schwieger gave chase but the old ship, steaming at full speed and zigzagging, eluded him.

Schwieger ordered the
U-20
to surface to find “unusually good visibility, very beautiful weather.” Then at one twenty
P.M.
, a petty officer spotted something else and shouted to Schwieger to come and look. Staring through his binoculars, Schwieger saw “a forest of masts and stacks.” At first he assumed “they must belong to several ships. Then I saw it was a great steamer coming over the horizon.” According to his war diary, as he and his men continued to watch they made out the four funnels of a large passenger steamer directly ahead. Schwieger gave the order “diving stations.” Leveling off at the periscope depth of thirty-five feet, Schwieger watched the
Lusitania
. At first he thought that, as with the
Juno
, he would not be able to catch her: “When the steamer was two miles away it changed its course. I had no hope now, even if we hurried at our best speed, of getting near enough to attack her.” He had just summoned Lanz to the periscope but “at that instant . . . saw the steamer change her course again. She was coming directly at us. She could not have steered a more perfect course if she had deliberately tried to give us a dead shot. A short fast run and we waited.”

With the
Lusitania
just twenty-three hundred feet away, Schwieger ordered his torpedo officer Raimund Weisbach to be ready to fire the fifth of his original seven torpedoes. Weisbach checked the position of rudder and hydroplanes and set the depth at ten feet. A young conscript electrician from Alsace, Charles Voegele, protested against attacking what was clearly a passenger liner but Schwieger ignored him and at two ten
P.M.
ordered Weisbach to fire. Released from a bow torpedo tube, the three-thousand-pound missile—twenty-feet long, with a diameter of twenty-one inches and carrying 350 pounds of TNT—sped through the water at over forty knots, ten feet beneath its surface, releasing a stream of bubbles in its wake.
*

The
Lusitania
’s lookouts had been ordered to “report
anything
that appeared suspicious,” even if it was just “a broom handle in the water.” Seaman Leslie Morton had just taken up his position as “extra look-out, right up in the eyes of the ship on deck; my responsibility being the starboard side of the bow from ahead to the beam.” To his horror he suddenly spotted “a turmoil, and what looked like a bubble on a large scale in the water, breaking surface some 800 to 1000 yards away. A few seconds later I saw two white streaks running along the top of the water like an invisible hand with a piece of chalk on a blackboard. They were heading straight across to intercept the course of
Lusitania
. I grabbed the megaphone which was provided for the look-outs’ use and yelled towards the bridge: ‘Torpedoes coming on the starboard side, Sir!’ ”

As other lookouts also yelled warnings, Second Officer Percy Hefford grabbed his binoculars and seeing something moving through the water ordered every watertight door to be closed. Captain Turner ran from his cabin up the narrow stairs to the bridge in time to see a foaming white line streaking straight for the ship but too late to order evasive action. He heard a sound “like the banging of a door on a windy day” followed by “a kind of a rumble” and thought a torpedo had struck between the second and third funnels on the starboard side. Quartermaster Hugh Johnston, at the wheel, and those on the bridge found themselves choking in coal dust so thick “we couldn’t see each other for quite a while.” Turner told Johnston to steer “hard-a-starboard the helm,” intending to make for the shore twelve miles off.

Johnston obeyed and Turner then ordered him to hold the ship steady and “keep her head into Kinsale.” However, Johnston found it impossible to steady the helm. Turner again gave the command “hard-a-starboard” and Johnston again put the wheel round only to find that this time there was no response at all—the steering mechanism had locked. Turner told him to “keep trying.” With the
Lusitania
still plowing ahead, Turner ordered “full speed astern,” intending to reduce her speed by reversing the engines. Down in the engine room Senior Third Engineer George Little heard the bell ring with the command but could not obey. The steam pressure had plunged from 195 pounds to 50. The engines were out of commission and the
Lusitania
out of control.
*

Second Officer Hefford, scanning the list indicator beneath the compass, told Turner that the ship was listing 15 degrees to starboard. Turner muttered “My God” and ordered all boats to be lowered to the rail and his officers to their boat stations. Meanwhile, in the Marconi room radio officer Robert Leith was repeatedly tapping out an SOS message:
COME AT ONCE, BIG LIST OFF SOUTH HEAD, OLD KINSALE
. A coastal wireless station picked the distress call up almost immediately and Leith next transmitted the ship’s precise position:
10 MILES SOUTH OF THE OLD HEAD OF KINSALE
. Again the message was picked up.

In the first minutes after the attack, passengers’ initial reactions were shock and uncertainty. One man noticed that “most of the people seemed transfixed where they stood.” When the torpedo struck many had been finishing lunch, like bellboy Ben Holton, who was enjoying a “sweet boiled apple pudding” when he heard “a shattering roar” or, like first-class passengers Oliver Bernard and Theodate Pope, taking a stroll on deck in the afternoon sun. Bernard suddenly glimpsed what looked like “the tail of a fish,” but he was convinced it must be a submarine periscope. Staring harder he made out “the fast-lengthening track of a newly-launched torpedo, itself a streak of froth.” Though everyone aboard had been “thinking, dreaming, sleeping, and eating submarines” since leaving New York, he could scarcely believe that an attack had actually happened. When the torpedo hit, he felt “a slight shock through the deck,” followed by “a terrific explosion” and “a sullen rumble in the bowels of the liner.” Next a huge column of water shot about sixty feet into the air and debris rained down. Before long he noticed “on all hands a pell-mell scurry below to obtain lifejackets.” People reappeared singly, in pairs or in groups with life jackets in their hands or with them “inadequately strapped on.” Setting out to find a life jacket for a friend, on the port side of the promenade deck Bernard saw crewmen attempting to lower some of the boats. A seaman wielding an ax was holding back frantic passengers already trying to climb in. By the entrance to the first-class saloon Bernard nearly collided with Alfred Vanderbilt, who grinned at him. Another passenger heard Vanderbilt say quietly, “Well, they got us this time, all right.”