A Higher Form of Killing (29 page)

While the German high command bickered and sniped at one another, the American press condemned Germany’s latest note. “Impudently trifling in spirit and flagrantly dishonest in matter,” wrote the
Philadelphia North American
. The
New York
World
called it “the answer of an outlaw who assumes no obligation to Society.”

President Wilson immediately drafted a firm response on his Hammond typewriter, which he put to a cabinet meeting the next morning, June 1. To a fellow cabinet member, Bryan looked “under great strain.” When his renewed proposal of a simultaneous protest to Britain about its blockade was rejected, he burst out “You people are not neutral—you are taking sides.” President Wilson told him with a “steely glitter” in his eyes, “Mr. Bryan, you are not warranted in making such an assertion. There are none of us who can justly be accused of being unfair.” Bryan apologized but continued to argue that “arbitration was the proper remedy.”

Wilson’s next draft of the reply stated that American customs officials had done their duty in verifying that the
Lusitania
was not a naval vessel, was not armed, was not serving as a troop transport, and that her cargo complied with the laws of the United States. If the Germans had evidence to the contrary they should produce it. In any case, questions of carrying contraband and of any contribution to the sinking from exploding munitions did not justify attacking the
Lusitania
without warning. Only if the
Lusitania
had resisted or refused to permit “visit and search” would the submarine commander have been justified in hazarding the ship.

Bryan believed he was losing any influence he retained and, deeply concerned by the latest draft’s uncompromising tone, on Saturday, June 5, visited William McAdoo, the secretary of the treasury and an old friend. A “visibly nervous” Bryan told him this second note, as drafted, “would surely lead to war with Germany . . . His usefulness as Secretary of State was over” and he intended to resign.

McAdoo persuaded him to think it over during the weekend but was under no illusion that Bryan would change his mind. He went to the White House to warn Wilson who showed no surprise, observing that Bryan had been “growing more and more out of sympathy with the Administration in the controversy with Germany.” In a letter to Edith Galt he put it more bluntly, indicating that Bryan “is a traitor, though I can say so as yet only to you.”

Bryan spent a troubled weekend—his wife had to call a doctor to prescribe him sleeping pills. On June 8, he visited Wilson and tried for an hour to make him change his stance, but could not. He told the president that “Colonel House has been Secretary of State and I have never had your full confidence.” Then he went back to his office and wrote out his resignation.

President Wilson immediately appointed Robert Lansing acting secretary of state and on June 9 he dispatched the final version of the United States’ second protest to the German government. It stated Germany must accept the right of American citizens “bound on lawful errands” to travel on merchant ships of belligerent powers. The lives of noncombatants “cannot lawfully or rightfully be put in jeopardy by the capture or destruction of an unresisting merchantman.” The German government should undertake the “measures necessary to put these principles into practice in respect of the safeguarding of American lives and American ships.”

The press and his opponents vilified Bryan following his resignation. A sarcastic
New York Times
called it the wisest action of his political career. The
New York
World
described it as “unspeakable treachery, not only to the President, but to the nation.” The
New York
Telegraph
thought that his “idea of an ultimatum seems to be that it should be addressed to the President of his own country.”

Even many fellow Democrats rejoiced. Ambassador Page congratulated Wilson on being a fine “executioner,” adding, “One American newspaper says truly: ‘There always was a yellow streak in [Bryan], and now in this crisis he shows a white liver.’ . . . Conscience he has about little things—grape juice, cigarettes, peace treaties, etc.—but about a big situation, such as embarrassing a President, he is fundamentally immoral. Well, cranks always do you a bad turn, sooner or later. Avoid ’em, son, avoid ’em!”

*
Just as today, the newspapers were eager for exclusive photographs and reports. The
Daily Mirror
of May 8 included the following: “
The Daily Mirror
pays the highest price for exclusive photographs and has always done so. Photographs of the sinking of the
Lusitania
and incidents aboard before the disaster should be sent to (the paper).”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“The Very Earth Shook”

Just over a week earlier, on May 31, as dusk was about to fall, between three and four hundred German army ground crew carefully guided the gray-painted zeppelin
LZ38
—secured by guylines to trolleys running along rails—out of its shed at Evere, north of German-occupied Brussels. The airship—536 feet long and 61 feet in diameter—was one of a new generation of zeppelins that both the German army and navy had been waiting for.
LZ38
could climb at one thousand feet a minute and its four six-cylinder 210-horsepower Maybach petrol engines gave it a top speed of fifty-five miles per hour. Its self-contained gas cells—secured by wire and netting within the latticed metal girders—held 1,126,400 cubic feet of hydrogen.
LZ38
could remain airborne for twenty-four hours.

The zeppelin was about to depart on the first ever air raid on London. The kaiser had sanctioned the mission only the day before, till then still reluctant to bomb any part of the city where his royal relations lived. A recent British raid on German headquarters at Charleville while he had been inspecting positions on the western front had prompted this change of heart. In the kaiser’s mind, by their act the British had violated what von Tirpitz called his “quaint” concept of “tacit understanding” between monarchs not to attack one another personally. The only condition he had imposed was that German raids had to be east of the Tower of London.

Thirty-five-year-old Hauptmann Erich Linnarz, the army’s most experienced pilot, was commanding
LZ38
on the mission that would launch Der Feuerplan (The Fire Plan) advocated by von Tirpitz when he had urged setting fire to London “in thirty places.” His hope was that the mass dropping of incendiary bombs on London would cause such ferocious firestorms that its citizens would demand an end to the war.

During the minutes before takeoff Linnarz and his men went through their final checks of the instruments—the compass, the inclinometer measuring the airship’s upward or downward angle in flight, the altimeter showing the height above ground, the variometer for measuring the speed of ascent or descent, the electric thermometer recording the temperature of the gas cells—all the controls and dials painted with luminous radium so they could be read in the dark. While
LZ38
had still been in its shed, the effect of the “lift”—the amount by which, with its gas bags full of hydrogen, it was lighter than the air it was displacing—had been exactly counterbalanced. Everything from the crew themselves, the petrol and lubricating oil, the guns and bombs had been carefully weighed and water ballast added to achieve the “neutral buoyancy” required to counteract the airship’s tendency either to rise or to rest too heavily on the ground.

In the hours ahead Linnarz and the rest of his twenty-strong crew would depend on each other as much as on
LZ38
’s technical sophistication for their safety and success. Being an airshipman required special qualities. Peter Strasser, commander of the German navy’s Airship Division, defined them as “a keen pleasure in flying, a strong sense of duty, self-control, will-power, and the ability to form rapid decisions; good eyesight, physical dexterity, and a sound physique, particularly heart and nerves; no tendency to dizziness or sea-sickness; a well-developed sense of direction; a quick perception of tactical and strategic conditions; a knowledge of the principles of both open and trench warfare; familiarity with the science of gunnery . . . the ability to take aerial photographs and interpret them; a working knowledge of petrol engines, meteorology, field telegraphy and wireless telegraphy . . . and the use of carrier pigeons”—the latter to take information back to base giving the airship’s last position in the event of mechanical or other problems.

Linnarz would command the mission from the fully-enclosed forward-control gondola slung beneath the airship’s keel where the windows gave him good all round visibility, except toward the rear. With him was his second in command, responsible for operating the bombsight—a complex instrument manufactured by the company Carl Zeiss of Jena, renowned for its optical instruments. To get a fix on the target, the officer first consulted the altimeter, then checked the airship’s speed over the ground using a stopwatch to time the passage of an object between two crosshairs representing a distance of three hundred meters. Also in the control car were the navigator and two warrant officers responsible for working the elevation and rudder controls. Immediately behind them, in a compartment soundproofed to cut out noise, were the two wireless operators who would use the radio equipment that for a while at least would keep Linnarz in touch with his base.

Linnarz’s engineer and team of mechanics were in the small streamlined rear gondola with the airship’s engines where the noise level made talking near impossible in the fume-laden air. Linnarz thought that “to exist for hours in this roaring devil’s cauldron where glowing heat and biting cold alternated, required a stone constitution and iron nerves.” However, it was nothing compared to “the demands made upon the mechanics when . . . the lives of the entire crew depended upon the repairing in mid-air of damage to the motor or propeller.”
LZ38
was also carrying a skilled sailmaker ready to mend any tears in the exterior skin enclosing the airship’s rigid duralumin frame or in the gas-tight fabric covering the hydrogen cells. The latter was made of several layers of expensive “gold beater’s skin”—the outer membrane of cattle intestines, thin but with great tensile strength and used as an interleaf in the making of gold leaf—bonded to a light cotton fabric.

To defend against attack,
LZ38
was carrying nine-millimeter Maxim machine guns, some in the front and rear gondolas, others mounted on external gun platforms. On occasion commanders chose to fly without them because of their weight and because they believed a zeppelin’s best defense against enemy fire was to rise out of range by jettisoning some of the water ballast stored in cloth-backed rubber bags.

To survive the subzero temperatures—sometimes as low as –30 degrees Celsius—Linnarz and his men were wearing two sets of thick woolen underclothes, leather overalls and helmets, fur-lined coats, scarves, and gloves. Their fur-lined shoes had straw or rubber soles since the metal nails of ordinary shoes could raise dangerous sparks from the ship’s struts. They carried bottles of liquid oxygen round their necks in case of altitude sickness. To sustain them they had supplies of strong coffee and “a swallow of cognac”—the latter only permitted once a certain altitude had been reached—and bread, sausage, and chocolate. Proximity to so much flammable hydrogen put smoking out of the question.

Like submariners, Linnarz and his men had to cope with a cramped and isolated environment. Along the length of the airship’s triangular keel—formed by the two bottom longitudinal girders of the hull and an apex girder—ran a narrow
langlauf
or catwalk connecting the various sections of the airship. From it ladders descended into the open air to the gondolas suspended beneath the keel. Climbing these ladders at altitude occasionally brought on vertigo, causing men to black out and tumble thousands of feet to their deaths. Along the catwalk were tanks of spare fuel for the engines, the bags of water ballast, the rudder-control cables, the speaking tubes through which the crew communicated, and the bombs hanging vertically in racks. Beneath them were shuttered hatches that could be opened either from the control hatch or by working control wires within the keel. On its mission to London
LZ38
was carrying thirty-five pear-shaped high-explosive bombs, weighing up to 220 pounds each, and ninety 20-pound incendiary bombs encased in tarred rope and packed with benzol, tar, and thermite—a substance that burns at a very high temperature.

Again like U-boatmen, airshipmen needed great skill to handle their fragile craft in difficult, often highly dangerous, conditions. An airman described the challenges of flying a zeppelin: “The aerial sea is in constant motion and in addition to variable currents flowing from different directions in the same horizontal plane . . . we have powerful up-draughts and down-draughts to allow for.” As in a U-boat, the prospect of meeting a horrible end must have been hard to ignore. Peter Strasser, who ordered naval zeppelin crews not to carry parachutes because of their heavy weight—fifty-one pounds—provided his men with poison as “an unfailing preventive from the agonising death which results from being burnt alive.”
LZ38
, as an army zeppelin, was carrying parachutes but the crew must have wondered whether they would in fact be of any use.