A Higher Form of Killing (20 page)

With four boiler rooms containing a total of twenty-five boilers providing steam to four giant steam turbines, the
Lusitania
was indeed fast. At full power, her turbine blades produced seventy thousand horsepower to turn four quadruple screw propellers that pushed her through the water at a top speed of twenty-five knots. What Sumner failed to mention was that on this next voyage the six boilers of boiler room number four would not be operating, reducing her maximum speed to twenty-one knots. This was a wartime economy measure since when running at top speed the
Lusitania
consumed nearly twenty trainloads of coal—six thousand tons—in a single Atlantic crossing and required sixty-five thousand gallons of water per minute to cool her engines.

However, at this stage in the war no ship traveling at faster than fourteen knots had been torpedoed and Sumner assured anxious passengers that the British Admiralty would take “mighty good care” of the
Lusitania
and “there was absolutely nothing to fear.” Most believed him and only a few altered their bookings to ships belonging to neutral countries. The American Line’s
New York
, with actress Ellen Terry and avant-garde dancer Isadora Duncan aboard, and Holland-Amerika’s
Rotterdam
were both sailing that day for England. However, neither could match the
Lusitania
for comfort or speed. When the
Lusitania
sailed she would be carrying 1,257 passengers—her largest eastbound complement since the start of the war—including 198 citizens of the neutral United States.

The warning also unsettled the 702-strong crew. A superstitious sailor seized the peacock-feathered hat of a newly wed passenger as she came aboard and flung it into the sea, telling her that peacock feathers spelled bad luck. The news of the warning soon spread below decks to the stewards and stewardesses preparing the cabins; the cooks and scullions like sixteen-year-old George Wynne from Liverpool and his semi-invalid father Joseph, cutting up vegetables in the galley, and the bellboys, like fifteen-year-old Ben Holton, who had amused themselves the previous night electrocuting rats in the hold but were now hurrying around the ship in their brass-buttoned uniforms delivering messages. It also reached the trimmers and firemen of the “black gang” who had been laboring all night to raise steam—the trimmers bringing coal from the huge longitudinal bunkers that, like those of the elderly cruisers
Aboukir
,
Hogue
, and
Cressy
sunk by the
U-9
in the early days of the war, ran the length of the ship and the firemen, working stripped to the waist and wearing clogs to protect their feet from the showers of hot ash, as they stoked the boiler furnaces. Now, sweaty and grimy though they were, some of the “black gang” left their posts seven decks below the bridge to come up and see what was happening.

The
Lusitania
’s captain, fifty-eight-year-old Liverpool-born William Turner, was phlegmatic—talk of torpedoing his ship was “the best joke I’ve heard in many days.” He had some experience. Earlier that year while captaining the Cunarder
Transylvania
, he had escaped a pursuing U-boat and believed he had outrun another on the
Lusitania
’s last voyage to New York.

As the time for departure approached the quayside became a jostling mass of passengers and porters as well as reporters eager for a good story and photographers ready to snatch a good shot of departing celebrities. Among the latter was rakish millionaire Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who was traveling to England to attend a board meeting of the International Horse Show Association and to donate a fleet of vehicles to the British Red Cross. Four years earlier the tall, elegant Vanderbilt had married his second wife, heiress Margaret Emerson McKim, after settling out of court with her then husband who had threatened to sue him for alienation of affection.

Security men also mingled with the crowds, not just because of the warning but because the U.S. and British authorities suspected that New York’s docks, from which 80 percent of ships bound from the United States to Britain departed, had been infiltrated by German agents planning to sabotage ships carrying American-manufactured war matériel to Britain. Despite their efforts, in all the upheaval at least three German spies slipped aboard the
Lusitania
that morning and concealed themselves.

Just after twelve twenty
P.M.
, because of delays caused by last-minute arrivals of forty extra passengers and their baggage from the Anchor Line’s
Cameronia
,
which was to be requisitioned by the British Admiralty—and according to press speculation was to sail to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to take on troops and supplies for England—and a last-minute visit to the ship by Captain Turner’s actress niece, tugs at last backed the
Lusitania
out into the Hudson. The earlier rain had cleared and in bright sunshine spectators on the quayside waved, flung confetti, and then covered their ears as the “Big Lusy’s” foghorn sounded three mighty blasts. At one end of the deck the ship’s band played “Tipperary” while at the other a Welsh male voice choir sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Photographs taken as the
Lusitania
slipped away show a group of young women, thought to be volunteer Red Cross nurses on their way to the western front, crowding the rail clutching American flags.

As the ship nosed past Sandy Hook out into the Atlantic, those on deck saw the three camouflage-painted British warships hovering just outside American territorial waters to keep watch on marine traffic arriving in and leaving New York and in particular to ensure that German liners interned there did not escape. Two of the three were purpose-built warships. However the third—the
Caronia
—had been a Cunard passenger vessel until the start of the war when the Admiralty requisitioned her into the navy and mounted guns on her deck to make her an armed merchant cruiser. Some seamen rowed from the
Caronia
with mailbags for the
Lusitania
to carry to England. A sailor on the
Caronia
’s deck took a last photo of the departing liner.

Five days earlier, a German intelligence report had been issued from Berlin detailing the movements of enemy merchant ships for the information of U-boat crews and other naval staff. One entry read:

1 May: Lusitania (Cunard), English, 30,396 tons, in passage to Liverpool, expected around 8 May

On the day before the
Lusitania
sailed, the submarine
U-20
left the German naval base of Emden near Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea. The
U-20
belonged to the Third U-boat Half-Flotilla together with two other submarines—the
U-27
—due to sail several days later, and the
U-30
, which had already departed. In addition to intelligence reports, the formal orders to all three from their commander, Hermann Bauer, read: “Large English troop transports expected starting from Liverpool, Bristol Channel, Dartmouth . . . Get to station on fastest possible route around Scotland. Hold as long as supplies permit . . . attack transport ships, merchant ships and warships.” More specifically, the
U-27
was to head for the Bristol Channel, the
U-30
for Dartmouth, while the
U-20
, under her commander Kapitän-Leutnant Walther Schwieger, was to make for the approaches to Liverpool, the
Lusitania
’s home port.

The thirty-year-old Berlin-born Schwieger had commanded the
U-20
since the previous December and had become much respected by his men for his competence, courage, and concern for their safety. His submarine was one of the new generation powered by MAN of Augsburg’s advanced diesel engines and commissioned in 1913. She could travel at fifteen knots on the surface and nine knots when submerged. Her armaments were one three-and-a-half-inch deck gun and four eighteen-inch torpedo tubes, two fore and two aft. She carried seven torpedoes, each with a 350-pound charge of trotyl—a newly developed TNT-type explosive.

Despite her technical sophistication, living conditions for the
U-20
’s crew of four officers and thirty-one men as well as for Schwieger’s dachshund were cramped. The submarine was only 210 feet long while the width between her ribs was a mere 20 feet. Supplies packed every spare space, with sausages wedged next to grenades. Most of the crew slept in hammocks—only a few had bunks. Even then, the bunk was not necessarily all their own since crewmen took turns using them depending on their duty rosters. Sometimes they had to share with equipment too. A submariner on the
U-20
recalled how “when the boat was fully loaded there was one torpedo more than there was place for. I accommodated it in my bunk. I slept beside it. I had it lashed in place at the outside of the narrow bunk, and it kept me from falling out of bed when the boat did some of its fancy rolling. At first I was kept awake a bit by the thought of having so much TNT in bed with me. Then I got used to it.”

Living in such confined conditions sometimes for months at a time was stressful. The air grew foul—“enough to give you a headache that you would never get over.” With little water to spare for washing, men stank of sweat and oil fumes. They wore the same leather clothes, sometimes for weeks, and hardly shaved, becoming in the words of one submariner as bearded and shaggy-haired as “the real pirates of old days.” Lack of fresh food, fresh air, and exercise wore them down. Constipation was a particular problem. Officers doled out castor oil to sufferers who then had to negotiate the U-boat’s complicated WCs, or “internal heads.” These operated on a system of valves and levers that blew the contents back in the user’s face if he made a mistake. “Getting your own back,” submariners called it.

The crew were also often damp. Bilge water slopped about while, since the internal temperature of a U-boat exceeded that of the seawater outside, “the moisture in the air condensed on the steel plates and formed drops which had a very disconcerting way of dripping on the face of a sleeper.” The men protected themselves with waterproof clothing or rubber sheets, but “it was really like living in a damp cellar.” Sailors woke up choking “with considerable mucus in the nose and frequently a so-called ‘oil-head.’ ”’

Claus Bergen, a German war artist seconded to the U-boat service, described what happened on the order to dive, “
Alarm! Tauchen!
” The deck emptied immediately as men rushed for the open hatchway to hurl themselves down the steel ladder. The captain stood in the conning tower as the heavy hatch was swung shut over his head. As soon as a bell signaled that the hatch was sealed, crewmen spun the wheels and levers to open vents, allowing seawater to pour into the diving tanks and the boat’s pumps to expel the air from them. Gradually the boat tipped forward and the interior took on a spectral quality. “In the dim glow of the electric light, a mystic modulation of various shades of grey, stands a figure enclosed in a narrow iron space, surrounded by all manner of levers and wheels, on a sort of pedestal, connected with the periscope that can be raised and lowered like a lift . . . . the commander.”

Peering through the glass of a small side porthole men saw “foaming masses of water crashing over our bows . . . Then a confusion of bright foam and clear water, inaudible, fantastic, outside the glass: light grey, dark grey, the deep water grows ever darker and more calm.” They were enchanted by “the magical green light” and the air bubbles sparkling over the hull. If a U-boat came to rest on the ocean floor, shoals of fish, ordinarily frightened away by the noise of the propellers, were lured by the electric lights and would “stare at us with goggling eyes close to the windows in the turret.”

To surface, the chief engineer blew out the diving tanks with compressed air and the boat rose to an “infernal din of hissing, roaring water.” The bow and the gun emerged first but soon the whole deck was clear, dripping with seawater. Strips of golden yellow seaweed dangled from the steel hawsers. At the welcome opening of the hatch fresh sea air streamed in and very soon the diesel engines began to throb. Surfacing was a relief but also essential. The batteries that powered a submerged U-boat’s electric motors needed frequent recharging which was only possible on the surface using the power of the main diesel (or petrol) engine to do so.

U-boatmen never forgot the “peculiar thrill and nervous sensation” of standing for the first time in the conning tower as the submarine submerged, or the anxiety of wondering whether all the valves and hatches had been properly closed and whether the U-boat’s steel hull could withstand the pressure. They found it hard to escape the feeling of being caught in “a gigantic mouse-trap.” Running beneath the surface, the crew were blind to “advancing ships, derelicts or projecting rocks.” They had to trust their commander at the periscope. If he did sight a ship he had only moments to decide whether to dive or to attack, knowing that his periscope could easily be spotted by a ship’s lookout in the crow’s nest. If the submarine hit a mine or was rammed, death was almost inevitable. A German submariner described opening a U-boat salvaged after striking a mine: “A burst of choking poisonous air poured out, and the sight of the corpses was terrible . . . What scenes of horror and madness had been enacted in that narrow cabin! The scratches on the steel walls, the corpses’ torn finger-nails, the blood-stains on their clothes and on the walls, bore all too dreadful witness.” What he saw brought home that “death in a plunging submarine was as evil a fate as the imagination could conjure.”