A Higher Form of Killing (32 page)

The official British reaction to Mathy’s raid—the most deadly so far—was guarded. An Admiralty communiqué stated only that an attack in the northeast [of England] had caused fires in “a drapery establishment, a timber yard and a terrace of small houses.” However, anti-German rioting broke out in Hull and many of its inhabitants, convinced the authorities were powerless to stop the zeppelins coming and going as they pleased, sought places outside the city to sleep at night.

Naturally enough, the Admiralty made much of the destruction of the zeppelin shed and
LZ38
and in particular of Warneford’s triumph as the first British pilot to destroy a zeppelin in the air. He was awarded the Victoria Cross within thirty-six hours but killed just a few days later when, on June 17, while taking American journalist Henry Needham on a flight from Paris, his plane went into a spin at two thousand feet. Warneford managed to pull out of the spin but in the process the plane’s tail broke off and at seven hundred feet it turned upside down. Both men were thrown to the ground. Needham died instantly, Warneford an hour later.
***

With the German army adjusting to the loss of two of its zeppelins, on June 16, Strasser sent two naval zeppelins—
L10
and
L11
—from Nordholz, headquarters of the German navy’s Airship Service on bleak sandy flats near Cuxhaven at the mouth of the Elbe, to raid Tyneside, a center of coal, steel, and shipbuilding in northeast England.
L11
turned back because of engine problems leaving
L10
to continue alone. Warnings sounded by a naval patrol vessel that spotted her went unheeded in the Tyneside shipyards, where men in the workshops and blast furnaces were working at full stretch. Klaus Hirsch,
L10
’s commander, described how the “great number of lights and the glare of blast furnaces” perfectly illuminated the dreadnought
Resolution
under construction in Palmer’s shipyard in Jarrow. He dropped seven high-explosive and five incendiary bombs, hitting Palmer’s engine shop with devastating effect but leaving
Resolution
undamaged.

Total casualties for the raid were eighteen dead and seventy-two wounded of which all but one fatality were Palmer’s workers.

*
In the first week of the war as a gesture toward national unity, the British government had remitted all suffragettes’ sentences of imprisonment. However, Sylvia remained an advocate of peace unlike her mother and sister Christabel who both supported the war.

**
Kapitän-Leutnant was the rank to which most naval airship captains were promoted. Army airship commanders usually had the rank of Hauptmann, “captain.”

***
After the war, nuns commemorated Warneford with a plaque on the wall of the Convent of Saint Elisabeth in Ghent, while a nearby street was named for him. A nun said, “There was in all our hearts a fierce joy for the intrepid daring and victory of Lieutenant Warneford.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Order, Counter-Order, Disorder!”

On June 15, 1915, the same day that
L10
attacked Tyneside, the inquiry into the sinking of the
Lusitania
opened in Central Hall, Westminster, before Lord Mersey and four assessors—Admiral Sir Frederick Inglefield, another serving naval officer, and two Merchant Navy captains. Sir Edward Carson, KC, the attorney general, began proceedings for the government of which he was a member.
*
He said that the first torpedo had hit the ship between funnels three and four. Then, contrary to the information known to the Admiralty and the government through Room 40’s decoded messages, but in line with the government’s wish to explain away the second explosion reported by survivors and avoid any discussion that it might be due to munitions, he added that “there was a second and perhaps a third torpedo.” He continued that the ship was only eight to ten miles from land when hit and although capable of twenty-one knots at the time was only doing eighteen. The court might consider, he said, whether the captain was correct in traveling at that speed, adding that Captain Turner had received “specific instructions and directions,” and, again, the court should assess how far the captain had followed them.

Predictably most interest focused on how Captain Turner would defend himself. He was probably suffering from posttraumatic shock, as just before the inquiry opened he wrote that he still could not bear “to think or speak” about the disaster. At his first appearance in open session, asked whether the
Lusitania
’s
crew were proficient in handling lifeboats, he answered, “No, they were not.” He later explained that they lacked practice and experience and admitted that he was “an old-fashioned sailor man” who did not think present standards matched those of his youth. Significantly, contrary to his evidence at the Kinsale inquest, he followed the Admiralty line and agreed that there had been not one but two torpedoes, the second “immediately after the first” which had struck between the third and fourth funnels. (In his only public interview about the sinking, which he gave to the
Daily Mail
in 1933, Turner reverted to there having been only one torpedo.)

Two sessions closed to the public considered the Admiralty’s instructions to Captain Turner. Sir Edward Carson cross-examined him precisely and aggressively in a seeming attempt to confuse him into admissions of failure to follow Admiralty guidance. Carson described all the instructions Turner had received, including those relating to avoiding enemy surface vessels, which advised sticking to the coast and directly contradicted advice on how to avoid submarines—which was to stay out of sight of land. On all but one occasion Carson carefully quoted the date of each instruction and asked Turner “did you get that?” The exception was the guidance on zigzagging. Carson read out all three paragraphs of the note of April 16, flagged by Webb and about which there was uncertainty as to whether Turner had received it. He did not give a date for it but simply asked Turner, “Did you
read
that?” Perhaps bemused, Turner replied, “I did.” Carson then hopped back to another note dated March 22, 1915, about steering a mid-channel course. Resuming his previous mode of questioning, he gave the precise date and asked “Did you get this?”

Carson put it to Captain Turner that he had been eight to ten miles from land (and by implication not following the mid-channel guidance) at the time of the
U-20
’s attack. Turner replied he had been more like fifteen miles off. He had closed in to take a four-point bearing to establish his precise position. Carson suggested that he must already have known approximately. Turner snapped back, “I wanted to get my proper position off the land—I do not do my navigation by guess-work.” The
Lusitania
had been doing only eighteen knots to allow him to time his arrival at the Mersey Bar so that he could cross it, as recommended, without delaying in known dangerous waters outside the harbor. Questioned closely on why he was not zigzagging at the time of the attack, Captain Turner replied that he thought he need only do so when he actually sighted a submarine. In any case the words about zigzagging that Carson had read to him seemed “different language” to what he recalled.

Throughout, Turner’s answers tended to the monosyllabic. He seemed anxious and sometimes confused, Cunard’s barrister once urging him “pull yourself together and think before you answer.” The barrister also interpolated extra information helpful to Turner and thus to Cunard. Toward the end of the hearing, he apologized to Lord Mersey for Turner being “a bad witness” in the sense that “he was confused.” Mersey responded: “In my opinion at present, he may have been a bad Master during that voyage, but I think he was telling the truth.”

When the lawyers discussed evidence substantiating Turner’s view about the hazards of delaying outside Liverpool harbor, Lord Mersey discovered that the Admiralty had supplied him with a less detailed memorandum, in particular about signals sent to the
Lusitania
, than provided to others. They were probably different drafts of Webb’s submission. Plainly exasperated, Mersey was told that because of the confusion and possible uncertainty over which version Turner had thought they were referring to during cross-examination, it might be difficult to use some of the information in assessing Turner’s actions.

In giving evidence on the number of torpedoes, most witnesses—among them Leslie Morton, the lookout who had seen the first torpedo—said there had been two. Two crewmen, both British naval reservists, said that in addition a third torpedo had been fired, perhaps by a second submarine from the port side. None said only one. Hugh Johnston, the quartermaster who was firm that there had been only one, was not questioned on the topic. Lord Mersey firmly deflected the Seamen’s Union representative from discussing the nature and location of the alleged torpedo strikes and the attendant consequences for the watertight compartments of the ship. This was despite the representative’s pleading that both he and Mersey had found bulkheads a relevant topic at the
Titanic
inquiry. Thus the effect of the torpedo on the
Lusitania
’s vulnerable longitudinal bunkers and the consequence for the speed of both the list and the sinking were not debated.

On June 10, five days before the inquiry began, the government had broadened the Defence of the Realm Act to make it an offense “to collect, record, publish, or communicate or attempt to elicit information” on the nature, carriage, and use of His Majesty’s “war materials” for any purpose. Previously the act had only prohibited the collection, recording, and so forth of such information if intended for communication to the enemy. Thus, in compliance with the new provision of the act, the inquiry did not discuss the
Lusitania
’s cargo in detail. Sir Edward Carson merely read into the record the U.S. government’s note to Germany refuting German allegations about the cargo, backed up with a note from the collector of customs in New York, Dudley Field Malone, to Cunard general manager Charles Sumner, confirming that the cargo did not violate American law on what passenger ships could carry.

When Lord Mersey and his assessors retired to contemplate their findings, his original intention was clearly to blame Captain Turner since he inquired through Admiral Inglefield whether the government would think it expedient that “blame should be very prominently laid upon the Captain” for disregarding Admiralty instructions. His concern was that if he did so Germany “might use it as another pretext for defending their action in sinking the vessel.” Both the First Lord of the Admiralty, Arthur Balfour, and the Foreign Office were consulted before the Admiralty replied direct to Mersey that neither would object to a verdict “that the Master received suitable written instructions which he omitted to follow and that he was also fully informed of the presence of hostile submarines . . . If you should still have any doubts on the subject, Mr. Balfour would be glad to see you.”

Whether Lord Mersey took up the invitation to meet is unknown. However, his short, two-paragraph-long report, published on July 17, did not blame Turner in any way. Instead, as Coroner Horgan had done, it placed responsibility for the disaster entirely on the captain and crew of the “submarine of German nationality” that carried out the attack, and on their superiors in Berlin. In a ten-page amplificatory annex, Lord Mersey stated that the attack was “murder” and “contrary to international law and the usages of war.” Both Captain Turner and Staff Captain Anderson were “competent men and . . . did their duty . . . No doubt there were mishaps in handling the ropes of the boats and in other such matters but there was . . . no incompetence or neglect and I am satisfied that the crew behaved well throughout and worked with skill and judgement . . . They did their best in difficult and perilous circumstances and their best was good.” The German warning demonstrated that the attack was premeditated and planned before the
Lusitania
sailed.

Lord Mersey concluded unequivocally that “two torpedoes” hit the
Lusitania
on the starboard side “almost simultaneously” but also gave some credence to the evidence of a second submarine firing from the port side, adding “there was no explosion of any part of the cargo.” The Admiralty had devoted great care “to the questions arising out of the submarine peril” and the officials merited “the highest praise.” The advice given to Captain Turner was not meant “to deprive him of the right to exercise his skilled judgement . . . His omission to follow the advice in all respects cannot fairly be attributed either to negligence or incompetence. He exercised judgement for the best . . . The whole blame for the cruel destruction of life in this catastrophe must rest solely with those who plotted and with those who committed the crime.”

Continuing tensions between the civilian and naval factions within the German government, and the consequent arguments over the drafting of the reply to the second U.S. note, delayed its dispatch until July 8. Ignoring the American protests against sinking without warning, it reiterated complaints about the British blockade that forced Germany to defend “her national existence” with the submarine campaign. It offered to guarantee the safety of American ships and lives by introducing a safe-conduct scheme. Designated American ships flying the Stars and Stripes and painted in red, white, and blue would receive safe conduct through the submarine zone if they carried no contraband and gave reasonable advance notice.