Dead Wake (19 page)

A lot of her friends and family knew she was sailing that day on the
Lusitania
. “My!” she wrote. “
The mail I got today. The steward who was giving it out was amused. He said it might be my birthday.” Friends and relatives had sent her letters and gifts. “I had a pair of silk stockings from Prue and a piece of silk from Aunt Ruth and a rose. I had cards from Nellie Casson, Will Hobson, Tom, Edith Klaas and a nice letter from Lu which I’m going to answer.”

Some were concerned about her voyage. “I’m so surprised to hear that Will and Bee cried, I didn’t think it would worry them.” She herself hated to cry, but, she wrote, “I’ve felt like doing it quite a lot since I’ve left.”

U
PON ENTERING
international waters, Turner slowed the ship. In the distance, three large vessels materialized from the haze. These were British warships, stationed there to keep the
Vaterland
and the other German liners locked in New York Harbor. Turner ordered “full astern” to bring the
Lusitania
to a complete stop.

Two of the three ships were cruisers, HMS
Bristol
and
Essex
; the third was the
Caronia
, a Cunard liner converted to military use and now heavily armed. Turner had once been its captain. The two cruisers lay off the
Lusitania
’s starboard side, the
Caronia
off the port, each at a distance of about a “cable’s length,” equivalent to a tenth of a nautical mile, or roughly 600 feet. All three warships lowered a small boat, and the sailors in each began rowing toward the
Lusitania
, through “
swirling mist-veils,” as Capt. James Bisset, the
Caronia
’s master, recalled. The boats carried mail bound for England. “There was scarcely a breeze to ruffle the surface of the ocean,” Bisset wrote. “A light mist clung around the ships, like a shroud.”

Bisset spotted Captain Turner on the bridge, and Staff Captain Anderson. He knew the two men well. Some years earlier Bisset had served under both as junior third officer on the
Umbria
, an older passenger liner.

Turner and Anderson stepped out onto the port-side wing of the bridge and waved to the officers on the
Caronia
’s bridge. Everyone seemed to know one another, having served under, beside, or over one another through the years. After Turner and Anderson went back inside the bridge, the
Lusitania
’s second officer, Percy Hefford, appeared on the port wing. “He was a special friend of mine,” Bisset recalled. Before both joined Cunard, they had served together on an ancient tramp steamer. The thing Hefford had wanted most was to serve aboard the
Lusitania
. “Now, there he was,” Bisset wrote.

The two men used their arms to semaphore greetings and good-byes.

“Cheerio!”

“Good luck!”

“Good voyage!”

After the boats pulled away to return to their respective ships, Captain Turner gave the order for maximum speed. Full ahead. The
Lusitania
’s giant propellers raised a Niagara of water at the stern, and the ship began to move. Turner sounded his foghorn three times, the “Sailor’s Farewell.”

Ordinarily, all the
Lusitania
’s furnaces and boilers would be fully engaged during a crossing, with all four funnels belching smoke, but the war had caused a decline in travel so dramatic that Cunard had been compelled to seek cost reductions wherever it could find them.
Turner was under orders issued the preceding November to run the ship using only three of its four boiler rooms, for a savings of 1,600 tons of coal per trip. But this also reduced the ship’s maximum speed by 16 percent, from 25 knots to 21, ironic considering the ship’s original mandate. Though seemingly a modest reduction, it nonetheless cut the distance the
Lusitania
could travel each day by 100 nautical miles, adding one full day to a transatlantic crossing.

A man aboard one of the warships took a photograph, believed to be the last ever taken of the
Lusitania
, which showed the ship steaming off into the mist-shrouded Atlantic, smoke pouring from just three funnels. Cunard did not publicize the change, and few, if any, passengers knew it had been made.

B
Y
8:25
A
.
M
., S
UNDAY
, F
AIR
I
SLE WAS VISIBLE
3
SEA MILES
ahead, to starboard, but Schwieger could not yet make out the “Mainland” of the Orkneys archipelago, off the northernmost tip of Scotland, which by now he expected to see off his port side. The Mainland was the largest island in the Orkneys and had the highest elevation.

On this third day of the cruise, there was new tension in the boat. U-20 was about to leave “Bright Hans” behind and enter the closely watched waters of the North Atlantic, north of Scotland, in the vicinity of the big British base at Scapa Flow. Schwieger could not have been surprised, therefore, when just after logging his location, he spotted two destroyers in the distance, moving with a deliberation that suggested they were on patrol.

He ordered a fast dive, climbed down into the conning tower, and closed the hatch behind him.

S
IMPLE ENOUGH
in concept, diving was in fact a complex and perilous process that took time and left a U-boat exposed to attack. With a well-trained crew, a submarine of U-20’s class could descend from a fully surfaced condition to a level deep enough to clear the hulls of the largest ships in
as little as seventy-five seconds. In a crisis, however, each of those seconds could seem very
long.
Certain older boats needed from two and a half minutes to as many as five. Their crews nicknamed them “
suicide boats.” While diving, a U-boat was at its most vulnerable, subject to ramming by warships, and to gunfire from long distances away. Penetration by a single shell would prevent a U-boat from submerging, thus eliminating its one advantage and its sole means of escape.

The men controlling U-20’s bow and stern hydroplanes—horizontal rudders—now adjusted them for maximum dive, bow planes down, stern planes up. To submerge, a submarine did not simply fill its dive tanks with water and sink. As the boat moved forward under power, water flowed over the planes in the same way that air passes over the wings and flaps of an aircraft, driving the boat below the surface. Seawater would be pumped into the tanks only to the degree necessary to achieve a particular depth. Finding this point took skill, for it varied from day to day, even moment to moment, as sea conditions changed and the weight of the boat steadily declined. The firing of a torpedo made a U-boat suddenly 3,000 pounds lighter. Even the consumption of food diminished the boat’s weight by a perceptible amount. The boxes and crates in which food was stored went overboard; the supply of fresh water, a significant source of weight, fell daily.

The buoyancy of seawater changed in accord with shifts in temperature and salinity. In the Baltic, boats descended much more readily than in the more heavily salted waters of the North Sea. A submarine passing the mouth of a river might suddenly find itself dropping because of the outrush of fresh water, like an airplane passing through an air pocket. Changes in water temperature due to current and depth also affected buoyancy. A miscalculation could cause catastrophe. A submarine might bob unexpectedly to the surface within view of a destroyer.

Bad weather further complicated things. High waves could prevent the hydroplanes from digging fully into the sea.
Commander Paul Koenig recalled one terrifying morning when, after surfacing into a storm, he spotted the smoke plume of a nearby destroyer and ordered an emergency dive. The men in the control room below opened vents to admit water into the tanks at both sides of the bow
to reduce buoyancy. The boat stayed on the surface. Koenig watched through one of the tiny windows in the conning tower with increasing anxiety as each new wave lifted the bow into the air.

Koenig ordered the hydroplanes tilted to their maximum angles and called for full speed ahead, hoping the acceleration would increase the downward drive of the planes. Still the boat stayed on the surface, rising and falling in the waves.

At last the planes dug in, and the boat began to descend. But now a new problem presented itself. The boat plummeted downward at an angle so steep that Koenig had to grasp the periscope eyepiece to keep from falling. The “manometer,” which registered depth, showed a startling rate of descent. Then came an impact. Men were propelled forward, along with everything else in the boat that wasn’t bolted in place.

There was silence. The face of the manometer cast
a reddish light through the control room. One officer broke the tension. “
Well, we seem to have arrived,” he said.

The boat stood at a steep angle, about 36 degrees. The stern oscillated up and down. The engines continued running, “raving at intervals in a way that made the whole boat roar from stem to stern,” Koenig wrote. The chief engineer was first to grasp what was happening. He ordered full stop.

Koenig understood. The submarine’s bow was lodged in the seabed, which here, according to his charts, was 31 meters below the surface, about 100 feet. His boat was twice that in length. With the action of the waves, the stern at intervals protruded from the surface, and the propellers spun in open air, stirring a geyser of foam visible a long way off. Koenig feared—expected—that at any moment a shell from the destroyer would come crashing through the hull.

Now, with the problem defined, Koenig directed the crew to fill the stern diving tanks and blow water from the bow. Gradually the submarine rose and righted but stayed safely submerged. Koenig ordered full speed and away.

I
N DIVING
, timing was crucial. As U-20 began its descent, its engineers shut down the diesel engines and engaged the electric. All vents and exhaust ports leading to the exterior of the hull had to be closed and hatches sealed. Once this was done, Schwieger gave the order to begin admitting water to the dive tanks. Air was forced out through valves at the top, and seawater entered through valves below. Suction engines helped draw the water in.
To speed the process, Schwieger sent a contingent of men into the bow.

Just as U-20 neared its cruising depth, Schwieger ordered air pumped back into the tanks to halt the boat’s descent. The crew always knew when this point was reached because the pumps would engage
with an angry growl.

In the control room, the helmsmen maintained depth by adjusting the hydroplanes. To ascend to periscope depth, they maneuvered only with the planes, not by filling the dive tanks with air. This allowed more precision and reduced the possibility that the boat might unexpectedly surface. While submerged, a U-boat had to keep moving at all times, held trim and steady by the hydroplanes. The only exception was when a boat was in shallow waters, where it could sit on the bottom. In deep seas like the North Atlantic, this was impossible, for the pressures at the seabed would crush a boat’s hull. The constant forward motion caused a problem. When the periscope was up, it produced a wake on the surface, a white feather of water visible for miles.