Dead Wake (45 page)

“To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”

Now came pandemonium. Everyone rose at once. Flags waved. Men cheered, whistled, shouted, cried. Wilson had spoken for thirty-six minutes; he never mentioned the
Lusitania
by name. He quickly walked from the chamber.

Four days passed before both houses of Congress approved a resolution for war. During this period, as if deliberately seeking to ensure that no American had last-minute doubts, U-boats sank two American merchant ships, killing at least eleven U.S. citizens. Congress took so long not because there was any question whether the resolution would pass but because every senator and representative understood this to be a moment of great significance and
wanted to have his remarks locked forever in the embrace of history. Wilson signed the resolution at 1:18
P
.
M
. on April 6, 1917.

To Winston Churchill, it was long overdue. In his memoir-like history
The World Crisis, 1916–1918
, he said of Wilson, “
What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915. And if done then what abridgment of the slaughter; what sparing of the agony; what ruin, what catastrophes would have been prevented; in how many million homes would an empty chair be occupied today; how different would be the shattered world in which victors and vanquished alike are condemned to live!”

As it happened, America joined the war just in time. Germany’s new campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare had succeeded to an alarming degree, although this had been kept secret by British officials. An American admiral, William S. Sims, learned the truth when he traveled to England to meet with British naval leaders to plan America’s participation in the war at sea. What Sims discovered shocked him. German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk.
In Queenstown, U.S. consul Frost saw striking corroboration of the new campaign’s effect: in a single twenty-four-hour period, the crews of six torpedoed ships came ashore. Admiral Sims reported to Washington, “
Briefly stated, I consider that at the present moment we are losing the war.”

Just ten days later, the U.S. Navy dispatched a squadron of destroyers. They set off from Boston on April 24. Not many of them. Just six. But the significance of their departure was lost on no one.

O
N THE MORNING
of May 4, 1917, anyone standing atop the Old Head of Kinsale would have seen an extraordinary sight. First there appeared six plumes of dark smoke, far off on the horizon. The day was unusually clear, the sea a deep blue, the hills emerald, very much like a certain day two years earlier. The ships became steadily more distinct. Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these
were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain’s hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble,
The Return of the Mayflower
. American flags hung from homes and public buildings. A British destroyer, the
Mary Rose
, sailed out to meet the inbound warships, and signaled, “
Welcome to the American colors.” To which the American commander answered, “Thank you, I am glad of your company.”

On May 8, the destroyers began their first patrols, just a day beyond the two-year anniversary of the sinking of the
Lusitania
.

O
NE HOT DAY IN
J
ULY
1916,
A HARBOR PILOT WALKED
into the ship-news office in Battery Park in Manhattan and invited a group of reporters to accompany him on a brief voyage, by tugboat, up the Hudson River to Yonkers, north of Manhattan, where he was to “fetch out” a ship, that is, guide it downriver to the wider and safer waters of New York Harbor. Ordinarily this was not a voyage the reporters would be inclined to make, but the day was stifling and the pilot said the fresh air would do them all good. The reporters, among them the
Evening Mail
’s Jack Lawrence, also brought along a good deal of alcohol, or, as Lawrence put it, “liquid sustenance.” As their tugboat approached the Yonkers wharf, the reporters saw that the ship was an old Cunard ocean liner, the
Ultonia
, docked there to pick up a load of horses for the war. It was a small ship, with one funnel. “
She looked so smeared and dirty and utterly woebegone that we hardly recognized her,” Lawrence wrote. The ship’s black hull had been painted gray, in haphazard fashion. “Much of this had chipped off, giving her a peculiar, spotted appearance.”

The day was languid, the river calm, and yet the ship moved with a peculiar side-to-side motion. Lawrence had never seen such a thing and found it “almost uncanny.” This rolling, the pilot explained, was caused by the hundreds of horses within the ship. Sensing movement, all the horses roped to one side of the hull
would suddenly rear backward in alarm, causing a slight roll. This in turn would startle the horses anew and cause those on the opposite side to step back. The side-to-side roll became more pronounced with each cycle, to the point where the ship looked as if it were being buffeted by a heavy sea. This, the pilot explained, was called a “
horse storm,” and under certain conditions it could bang a ship against its wharf and damage deck rails and boats.

As the tugboat pulled up alongside the
Ultonia
, the ship’s cargo doors swung open to admit the pilot. The sun blazed. Inside the darkened hold stood one man, shaded by the overhead door. He looked down at the pilot and reporters. He did not smile. Lawrence recognized him at once: Capt. William Thomas Turner. “
His old blue uniform was soiled and wrinkled,” Lawrence wrote, but “his cap, bearing the Cunard Line insignia, was still at the familiar jaunty angle. The figure of the man was still erect and commanding.”

The pilot climbed into the ship.

“Glad to see you aboard, sir,” Turner told him. “We’ll get under way immediately. These horses are raising hell.”

Turner had been given command of the ship in November 1915, after its regular captain had fallen ill during a stop in France. He had been the only captain available to replace him. Just before Turner left Liverpool to take over command, Cunard’s chairman Alfred Booth asked him into his office. Booth began to apologize about assigning Turner to such a modest vessel, but the captain stopped him. “
I told him there were no regrets on my part,” Turner said. “I would go to sea on a barge if necessary to get afloat again, as I was tired of being idle and on shore while everyone else was away at sea.”

In December 1916, Cunard reassigned Turner and put him in command of the
Ivernia
, another passenger ship recommissioned for war duty, though this one carried troops, not horses. Turner was not its master for long.
On January 1, 1917, while in the Mediterranean off the island of Crete, the ship was torpedoed and sunk, killing 153 soldiers and crew. Turner survived. The ship had been zigzagging at the time of the attack.

Cunard made Turner a relief captain and put him back in charge of the
Mauretania
, but this was a thin expression of confidence, for the ship was in dry dock.

In 1918, Turner was once again compelled to relive the
Lusitania
disaster when a federal judge in New York opened a trial to determine whether Cunard was liable for the ship’s loss. The proceeding combined seventy lawsuits filed by American survivors and next of kin. Here too the judge ruled that the sole cause of the disaster was Schwieger’s attack and that he had fired two torpedoes.

The final humiliation for Turner came later, with publication of Winston Churchill’s book, in which Churchill persisted in blaming Turner for the disaster and, despite possessing clear knowledge to the contrary, reasserted that the ship had been hit by two torpedoes.

The old captain—“
this great little man,” as his friend George Ball put it—had survived the sinking of the
Lusitania
with his pride intact; he’d survived the sinking of the
Ivernia
; but this new affront hurt him. At sixty-four, when Cunard required captains to retire, Turner left the company and traveled to Australia to try to mend things with his estranged family but found that life there did not suit him. He returned to England and retired to his home in Great Crosby, outside Liverpool, to be looked after by his longtime companion, Mabel Every. He kept bees in half a dozen hives that he had built in his yard and harvested the honey they produced. Often in conversation he would absentmindedly pick stingers from his arms and shins.

Turner was said to be a fundamentally happy man who liked a good pipe now and then. He told stories of the sea, but never the one most people wanted to hear. “
Capt. Turner felt the loss of the
Lusitania
very much, and seldom mentioned it to anyone,” wrote Miss Every. It was this silence that told his friends how heavily the disaster weighed on him. In a reply to a sympathetic female friend in Boston, Turner wrote, “
I grieve for all the poor innocent people that lost their lives and for those that are left to mourn their dear ones lost.” But that was all he was willing to say on the subject, he
told her. “Please excuse me saying more, because I hate to think or speak of it.”

At the same time, he was not haunted by the disaster; nor did it leave him depressed and broken, as popular conception might have held. Wrote George Ball, “
He was far too strong a character to brood over a matter that was beyond rectification and allow it to worry him to the point of melancholy—a characteristic he never at any time displayed.” Turner himself said, in an interview with the
New York Times
, “
I am satisfied that every precaution was taken, and that nothing was left undone that might have helped to save human lives that day.”

Turner retained his good humor, according to George Ball. “
Merriment and humor were always prominently observable in his company and never was he unable to keep all his associates interested and amused.” This became more difficult when, in his seventies, cancer infiltrated his colon. “The poor fellow did suffer great agony in the last year of his life,” Ball wrote.

Turner died on June 24, 1933, at the age of seventy-six. “
He died as he had lived,” Ball wrote, “full of courage and spirit and without complaint. So passed to the great beyond one of the hardy and able sailors of the old hard school.”

Turner’s niece, Mercedes Desmore, attended the funeral. The captain was buried at a cemetery in Birkenhead, across the Mersey from the Liverpool docks. His name was engraved at the bottom of the family tombstone, along with a brief reference to the
Lusitania
.

A new war came, and on September 16, 1941, a Nazi U-boat torpedoed and sank a British ship, the
Jedmoor
, off the Outer Hebrides, killing thirty-one of its thirty-six crew. Among the lost was a fifty-five-year-old able seaman named Percy Wilfred Turner—Captain Turner’s youngest son.

I
N
A
PRIL
1917, Kptlt. Walther Schwieger was given command of a new submarine, U-88, larger than U-20, and with twice the number of torpedoes. A few months later, on July 30, he received the German navy’s highest award, a pretty blue cross with a French
name, Pour le Mérite, nicknamed the Blue Max. At the time he was only the eighth U-boat commander to receive one, his reward for having sunk 190,000 gross tons of shipping. The
Lusitania
alone accounted for 16 percent of the total.

In London, in the Old Admiralty Building, Room 40 tracked Schwieger and his new boat through four cruises, one of which lasted nineteen days. The fourth cruise began on September 5, 1917, and proved to be considerably shorter. Soon after entering the North Sea, Schwieger encountered a British Q-ship, the HMS
Stonecrop
, one of a class of so-called mystery ships that outwardly looked like vulnerable freighters but were in fact heavily armed. While trying to escape, Schwieger steered his boat into a British minefield. Neither he nor his crew survived, and the submarine was never found.
Room 40 recorded the loss with a small notation in red: “Sunk.”

In Denmark, coastal residents continued to visit the shore where his previous boat, U-20, had run aground, and now and then would climb upon the wreckage, until in 1925 the Danish navy demolished the remains with a spectacular explosion. By then, the conning tower, deck gun, and other components had been removed.
They reside today in a seaside museum in Thorsminde, Denmark, on an austere stretch of North Sea coastline. Severed from its base and laced with rust, the conning tower sits on the museum’s front lawn with all the majesty of a discarded refrigerator, a forlorn ghost of the terrifying vessel that once hunted the seas and changed history.

C
APT
. R
EGINALD
“B
LINKER
” H
ALL
was knighted in 1918 for his work with Room 40, though the work itself was kept secret for decades. He went on to win election to the House of Commons as a Conservative member and remained active in politics through the 1920s. At one point, during a general strike in 1926, the Conservative party established a temporary newspaper, the
British Gazette
, and put Hall in charge of personnel. The editor in chief was his old boss, Winston Churchill. Circulation soared to one million
copies a day before the strike ended. Hall retired from politics in 1929 and moved to a home in the New Forest, a lovely terrain of pasture and woods in southern England.