Dead Wake (25 page)

The note achieved nothing. Complaints poured in from American shippers whose cargoes had been detained or confiscated, although the State Department did succeed in securing
the prompt release of an automobile shipped by an American socialite. For the British the stakes were simply too high to allow compromise. As Britain’s ambassador to America, Cecil Spring Rice, had written the previous fall, “
In the life and death struggle in which we are now engaged it is essential to prevent war supplies reaching the German armies and factories.”

America’s neutrality seemed harder and harder to maintain. In a letter to a female friend, Mary Hulbert, Wilson wrote, “
Together England and Germany are likely to drive us crazy, because it looks oftentimes as if they were crazy themselves, the unnecessary provocations they invent.”

Still, Wilson recognized the fundamental difference that existed between how the two sides executed their campaigns against merchant traffic. The Royal Navy behaved in civil fashion and often paid for the contraband it seized; Germany, on the other hand, seemed increasingly willing to sink merchant ships without warning, even those bearing neutral markings. The torpedo attack on the
Gulflight
was a case in point. Within the State Department, Undersecretary Robert Lansing warned that in light of the
Gulflight
attack the United States was duty bound to adhere to Wilson’s February declaration vowing to hold Germany “to a strict accountability” for its actions. Wilson made no public comment, but he and Secretary of State Bryan, in background conversations with reporters, signaled that the administration would treat the incident in judicious fashion. “
No formal diplomatic action will be taken by the United States Government … until all the facts have been ascertained and a determination reached,” the
New York Times
reported in a front-page story on Wednesday, May 5.

In fact, Wilson found the
Gulflight
incident disquieting. This was an American ship; the attack had killed three men. What’s
more, it had occurred without warning. While the incident didn’t strike Wilson as having the magnitude to draw the nation into war, it did demand some kind of protest. That Wednesday, he cabled his friend Colonel House, still in London, to ask his advice on what kind of response to send to Germany.

House recommended “
a sharp note” but added, “I am afraid a more serious breach may at any time occur, for they seem to have no regard for consequences.”

LUSITANIA

THE MANIFEST

A
BOARD THE
L
USITANIA
,
THE
C
UNARD
D
AILY
B
ULLETIN
kept passengers abreast of war news but, like its counterparts on land, reported only broad movements of forces, as if war were a game played with tiles and dice, not flesh-and-blood men. These reports did not begin to capture the reality of the fighting then unfolding on the ground, particularly in the Dardanelles, where the Allied naval and ground offensive had stalled and British and French forces had dug trenches that mimicked those on the western front.

The most terrifying part of battle was the exit from a trench—standing up and climbing out, knowing that the opposing force would at that moment unleash a fusillade that would continue until the offensive concluded, either with victory, meaning a few yards gained, or defeat, a few yards lost, but invariably with half one’s battalion dead, wounded, or missing. “
I shall never forget the moment when we had to leave the shelter of the trenches,” wrote British private Ridley Sheldon, of combat at Helles, at the southwest tip of the Gallipoli Peninsula. “It is indeed terrible, the first step you take—right into the face of the most deadly fire, and to realize that any moment you may be shot down; but if you are not hit, then you seem to gather courage. And when you see on either side of you men like yourself, it inspires you with a determination to press forward. Away we went over the parapet with fixed
bayonets—one line of us like the wind. But it was absolute murder, for men fell like corn before the sickle.”

The wounded lay in the open or in shell holes awaiting stretcher bearers who might not come for hours, or even days. Injuries ranged from minor penetrations by shrapnel to grotesque disfigurements. “
I got back into the trench, and saw what I had not seen before, for the smoke had cleared now,” wrote Capt. Albert Mure, also on Helles. A shell had just landed in his trench, in the spot where moments earlier he had been writing messages to be delivered by two orderlies. One orderly survived, the other did not. “His body and his head lay 4 or 5 feet apart. Two of my signalers were killed also, and mutilated so horribly that to describe their condition would be inexcusable.”

Elsewhere at Helles, Sgt. Denis Moriarty and his First Royal Munster Fusiliers fought off a Turkish assault that began at ten o’clock at night. “
They crept right up to our trenches, they were in thousands, and they made the night hideous with yells and shouting, ‘Allah, Allah!’ We could not help mowing them down.” Some managed to reach Moriarty’s trench. “When the Turks got to close quarters the devils used hand grenades and you could only recognize our dead by their identity discs. My God, what a sight met us when day broke this morning.”
By the time the Allied invading force would finally be evacuated, in January 1916, some 265,000 Allied troops and 300,000 Turks would be dead, wounded, or missing.

Men in the ships massed offshore fared little better. The armada was an impressive one—hundreds of vessels, ranging from minesweepers to giant dreadnoughts. But many were in easy range of Turkish artillery embedded in high ground, which dropped thousands of tons of high explosives onto their decks. The French battleship
Suffren
was struck by a shell that destroyed a gun turret and ignited a fire deep within its hull; another shell destroyed its forward funnel. Rear Adm. Émile Guépratte descended from the bridge to survey the damage and bolster the morale of his sailors. “The scene,” he wrote, “
was tragically macabre: the image of desolation, the flames spared nothing. As for our young men, a few
minutes ago, so alert, so self-confident, all now [lay] dead on the bare deck, blackened burnt skeletons, twisted in all directions, no trace of any clothing, the fire having devoured all.”

Aboard the
Lusitania
, there was quiet. There were books, and cigars, and fine foods, afternoon tea, and the easy cadence of shipboard life: strolling the deck, chatting at the rails, doing crochet, and just sitting still in a deck chair in the sea breeze. Now and then a ship appeared in the distance; closer at hand, whales.

B
ACK IN
New York, on Wednesday, May 5, Cunard at last provided the customs office with the
Lusitania
’s full cargo manifest. Unlike the initial one-page version filed by Captain Turner before departure, this “Supplemental Manifest” was twenty-four pages long and listed over three hundred consignments.

Here were muskrat skins, nuts, beeswax, bacon, salt brick, dental goods, cases of lard, and barrels of beef tongues; machinery from the Otis Elevator Company; and enough candy—157 barrels of it—to populate the fantasies of all the schoolchildren in Liverpool. The manifest also listed one case of “Oil Paintings,” these accompanying first-class passenger Sir Hugh Lane, a Dublin art collector. To identify this consignment merely as oil paintings was an understatement. The paintings were insured for $4 million (about $92 million today) and were rumored to have included works by Rubens, Monet, Titian, and Rembrandt.

More problematic, but entirely legal under U.S. neutrality laws, were the 50 barrels and 94 cases of aluminum powder and 50 cases of bronze powder, both highly flammable under certain conditions, as well as 1,250 cases of shrapnel-laden artillery shells made by the Bethlehem Steel Company, bound for the British army, and badly needed on the western front, where British forces were hampered by a severe shortage of artillery ammunition. (Wrote Churchill, “
The army in France was firing away shells at a rate which no military administration had ever been asked to sustain.”)
The shrapnel shells were essentially inert. They contained only a minimum bursting charge; their associated fuses were packed separately and
stored elsewhere. The cartridges that held the powerful explosives needed to propel the shells from a gun were
not
among the ship’s cargo; these would be attached later, at an arsenal in Britain.

Also aboard, according to the manifest, were 4,200 cases of Remington rifle ammunition, amounting to 170 tons.

U-20

AT LAST

T
HROUGHOUT THE MORNING OF
W
EDNESDAY
, M
AY
5, heavy fog lingered over the sea off Ireland. From 4:00
A
.
M
. on, every time Schwieger checked on the weather through his periscope all he saw was a dark opacity. He held U-20 on a southerly course and kept its speed slow, probably about 5 knots, to conserve battery power. At 8:25
A
.
M
. Schwieger gauged visibility as good enough to bring the boat to the surface, though banks of fog persisted all around him.

His crew now decoupled the two electric engines and engaged the diesels to bring U-20 to cruising speed and recharge the batteries. Somewhere off to his left, in the murk, was the southwest coast of Ireland, here a phalanx of stone cliffs jutting into the North Atlantic. He would soon pass Valentia Island, where the British had built a powerful wireless transmitter. Schwieger’s own wireless man would by now be picking up strong signals from the Valentia tower, but could not read the codes in which they were sent.

U-20 moved through curtains of fog. By 12:50
P
.
M
. Schwieger believed himself to be abreast of the Fastnet Rock, though he could not see it. The rock was one of Britain’s most prominent maritime landmarks, a road sign to the Western Approaches. Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century knew it as “Ireland’s Teardrop” because it was the last bit of Ireland they saw before their ships
entered the North Atlantic en route to America. Here Schwieger ordered a left turn, to begin sailing along Ireland’s south coast toward Liverpool. This was the upper edge of a great funnel of ocean called the Celtic Sea, where inbound ships converged from north, west, and south. It was the perfect hunting ground for a U-boat, but Schwieger saw nothing.

He wrote, “During the whole afternoon no steamer sighted in spite of the clearing weather, although we found ourselves within one of the main shipping lanes.”

Visibility improved. Soon Schwieger was able to see the Irish coast, but only for a few moments. Over the next three hours, U-20 cruised on the surface and encountered no ships of any kind. The evening haze began to gather once again.

Just before five o’clock, while off the coast of County Cork, Schwieger spotted what at first seemed to be a large square-rigged sailing ship. In the haze, it cut a lovely figure, its three masts billowing with canvas. Unlike other U-boat commanders, who sank such ships with reluctance, Schwieger was unmoved. He saw a target. U-20 turned toward the ship, and Schwieger’s men loaded and aimed its deck gun.

As Schwieger got closer, he saw that once again the light and haze had deceived him. The ship did have three masts, but it was only a small schooner. He signaled the vessel to stop. Although he had fired on ships many times without warning, here he returned, briefly, to cruiser rules. “As no danger existed for our boat in approaching,” he wrote, “we made for the stern of the sailer.”

He ordered the schooner’s captain and four-man crew to abandon ship and bring its registry and cargo manifest over to U-20. The schooner proved to be the
Earl of Lathom
, out of Liverpool, carrying rocks from Limerick. It weighed all of 99 tons.

As the schooner’s crew began rowing away, Schwieger ordered his men at the gun to begin firing at the schooner’s waterline. Despite its small size and decidedly nonbuoyant cargo, the vessel proved a stubborn target. Shot after shot boomed across the sea and exploded against its hull. Schwieger’s gun crew needed twelve shells to sink it.

S
EVERAL HOURS
later, as dusk and fog gathered, Schwieger found another target. A steamship emerged from the fog, very near—too close to allow Schwieger to prepare an attack. He turned U-20 away, to gain sea room, but kept the boat on the surface. The steamship stopped, apparently expecting an examination under cruiser rules.

Outwardly, the vessel weighed about 3,000 tons and seemed to be Norwegian, but Schwieger and his pilot, Lanz, sensed something amiss. The markings were unusually high on the hull, and Schwieger suspected they might have been painted onto tarpaulins.

Schwieger maneuvered for a torpedo attack. He ordered a bronze torpedo, set to run at a depth of 8 feet. When U-20 was about 330 yards away from the steamer, Schwieger gave the order to fire.