Dead Wake (42 page)

On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “
willful and wholesale murder.”

Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty,
ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, “
That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the
Lusitania
against attack.”

T
HE
A
DMIRALTY
was far more prompt in laying out the contours of its strategy for assigning fault to Turner. The day after the disaster, Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, circulated a two-page memorandum, marked “Secret,” in which he charged that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s instructions that called for him to zigzag and to “give prominent headlands a wide berth.” Instead, Webb wrote, Turner had “
proceeded along the usual trade route, at a speed approximately three-quarters of what he was able to get out of this vessel. He thus kept his valuable vessel for an unnecessary length of time in the area where she was most liable to attack, inviting disaster.”

Webb made a formal request for an investigation by Britain’s Wreck Commission, under Lord Mersey, who had led inquiries into the losses of many ships, including the
Titanic
and the
Empress of Ireland
.

On Wednesday, May 12, Webb intensified his attack on Captain Turner. In a new memorandum, he wrote that Turner “
appears to have displayed an almost inconceivable negligence, and one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he has been got at by the Germans.” In the left-hand margin, First Sea Lord Fisher, in his wild fulminating hand, jotted, “I hope Captain Turner will be arrested
immediately
after the inquiry
whatever
the verdict of finding may be.”

The Admiralty took the unprecedented step of insisting that key parts of the planned inquiry, especially the examination of Turner, be held in secret.

U.S.
CONSUL
F
ROST
sensed early on that the Admiralty’s soul had hardened against Turner. On Sunday, May 9, Frost paid a call on Admiral Coke, senior naval officer in Queenstown, accompanied
by two U.S. military attachés who had just arrived from London to help arrange the return of American dead.

Admiral Coke openly criticized Turner for sailing too close to shore and too slowly and read aloud the warnings that had been sent to the
Lusitania
on Friday. But Consul Frost was surprised at how little detail these messages contained. “
Bare facts only,” Frost noted, later. “No instructions or interpretation. It is true that Turner should have kept farther out; but to my mind it seemed that the Admiralty had by no means done their full duty by him.”

One of the American attachés, Capt. W. A. Castle, wrote his own account of the meeting and noted that a particular subject was glaringly absent from the conversation. “
I was struck by the fact that the Admiral while seeming to be desirous of justifying the Admiralty in its measures of protection, did not mention the presence of any destroyers or other Naval vessels.” Castle added that during his train trip back to London he had discussed the subject with a fellow passenger, a Royal Navy lieutenant, “who spoke quite frankly, although I suppose of course confidentially, and said that he could not understand nor could his brother officers, why so many torpedo boats of the old type, which could make 25 knots an hour without difficulty, and would be just the thing to protect an incoming steamer, are left at various wharves, instead of being used for this purpose, and said that had they placed one of these to starboard, another to port, and another in front of the
Lusitania
, she could not have been torpedoed.”

W
HY THE
A
DMIRALTY
would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the
Lusitania
. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “
Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but
also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere.

The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.

In the first message of the series, Schwieger reported: “
Have sunk off the South Coast of Ireland, one sailing ship, two steamers, and LUSITANIA. Am steering for the mouth of the Ems.”

The Admiralty received it at 9:49
A
.
M
.; the decrypted copy was marked “Most Secret.” This message confirmed that the culprit had indeed been U-20, the submarine that Room 40 had been tracking since April 30.

That afternoon, Room 40 received the intercept of a reply sent to Schwieger by the commander of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which read, “
My highest appreciation of Commander and crew for the success they have achieved. Am proud of their achievement and express best wishes for their return.”

Then came a third message, sent from Schwieger to his base. After detailing the latitude and longitude of his attack on the
Lusitania
, Schwieger noted that he had sunk the ship “
by means of one torpedo.”

This was a surprise. By now the prevailing view in the world’s press was that the
Lusitania
had been sunk by
two
torpedoes and that these accounted for the two major explosions reported by passengers. But now the Room 40 cognoscenti knew without doubt that Schwieger had fired only one torpedo.

And this, they understood, raised sensitive questions: How could a single torpedo sink a ship the size of the
Lusitania
? And
if there was no second torpedo, what exactly, caused the second explosion?

They recognized, also, that Schwieger’s message had to be kept secret at all costs, for it was precisely this kind of special knowledge that could tip Germany to the existence of Room 40.

B
Y THE TIME
the Mersey inquiry began, on June 15, 1915, the British government had undergone one of its periodic upheavals, amid controversy over the shell shortage on the western front and the failure, at great cost in lives and ships, of Churchill’s plan to force the Dardanelles. New men ran the Admiralty. Fisher had resigned, and Churchill had been jettisoned. These changes, however, caused no easing of the campaign against Captain Turner.

After preliminary public testimony from several witnesses, including Turner, who briefly described his experience in the disaster, Lord Mersey convened the first of the secret sessions and again called Turner to the witness box. The Admiralty’s lead attorney, Sir Edward Carson, attorney general, questioned the captain in harsh fashion, as if the proceeding were a murder trial with Turner the prime suspect. Carson clearly hoped to prove that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s directives, in particular its instructions to keep to a midchannel course.

Turner testified that by his own standards he
was
in midchannel. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he passed the Old Head of Kinsale at distances as close as a mile. Indeed, one photograph of the
Lusitania
shows the ship steaming at full speed past the Old Head at the maritime equivalent of a hair’s breadth. At the time of the attack, the ship by Turner’s reckoning had been a dozen miles off, maybe as many as 15. (Years later a diver would pinpoint the wreck’s location at 11¾ miles from Kinsale Head.)

Carson also badgered Turner as to why the
Lusitania
was moving at only 18 knots when it was torpedoed and challenged the wisdom of the captain’s plan to reduce speed in order to arrive at the Mersey Bar off Liverpool at a time when he could sail
into the harbor without stopping. Carson argued that if Turner had zigzagged at top speed he could have evaded the submarine and, owing to the time consumed by the frequent course changes, would still have made the bar on time.
Carson let pass the fact that although Turner was not deliberately zigzagging, his several changes of course that morning to set up his four-point bearing did describe a zigzag pattern, with fatal result: the last starboard turn put him directly in U-20’s path.

Turner’s own lawyer, Butler Aspinall, Britain’s leading expert in maritime law, did his best to sculpt Turner’s story into a coherent account of the
Lusitania
’s last morning and to win for him Lord Mersey’s sympathy. “
I mean to say, we have the very great advantage of knowing so much now which was unknown to him then,” Aspinall said; “we are sitting upon the matter in cool judgment, with an opportunity of looking at the charts, and the circumstances under which we are dealing with it were not the circumstances under which the Master would have an opportunity of dealing with it.”

In all, Lord Mersey heard testimony from thirty-six witnesses, including passengers, crew, and outside experts. At the conclusion of the inquiry, he defied the Admiralty and absolved Turner of any responsibility for the loss of the
Lusitania
. In his report, Mersey wrote that Turner “
exercised his judgment for the best. It was the judgment of a skilled and experienced man, and although others might have acted differently and perhaps more successfully he ought not, in my opinion, to be blamed.” Mersey found Cunard’s closure of the ship’s fourth boiler room to be irrelevant. The resulting reduction in speed, he wrote, “
still left the
Lusitania
a considerably faster ship than any other steamer plying across the Atlantic.” Mersey laid blame entirely on the U-boat commander.

Turner doubtless was relieved, but, according to his son Norman he also felt he had been unjustly treated. “
He was very bitter about the way in which, at the enquiry … it was sought to fix the blame on him for the sinking, and particularly to try to condemn him for being on the course he was.” Lord Mersey seemed to share this sentiment. Soon afterward, he resigned his post as wreck commissioner,
calling the inquiry “
a damned dirty business.” Cunard retained Turner on its roster of captains.

At no time during the secret portions of the proceeding did the Admiralty ever reveal what it knew about the travels of U-20. Nor did it disclose the measures taken to protect the HMS
Orion
and other military vessels. Moreover, the Admiralty made no effort to correct Lord Mersey’s finding that the
Lusitania
had been struck by two torpedoes—this despite the fact that Room 40 knew full well that Schwieger had fired only one.

Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the
Lusitania
wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed,
these
are the great lingering questions of the
Lusitania
affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS
Orion
; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the
Lusitania
’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why
was
the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?

There is silence on the subject in the records of Room 40 held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom and Churchill College, Cambridge. Nowhere is there even a hint of dismay at missing so clear an opportunity to use the fruits of Room 40’s intelligence to save a thousand lives.

The question perplexed at least one prominent naval historian, the late Patrick Beesly, who, during World War II, was himself an officer in British naval intelligence. Britain’s secrecy laws prevented him from writing about the subject until the 1970s and 1980s, when he published several books, including one about Room 40, said to be a quasi-official account. There he addressed
the controversy only obliquely, stating that if no deliberate plan existed to put the
Lusitania
in danger, “
one is left only with an unforgivable cock-up as an explanation.”

However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. “
As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy,” he said, “I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship.” But, he said, “on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the
Lusitania
in order to involve the United States in the war.” So much was done for the
Orion
and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the
Lusitania
. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, “If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances?”