The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (6 page)

Vanderbilt had inherited the patriarchal place at the Vanderbilt family table when his father, Cornelius II, died in 1899. He had cancelled his booking on the
Titanic
three years earlier at such a late hour that some reports of its destruction listed him as one of the dead. Now, however, he and other well-heeled travellers were being warned by mysterious forces: ‘
THE LUSITANIA IS DOOMED. DO NOT SAIL ON HER
,’ read the telegram received by Vanderbilt, its macabre signature, ‘morte’. Death.

The
Lusitania
had been a German target since the beginning of the war. The British Admiralty had registered the ship as an armed merchant cruiser in September 1914, planning to fit guns on her decks. The plan was scrapped as too energy-expensive, but the idea created the abiding impression that the liner was not a luxurious vessel for civilians but a weapon of war. The fact that the
Lusitania
was a target was not news to the codebreakers in Room 40. In March 1915, Blinker Hall’s team had been reading intercepted German intelligence reports detailing ships heading for British ports, as well as those heading to the neutral Netherlands. On 2 April, after the Germans had sunk neutral Dutch, Spanish, Norwegian and Greek ships, much to their governments’ outrage, the Kaiser declared that the ships of neutral countries would not be targets. On 10 March, Room 40 intercepted German intelligence broadcast from the high-power long-wave station in the North Sea town of Norddeich reporting that the ‘fast steamer
Lusitania
leaves Liverpool March 13th’.

While the
Lusitania
was clearly an enemy ship insofar as she flew Britain’s nautical flag the Red Ensign, the ominous telegrams sent to prominent passengers in New York imply that her targeting had more sinister motives, a suggestion that has led to many conspiracy theories since her doom.

One of the most compelling is that Room 40, while not having a direct hand in her destruction, certainly helped create a climate of terror around her. The telegrams sent to Vanderbilt and others all originated at the
Providence Journal
. This small local newspaper punched far above its weight during the First World War, often breaking stories then picked up by global powerhouses such the
New York Times
. The
Providence Journal
was run by John Revelstoke Rathom, who had risen from being the paper’s managing editor, to running the operation as editor and general manager in 1912. Rathom was an Australian ex-pat who happened to be great mates with another Australian ex-pat, Guy Gaunt, the British Naval Attaché in Washington DC.

Captain Guy Gaunt, the British Naval Attaché to the USA

Guy Gaunt, like other foreign service operatives, spent much of his time in New York City, which fuelled both his access to and his love of society, and his considerable ego. While not trained in intelligence, he was Britain’s de facto spy for the entire United States for the first two years of the war, reporting back to Blinker Hall first, and MI5, second. As such, Gaunt would have access to Room 40’s intelligence and through his friendship with Rathom, a friendly newspaper in which to plant whatever seeds he needed to sow.

The threatening telegrams arrived on the same day as the warning issued by the German embassy, which was likely penned for von Bernstorff by his unofficial propagandist George Sylvester Viereck, editor of the pro-German five-cent weekly
The Fatherland
. On the cover of its 28 April 1915 edition it featured a drawing of an Allied liner not unlike the
Lusitania
– though with a gun prominent on her bow – listing after being hit by a torpedo. The caption beneath the depiction of survivors in lifeboats and floundering in the water read: ‘The Work of a German Submarine’. And, with no small irony, beneath that the title of the edition’s featured article was ‘German Love of Peace’.

Those who boarded the
Lusitania
on 1 May 1915 might have taken comfort in a
New York Times
article accompanying von Bernstorff’s warning, in which Cunard’s agent, Charles B. Sumner, claimed that when he first heard the warning submitted over the telephone the previous night, he thought it was another blackmailer. Sumner reported that Cunard had received several blackmail attempts against its Atlantic liners, most recently one demanding $15,000 to prevent a similar notice threatening harm, which he dismissed as a nuisance ‘to annoy the line and make its passengers uncomfortable’.

Sumner had no fear for the safety of Cunard’s passengers, and indeed stressed the security measures that the line employed.

‘No passenger is permitted aboard … unless he can identify himself.

No express matter (i.e. unaccompanied parcel) of any sort is taken.

Every passenger must identify his baggage before it is placed on board.’ He added that the British navy was responsible for all ships in the danger zone off the British Isles, and ‘especially for Cunarders … As for submarines I have no fear of them whatever.’

Anyone sceptical about a Cunard employee practising damage control would have taken no solace in another
New York Times
piece that day, which reported that a German submarine crew had mocked the survivors of a ship they had torpedoed. B. T. Peak, the second engineer of the British steamer SS
Falaba
, which had been sunk by submarine U-28 off the Irish coast on 28 March – resulting in 100 dead, including an American – said from his London hospital bed: ‘I was hoping they would pick me up but instead they were laughing and seemed to treat it all as a huge joke … It was quite evident the Germans were prepared to see the people drown.’

The Fatherland
28 April 1915

The Germans had sunk 19 merchant ships in the Atlantic between October 1914 and the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1915, and that total was about to rise sharply (by the end of the war they would have sunk 5,000 Allied ships). The British Admiralty sent destroyers to escort passenger ships, and instructed them not to fly flags or otherwise call attention to their nationality. The
Lusitania
had her orange and black funnels painted dark grey during the voyage to make her well-known profile less visible to submarines, but Cunard had also shut down one of her four engine boiler rooms to save money on light passenger loads, reducing the ship’s top speed by three and a half knots, to 22 knots, or about 25 miles per hour.

Nearly one week on from the sinking of the
Falaba
, after the first-class passengers had taken their Friday lunch in the frescoed gold and white Louis XVI dining room, the
Lusitania
was on the home stretch of her journey, sailing in patchy fog about 11 miles off the fishing village of Kinsale, on the south coast of Ireland. The liner’s captain, William Turner, who had spent 46 of his 59 years at sea, had reduced speed, partly due to the fog, and partly to time his arrival in Liverpool for after dark, when it would be harder for a submarine to target the ship. Despite Sumner’s assurance, there were no British cruisers escorting the
Lusitania
safely through the danger zone.

The German submarine U-20, however,
was
sailing in those waters, hunting for Allied shipping. The codebreakers of Room 40 knew the vessel was active, and so too did the Admiralty. The U-boats maintained regular wireless contact with their home bases, messages that were intercepted and then decoded by Room 40. This accumulated data gave the codebreakers intimate insights into the habits and patterns of the U-boats – when they left port, their direction and speed, until the U-boat was out of wireless range – as they hunted for easy prey around the British Isles.

However, because of Room 40’s isolation from other sections of the Admiralty, and even from other departments within Naval Intelligence, it had no way of applying the knowledge it gathered, deprived as it was of any information regarding the location or trajectory of Allied shipping. Room 40 simply passed its findings on for others to analyse. Nevertheless, messages intercepted by the codebreakers from German submarines and wireless transmitting stations were passed on to the British navy, and to ships at risk, via the slightly creaky chain of command.

This particular U-boat’s commander, Walter Schwieger, and his 32-man crew had gained notoriety for firing at – and missing – the
Asturias
, a British hospital ship, in February of that same year. On 5 May, U-20 sank the three-masted wooden British schooner the
Earl of Lathom
, in a grenade attack. The next day, it sank the British steamers
Candidate
and
Centurion
.

Schwieger was planning on heading back to base, but had to linger to avoid HMS
Juno
, a passing British cruiser. He had just two torpedoes left, and the
Juno
was moving fast and zigzagging. This, combined with the fog, made the prospect of a shot at her the kind of chance Schwieger didn’t want to take.

And then along came the
Lusitania
, which Schwieger knew was an English ship. Her course and speed gave him a target that no amount of planning could guarantee: a clear bow shot from 700 metres. At 2.10 p.m., the single torpedo fired by Schwieger’s U-20 struck the
Lusitania
just under her bridge. Schwieger later described the scene in his diary: ‘A second explosion must have followed that of the torpedo (boiler or coal or powder?) … The ship stopped immediately and quickly listed sharply to starboard, sinking deeper by the head at the same time. It appeared as if it would capsize in a short time. Great confusion arose on the ship; some of the boats were swung clear and lowered into the water.’

The second explosion was the source of much outrage, another example of German overkill. However, the fatal blow was struck by U-20’s torpedo; the secondary explosion was likely the result of a chemical chain reaction in the
Lusitania
’s cargo. The result, though, was lethal to more than half of the 1,959 passengers on board. In the end, 1,196 died – 128 of them American citizens, the majority of whom were women and children.

The death of American women and children was trumpeted by the Allies, in case the Americans had been unmoved by this latest, and to date worst, German atrocity involving the slaughter of innocents. In London, the newspapers called the
Lusitania
’s sinking a massacre in cold blood. Across the United States, the press followed the story first with hope that all had survived; the 7 May edition of the
Tacoma Times
of Washington State, enjoying an eight-hour time difference from the site of the sinking, claimed that ‘latest reports say that all persons on board were saved by lifeboats’. The next day, the reports were angry and sad, as details came into focus: ‘Germany Glad Ship Sunk: 1,200 Die’ shouted a banner headline on the
El Paso Herald
, adding beneath it, ‘Weeping Widows Mourn Dead’.

Would this be the fatal blow to bring the United States into the European war on the side of the Allies? Former President Theodore Roosevelt, who made no secret of his desire to get America into the fight, said, ‘It seems inconceivable that we should refrain from taking action on this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.’ From the White House, however, there was a disquieting silence.

There was nothing but noise from the German-American community. At Lüchow’s popular German restaurant near Union Square in Manhattan, exuberant German families enjoyed the orchestra’s patriotic German songs, while a few blocks north, at Hofbrau Haus, patrons were raising toasts to the Kaiser and to the sinking of the
Lusitania
. At the exclusive German Club, one cavalry captain, stranded in New York by the war, said, ‘This is a masterstroke which will curb transatlantic travelling and isolate Great Britain more effectively than a whole fleet of super-dreadnoughts could possibly accomplish. It’s the doom of Great Britain.’

And yet President Woodrow Wilson was still silent. Wilson had just finished his Friday lunch and was preparing for a round of golf when he received news of the
Lusitania
’s sinking via a telegram from the US Consul in Cork, Ireland on 7 May. The first report said all souls on board were safe, but still, Wilson cancelled his golf game and went for a drive. He had other things on his mind, the most pressing being his wooing of the widow Edith Galt, whom he had met in March. ‘My happiness absolutely depends on your giving me your entire love,’ he wrote to her that night, while news reports now painted a more complete picture of the carnage on the Irish Sea.