“I’d never seen a more uneventful or stupid voyage,” declared one passenger on the Lusitania’s final crossing, but surely this was a minority opinion. On May 1, 1915, this “floating village in steel,” the jewel of Britain’s Cunard line, set forth from New York bound for Liverpool, carrying 1,959 passengers and crew — including 189 Americans.
German U-boats were patrolling the North Atlantic, and Germany had issued a grim warning: British shipping lanes were now a “zone of war,” and vessels flying the flag of Great Britain would be “liable to destruction.” To some, at a time when the entire world was waiting to see if America would be drawn into the war in Europe, the Lusitania appeared to be tempting fate. “The blowing up of a liner with American passengers may be the prelude,” wrote U.S. Ambassador Walter Page from London. “I almost expect such a thing.”
This enthralling and richly detailed account demonstrates that there was far more going on beneath the surface — both literally and figuratively — than is generally known. Though many believed that civilian ships would be safe from attack, codebreakers in London were tracking the movements of German submarines with the aid of a dead signalman’s codebook, and were aware that the German navy considered the Lusitania to be “fair game.” Even so, few measures were taken to ensure the ship’s safe passage.
William Thomas Turner, the Lusitania’s rugged and experienced captain, was not made aware of the codebreakers’ efforts, but he did receive assurances that the Royal Navy would provide an escort through British waters. When that escort failed to appear, Turner seemed unfazed. Outwardly, at least, the captain appeared to share the sanguine views of his employers. “The truth is that the Lusitania is the safest boat on the sea,” Cunard officials claimed.
As Larson demonstrates, however, the world had been slow to grasp the dark implications of the Unterseeboot, or U-boat. Some of the book’s most gripping chapters track the evolution of the submarine from “a suicidal novelty” to a brutally effective killing machine, together with the extraordinary burdens placed on the shoulders of the U-boat captains.
Thirty-two-year-old Walther Schwieger, in command of the U-20, “a pinpoint in a vast sea,” had acquired a reputation for ruthlessness after firing a torpedo at a presumably unarmed hospital ship. By May of 1915 he was regarded as one of Germany’s most knowledgeable commanders, and when rumors surfaced that Britain was about to launch an invasion, Schwieger was ordered to hunt and attack potential troop transports. Aboard the Lusitania, however, most passengers shrugged off the possibility of a torpedo attack.
Larson uses letters, journals and the accounts of survivors to reconstruct the shipboard experiences of a representative group of passengers, and these are among the most vivid and often heartbreaking passages in the book.
Larson’s account is the most lucid and suspenseful yet written of the Lusitania, and he finds genuine emotional power in the unlucky confluences of forces, “large and achingly small,” that set the stage for the ship’s agonizing final moments. Capt. Turner, for his part, understood that some dangers were an unavoidable part of life at sea. Days before the Lusitania set off from New York, he testified at a hearing on behalf of families of passengers who perished aboard the Titanic three years earlier.
When asked if he had drawn any lessons from the Titanic tragedy, he gave a chillingly blunt reply:
“Not the slightest,” he said. “It will happen again.”
On May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat, causing the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew.
