DEAD WAKE
The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Erik Larson
Crown Publishers; 430 pages; $28
One day seven years ago, while on a magazine assignment, I found myself on a boat off the coast of Ireland, bobbing in dark, heavy seas 300 feet above the slumbering wreck of the R M S Lusitania as sport divers returned triumphantly to the surface. When they came aboard, the gleeful explorers, part of a marine archaeology expedition sanctioned by the Irish government, produced a piece of history - a plastic container holding a handful of .303 rounds they'd found inside the plankton-hazed ruins, rounds that had been manufactured in America and bought by the British to kill Germans during World War I. One of the divers peeled back the lid, and the corroded ammunition greeted fresh air for the first time in 93 years.
Few tales in history are more haunting, more tangled with investigatory mazes or more fraught with toxic secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, one of the colossal tragedies of maritime history. It's the other Titanic, the story of a mighty ship sunk not by the grandeur of nature but by the grimness of man. On May 7, 1915, the four-funnelled, 787-foot Cunard superliner, on a run from New York to Liverpool, encountered a German submarine, the U-20, about 11 miles off the coast of Ireland. The U-boat's captain, Walther Schwieger, was pleased to discover that the passenger steamer had no naval escort. Following his government's new policy of unrestricted warfare, Schwieger fired a single torpedo into her hull. Less than half a minute later, a second explosion shuddered from somewhere deep within the bowels of the vessel, and she listed precariously to starboard.
The Lusitania sank in just 18 minutes. Nearly 1,200 people, including 128 Americans, died with it. The casualties included the millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt, the Broadway impresario Charles Frohman and the noted art collector Hugh Lane, who was thought to be carrying sealed lead tubes containing paintings by Rembrandt and Monet.
The world was outraged to learn that the war had taken this diabolic new turn, that an ocean liner full of innocent civilians was now considered fair game. The sinking turned American opinion against the Germans and became a rallying cry when America finally entered the war in 1917.
But in the years that followed, unsettling questions clung to the Lusitania case, contributing to a persistent hunch that the ship had somehow been allowed to sail into a trap. Why had the British Admiralty failed to provide a military escort? What was the cause of that catastrophic second explosion? Why was a British cruiser sent to rescue the Lusitania's dying victims suddenly called back to port? And what about Winston Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty, who conveniently left Britain for France days before the sinking?
Shortly before the disaster, Churchill had written in a confidential letter that it was "most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany". Afterward, he all but celebrated the sinking as a great Allied victory, saying, "The poor babies who perished in the ocean struck a blow at German power more deadly than could have been achieved by the sacrifice of a hundred thousand fighting men."
The Germans, for their part, argued, and with good reason, that the British had long been using passenger liners like the Lusitania to ferry troops, weapons and ordnance from supposedly neutral America to war-weakened Britain. The Lusitania, in fact, was known to be carrying tonnes of war materiel that fateful day (including four million rounds of ammunition, samples of which the Irish divers discovered seven years ago). Schwieger, was surprised that a single torpedo had sunk such a massive ship - and so quickly. Yet from his periscope, he noted a second explosion, apparently the same one that so many aboard the ship also felt and heard. Over the years, many people have contended that this second explosion was very likely caused by secret stores of volatile munitions that detonated within the ship's holds.
Erik Larson is one of the modern masters of popular narrative non-fiction. In book after book, he's proved adept at rescuing weird and wonderful gothic tales from the shadows of history. And so Erik Larson and the sinking of the Lusitania would seem to be an ideal pairing.
When it comes to the story of the sociopath, the Larson magic is very much on display in Dead Wake. The passages concerning the U-20 knife along with a clean and wicked elan.
Though Schwieger apparently bore little sense of pity for his human victims, he had a soft spot for dogs - at one point, the U-20 had six aboard. Mr Larson paints him as less villain than aggressive and essentially amoral predator in full mastery of his vessel, a decent leader of men who did his job relentlessly well while working under nearly impossible circumstances.
What makes the story of Schwieger's ceaseless predations so much more discomfiting is that the British Admiralty apparently had a very good idea of his whereabouts in the days leading up to the sinking - and yet did nothing. Encryption experts working with the Admiralty's Room 40 regularly intercepted Schwieger's transmissions and closely followed his movements around the British Isles.
If creating "an experience" is Mr Larson's primary goal, then Dead Wake largely succeeds. Yet from the standpoint of scholarship or human drama, there's not much fresh ground here. Readers of Diana Preston's definitive (if occasionally soporific) Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy (2002) will find little in the way of new evidence or new revelations. He seems curiously incurious about the second explosion - which remains the single greatest mystery of the Lusitania's rapid sinking. He devotes less than a full page to the question, then brusquely declares, on the basis of scant evidence, that it was caused by a rupture of the Lusitania's main steam line.
If Dead Wake is not (by Mr Larson's standards) a great book, it is an entertaining book about a great subject, and it will do much to make this seismic event resonate for new generations of readers. A century later, the Lusitania remains a daunting subject just as it remains a daunting shipwreck - a dark realm, full of secrets and lost souls.
© The New York Times News Service 2015
