The Sinking of the Lusitania

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Lusitania_warning.jpg

She went down 100 years ago today. It only took 18 minutes after the torpedo struck. (By comparison the Titanic took 2 hours 40 minutes to sink).

The Cunard ad and warning from the Imperial German Embassy ran in the New York Times on May 1, 1915, the day the ship left Manhattan.

Erik Larson has written a terrific and extremely well-researched book called Dead Wake about the ship's final voyage. The narrative shifts back-and-forth between the perspective of the Lusitania's captain and that of the commander of the U-boat, which makes for incredible tension as the two men unknowingly converge. Also the amount of detail Larson was able to uncover about the ship's passengers is astonishing. This is not fictionalized, it's all derived from the survivors' testimony and evidence.

So many errors of judgment had to be made, and compounded with so much bad luck for the sinking to happen as it did.

My grandfather sailed on one of her sister ships, the RMS Aquitania, from the US to Europe during WWII. He used to tell a story of how the ship would change coarse every five minutes because that's how long it would take a U Boat to lock in a torpedo.

I read Dead Wake last month, and yeah, the level of detail is incredible. And it's truly a reverse "for want of a nail" story, in that if they hadn't been delayed a couple of hours at the outset for some passenger transfers, they never would have encountered the U-boat that sank them.

winsor mccay drew an entire animated cartoon about it in 1918:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhCWmIu1H_g

Wow, there's a crazy amount of detail in that! at 7:05 in, for example.

That's fantastic.

Notes:

Only one torpedo hit the ship, not two as the animation shows. A second explosion in the engine room following the first torpedo explosion was erroneously thought at the time to be from a second torpedo.

The animation shows four funnels smoking, when in fact only three were in use on this voyage, one boiler room having been shut down to save on coal. This is significant because if all four had been in operation the ship would have crossed the Atlantic faster and not run into that U-boat.

The animation indicates that theater producer Charles Frohman (who introduced Peter Pan) died in the sinking. Songwriter Jerome Kern was supposed to be traveling with Frohman, but he overslept on May 1 and didn't make it onboard. If Kern had not overslept, perhaps today we wouldn't have the songs "Ol' Man River," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," or "The Way You Look Tonight," all of which he wrote subsequently.

Also notice how the animation breaks normal rules of film grammar by showing the sinking from two sides of the ship. I guess these rules were still being worked out in 1918.

I thought the reason it went down so fast was because the one torpedo hit ammunition in the hold and everything went boom

No, the torpedo did not strike where the ammunition was being carried, and at any rate it was just rifle cartridges, inert artillery shell casings, and some aluminum powder to be used to make bombs, but nothing that would cause a massive explosion.

The second explosion was probably due to a rupture in the steam lines.

The problem was that the engines were disabled and the captain could no longer stop the ship from cruising forward and with two huge holes in the hull the ship was taking on a massive amount of water as it surged forward.

Have placed this book on order

xp that's nightmarish!

Yeah, and the U-boat commander could have shot another torpedo, but he could see all the people struggling to survive through his periscope and he didn't have the heart to fire again.

There are so many great details to the story that I feel I should shut up and not spoil it for those who want to read the Erik Larson book

OK, one more factoid... Stop reading if you don't want to hear this...

The U-boat commander who fired the torpedo that sunk the Lusitania was himself killed in a horrible way two years later when he was fleeing a British warship and his U-boat struck a mine, killing the entire crew

The book was good not great. Its hopscotching from character to character gets wearying. And I don't give a damn about Wilson's courting of Edith Galt.

First of all, good review. I didn't find the switching from character to character as deadly as you did. I think the author was stunned by all the artifacts he found when doing his research, and with the story suddenly very vivid in his mind tried to put as much detail into the book as possible in order to give readers that same jolt.

There was a lot about the courtship but I didn't mind since that whole episode was new to me, and pretty unusual, plus it's relevant as an explanation of Wilson's inattention to the U-boat problem.