Disaster: Lusitania (s)
Complacency, Complicity, Conspiracy
Dead Wake by Erik Larson
Lusitania by Diana Preston
May 7, 1915, was a stunning day off the Irish coast as the epic ocean liner Lusitania headed for Liverpool, England, at the end of a six-day Atlantic crossing from New York.
She had just under 2,000 passengers and crew and was cruising at twenty-one mph, fast but well shy of the thirty she was capable of.
A German U-boat spied the ship, maneuvered into position and fired a single torpedo at a range too close to miss.
Packed with 350 pounds of high explosive, it hit the starboard or right side about a third of the way back creating a forty-foot hole in the hull.
Down she went in eighteen minutes, still moving at about five mph and out-of-control; listing or leaning heavily to starboard.
The Lusitania was a British-flagged vessel and Britain was at war with Germany; the Germans were flirting with sinking any ship they saw in an effort to starve the Brits of supplies and food.
The sinking and the 1,200 fatalities became the fodder of endless diplomatic wrangles between the U.S. and Germany with the British keen to use the tragedy to their advantage, especially their effort to drag the U.S. into the war.
The United States was ostensibly neutral with then President Woodrow Wilson trying to keep the country out of the war.
What follows in both books is high personal drama including acts of heroism and cowardice as well as glimpses of the “high and mighty” not at their best.
Wilson, a recent widower, had fallen very head-over-heels in love with Edith Galt and as Scott Berg, Wilson’s biographer, has wryly noted, a president in love is distracted and decidedly not what is needed in times of crisis.
Winston Churchill was then Britain’s top civilian naval official and he comes off as the fiendish scoundrel he could be, blithely unconcerned about either civilian casualties or the truth when it suited him.
The USA, Germany, Britain, the British Navy and Cunard, the owner of the ship, all engaged in various degrees of dissimulation. The disaster offered an opportunity for every party to leverage their respective positions regarding blame, liability, the ongoing war and how to win it, (or stay out of it.)
Churchill and the Brits withheld facts, spread disinformation and used the sinking and their selective use of secret information to influence American opinion.
Preston uniquely suggests that in 1915 the Germans may have welcomed U.S. entry into the war as Americans would have then hoarded artillery shells, a critical item in short supply, thus weakening the British effort.
The losers were the many women and children who died as lifeboat after lifeboat upended or otherwise foundered in a launching effort that was equal parts inept and impossible with the ship still moving.
Both books are good with Preston’s providing greater breadth and depth.
Cheers.
