Book review: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
The story of the last voyage of Cunard’s luxury ocean liner was a natural topic for such a writer, but what really convinced him to take it on was the existence of a wide array of archival materials, ranging from the love letters of the woman President Woodrow Wilson was courting at the time, to the actual war log of the U-boat commander Kapitänleutnant Schwieger, and a wealth of secret intelligence dossiers from the London Admiralty.
The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale on May 7, 1915, was marked last year with due solemnity. It is still hard to grasp the scale of the disaster: Only 764 of the liner’s 1,959 passengers and crew survived.
The 44,000-tonne liner sank in only 18 minutes, following a hit by one torpedo, and a second explosion, whose origin is still being debated.
The author stresses from the start, in a ‘Note to Readers’, that this is fact, and that anything between quotation marks can be traced to a memoir, letter, telegram or other historical document.
Sources are given in the notes at the end of the book. Within only a few pages, it becomes apparent why this warning was necessary: The factual detail is incorporated into a story so compelling it reads like a novel.
Larson’s perspective on the Lusitania tragedy is very much the view from New York, and his story proper starts at Pier 54 on the Hudson River, where the liner, which had already completed 201 Atlantic crossings, is being prepared for its next voyage to Liverpool under the tried and trusted Captain Turner.
The ship is booked to capacity, mainly by British and European citizens, with only 189 Americans on board.
The war was in its tenth month, but America remained neutral. In spite of a warning published in the New York press by the German embassy, both passengers and crew had a firm belief the Germans would not sink a passenger ship.
U-boats and torpedoes were new, untested war weapons, and many assumed the Lusitania was too big and too fast for their firepower.
The most exciting chapters are those based on the log of the U-boat, U-20, under the charismatic Captain Schwieger, an urbane, well-educated Berliner, known for his wit and warmth, who kept a black dachshund, saved from a shipwreck, on board.
Equally compelling are the accounts of the intelligence work carried out at the Admiralty’s Room 40, intercepting and decoding submarine commands, under Winston Churchill.
Larson proves the Admiralty knew how close the U-boat was to the great liner, even though Captain Turner was never warned. Nor was he encouraged to take the northern route to Liverpool, which was safe at the time.
Churchill also failed to provide an escort for the Lusitania, on the grounds it was not the job of the Royal Navy to escort merchant shipping.
Larson suggests that perhaps Churchill wanted the liner attacked, hoping the outrage would bring neutral America into the war.
It is an unlikely hypothesis, based largely on hindsight. His account of the wreck is appropriately horrific, but could have been improved if his research had brought him to Ireland, to gain knowledge of the geography, and to access, for example, the first-hand accounts that were broadcast on RTÉ Radio last year.
However, the larger picture that Larson presents, and his taut description of German and British naval tactics, make this book both an informative and a very enjoyable read.
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