American History Revised (62 page)

Eight decades later, Wilding was proven correct. In 1996 a Discovery Channel expedition—the first expedition devoted solely to marine forensics—visited the site. Using the modern technology of sonar imaging to analyze the starboard side of the wreck buried under fifty-five feet of sediment (caused by the hull crashing to the bottom of a 12,500-foot plunge at thirty-five miles per hour), the scientists identified six openings, total damage size 11.4 square feet.

Now look at the picture.

Would you entrust your life to this ship? The
Titanic
starboard bow plates where the ice hit.

Any one of these plates is a lot bigger than 12 or 11.4 square feet. It doesn’t take much to make several of these plates separate when a collision occurs and the vital forces consist of the enormous weight of a ship times its 25-knot speed times the counterweight of an immovable iceberg times the water resistance of the ocean when the two objects collide. We’re talking big numbers here.

Several recent books on the
Titanic
have posited various theories implying criminal liability by the White Star Line for building a ship allegedly unsafe because it had brittle steel and hand-driven rivets. They ignore the fact that no ship—not even a ship today—could survive this one-in-a-million coincidence that happened on April 14, 1912. Simple probability theory tells you that when you have thousands and thousands of ships crossing
dangerous oceans, anything can happen—and eventually will (which is why we will always have airplane crashes in the years ahead, no matter how hard the airlines and governments try to make flying 100-percent safe). “Standard operating procedure,” says historian Daniel Allen Butler, “is a disaster waiting to happen.”

“God himself could not sink this ship,” its makers had said. The
Titanic
boasted an array of safety features never seen before on the high seas: a double hull, sixteen watertight compartments, and an electrical system that could close every door simultaneously. The
Titanic
was an impressive ship, but God moves in strange ways.

Question 2. Why was it so hard to find the wreck?
As the
Titanic
floundered, it gave out its CQD (Come Quick, Danger) position as 41°50’N, 50°14’W. For seventy-three years people used this reckoning to try to locate the underwater wreck, with no luck.

When the wreck finally was found, the location was 41°43.9’N, 49°58.8’W—some thirteen miles away. Yet the fact remains that on that morning of April 15, 1912, when the
Carpathia
arrived at the site of the lifeboats, one of the first things the rescuing captain said to the
Titanic
’s fourth officer was: “What a splendid position you gave us!”

How can a huge ship sink two and a half miles and end up thirteen miles away? One answer: a lot can happen in seventy-three years. The ocean is not static, nor is the seabed a peaceful place. The Gulf Stream moves at the rate of 0.5 to 0.8 knots. If the
Titanic
remained intact as it sank—a view stated by
Titanic
’s surviving officers—it probably had plenty of trapped air and drifted eastward under the effect of the earth’s rotation, a phenomenon known in marine geology as Coriolis force (this is why, for example, the ocean’s surface is a slope, not flat—causing water in the mid-Atlantic to be forty-eight inches higher than the water on the Atlantic seacoast). Finally, on November 18, 1929, there occurred a huge
underwater earthquake that generated a two-hundred-mile tsunami, causing massive destruction to the coast of Newfoundland. “Such an underwater force,” suggests one marine expert, “more than likely moved the
Titanic
’s wreckage from its resting place, some miles east of the CQD position, to the one discovered by Dr. Ballard.”

Such a theory seems farfetched. The
Titanic
’s passengers, disagreeing with the officers, testified that the ship broke in half as it slipped beneath the surface. This would have eliminated any trapped air that might cause Coriolis drift. Also, the ship’s massive boilers were found outside the ship, resting nearby. Such boilers are so heavy they would have plummeted straight down after breaking loose from the hull. Clearly the ship landed very close to where it went down.

How, then, to explain the discrepancy between the two locations? Obviously the CQD position was wrong. But if the position was wrong, how did the
Carpathia
find the lifeboats? Pure luck. When the
Carpathia
arrived at the scene, with all the excitement and confusion going on, it did not bother to take a fix to determine its actual position (certainly no such evidence was presented at the post-sinking official inquiry). In the meantime, during the two hours since the sinking, the
Titanic
’s lifeboats, carried by the prevailing ocean currents, had drifted four miles south of the sinking site, directly into the path of the
Carpathia
, coming up from the southeast toward the position given out by the
Titanic.
In his relief at finding the lifeboats, it is easy to understand how the
Carpathia
’s captain would say, “What a splendid position you gave us!”

If the
Titanic
was thirteen miles away from where it was thought to be, how did Robert Ballard manage to find it? “Thinking outside the box,” he answers. Like Patrick Blackett who solved the problem of how to attack the German U-boats, Ballard understood that easier than finding the ship was to look for any of the numerous pieces of debris, then follow the path of the debris.

Question 3. What Happened to the Bodies?
After Robert Ballard came back from discovering the
Titanic
, he was besieged with questions about where the bodies were. Strange thing is, he couldn’t find any.

The answer to the question is, nobody knows. How can human bodies simply disappear in the deep of the ocean? Skulls and teeth are pretty indestructible, and you would think that some traces of bones and skulls would be found on the smooth sea bottom where the
Titanic
rests. After all, small glasses and silverware were found easily. Even pairs of shoes. In fact, one pair of shoes rests on the sea bottom just as if someone had laid them down perfectly.

Except that there is no way two matching shoes would end up two and a half miles down, where a thunderous underwater maelstrom broke a mighty ship in half, exactly six inches apart. This is a history book, not an anthropology book, so we let you, dear reader, figure out the answer. There was a man in those shoes once.

2020
Ten years from now, people may look back and find themselves repeating the 1950s question, “Who lost China?”—only this time the country is Iraq. They would point to the fact that the United States didn’t have enough troops to provide sufficient security and quell the insurrection. They may ask why President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld failed to heed the warnings of the Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, who had predicted the number of necessary soldiers to be “something on the order of several hundred thousand.”

Such is history taken out of context, the use of history for political ends. The instinct of every general is to ask for more troops than he needs, just to be on the safe side (witness McClellan during the Civil War). When General Shinseki appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2003 and was asked how many troops would be needed for the impending operation, he responded in vague generalities (“several hundred thousand”), and refused to be more specific, for the simple reason that he had no idea what would happen any more than Donald
Rumsfeld did. The senator who asked Shinseki the question was a liberal Democrat who had voted against the war resolution and presumably was looking for whatever political ammunition he could find; yet he chose not to pursue Shinseki. With the war about to start in another month, everyone’s attention was focused on how to overcome Saddam’s powerful army. The general calling the shots was not Shinseki, but Tommy Franks, head of Central Command. Because of concern for civilian casualties and the prospect that Saddam might try to blow up the oil fields as a last hurrah, General Franks resolved to capture Baghdad as quickly as possible. This required a light fighting force, which Franks determined to be 175,000 men, not a huge force of 300,000–400,000 with cumbersome supply lines and logistics. Certainly he knew Shinseki’s opinion—and he overruled him. (He also overruled other generals who argued for a smaller force.)

It was a daring gamble, and it worked, resulting in a military rout even more stunning than General Norman Schwarzkopf’s victory in the 1991 Gulf War. The “how many troops?” naysayers held their tongue and President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” All along, the U.S. strategy had been to win the war quickly and get out quickly, and not get involved in the messy business of nation-building and risk becoming labeled as “occupiers.” Said Donald Rumsfeld, “We are going to go in, overthrow Saddam, get out. That’s it.” Iraq was to be a war of liberation, not occupation. “Time,” as T. E. Lawrence had warned, “is short.”

The subsequent looting and total breakdown of civil order in Iraq caught everyone by surprise, not only the Defense Department but also the State Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA—none of whom had envisioned such a contingency and prepared a plan for it.
*
“The ‘plan’ was to be out of Iraq by the end of August,” admitted one staffer. At the time when Saddam’s statue fell in April, this seemed like a reasonable assumption.

But hopes and objectives do not make a plan; alternative scenarios also need to be developed, especially a worst-case one. “Better forty years of dictatorship than one year of anarchy” goes an Arab proverb. Despite this warning, serious contingency planning for anarchy was never done, not even by the State Department. Said General Colin Powell in a rueful admission after the fact, “A judgment was made by those responsible that the troop strength was adequate.” Even Saddam Hussein—who presumably knew Iraq better than
anyone—was stunned by the magnitude of the collapse and ensuing anarchy.

The following statistics of American occupations may be instructive. Certainly it was all the U.S. military planners had to go on:

Number of U.S. Soldiers per 1,000 Inhabitants