Blood and Thunder (58 page)

21

‘Every Shot Is Telling'

When RMS
Lusitania
went into service in 1907 she was regarded as the fastest, most beautiful ship afloat. Nearly 800ft long and built like a luxurious floating hotel, she was the last word in transatlantic liners.
Titanic
and her sister
Olympic
outsized her and ‘Lusy', as she was affectionately known, saw her own sister ship
Mauretania
go faster, but she was still a favourite on the transatlantic run. Indeed, of the four she was, in spring 1915, the only one still plying this lucrative trade. Although
Lusitania
had been prepared for life as an armed merchant cruiser, when hostilities commenced she was deemed too greedy in terms of coal and so was left to continue her normal work, albeit it under Admiralty supervision.

One of the menaces this ocean liner would have to contend with as she continued to ferry passengers at high speed back and forth across the Atlantic was the submarine. Submarines were not a new concept, nor were they received well in traditional naval circles. Nelson referred to underwater craft as ‘bulgarious … sneak dodges down below.' The idea of attacking a ship from beneath the waves was still viewed by many seamen as a type of piracy.

On 18 February 1915 Germany stepped up its underwater activity with a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in response to a British blockade of her ports. Since the reign of Henry VIII ships were supposed to stop and search an enemy, then give the passengers and crew time to depart the scene safely before sinking them. this concept did not marry with that of the submarine. Now all gloves were off. The Germans would attack and sink any British ship they could. Almost all the waters surrounding the British Isles were declared a war zone by the enemy.

British ships began resorting to tricky tactics to avoid being attacked by German U-boats. These included running up neutral flags to mask their identity.
Lusitania
herself had been adorned with an American flag at the beginning of the year as she made an eastbound crossing, arguing somewhat feebly that it was to signify that she had neutrals on board. Despite the threat though, the Royal Navy remained largely apathetic. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill didn't think the threat significant and in the first two weeks of the German campaign only seven ships were sunk out of nearly 3,000 arrivals and departures from Britain. Throughout April only seventeen merchant ships had been attacked. Nearly half of them had subsequently got away.

Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, at Eton just before Henry Rawlinson, was the British Ambassador to the United States. On 29 April a proof of a newspaper advertisement with an anonymous note landed on his desk. The advert appeared to be a warning and it was apparently to run in several newspapers on 1 May. It stipulated that neutrals sailed on British ships at their own risk. On this very day
Lusitania
was due to depart New York on the latest of her homeward crossings bound for Liverpool and the warning was construed by some as a direct threat against her.

Spring-Rice had originally dismissed the note as a hoax but when it actually appeared in print he cabled London with details.
A few people due to sail transferred off the ship and some cancelled their crossing altogether, but it was reasonable to believe that the submarine menace would not affect the great ship.
Lusitania
could outrun any U-boat easily, was faster than most warships and there was an option to provide her with a naval escort once she reached the designated war zone. Thus, as if nothing had been learned from the tragedy of the
Titanic
disaster, she was still considered ‘as unsinkable as a ship can be'.

One passenger who seemed to be unperturbed by the threat of the U-boat menace was Bernard Audley Mervyn Drake. He was 23 years old and had arrived at Eton in 1904, yet another of Mr Brinton's boys. ‘Audley' had no time for cricket, unlike John Manners whose room was close by, although he was an enthusiastic footballer. Dry and witty, he took a lively part in the House Debating Society. Once called upon to discuss the new concept of daylight saving time that had been put before Parliament, Audley dismissed it in a tongue-in-cheek manner. It would never catch on, he claimed. ‘Many people enjoyed their after dinner bridge and would not miss the evening for worlds.' Not to mention what would happen to the train timetable. ‘All clearminded men in Parliament,' he reminded the room, ‘had opposed the Bill as absolutely futile.'

As soon as he could, Audley took up science as his speciaility at Eton and after Cambridge he had travelled to the United States. His father was a highly talented electrical engineer and Audley was to follow him into the family business. He had settled temporarily in Detroit in 1913 to acquire a working knowledge of the electro-chemical industry, possibly in conjunction with some military work for the government. He had been having a very merry time and loved the bubbling ‘energy and kindness' of the Americans that he had met.

The time had come though to return home and contribute to the war effort. Originally booked into a spacious cabin on A Deck, Audley switched with his travelling companion, Frederick Lewin, a motor engineer and director of Friswell's who dealt in Peugeots and Renaults and had been visiting New York. Home for Audley for the duration of the crossing was now to be a small but ample first-class cabin on the inside of the ship. D-41 was located just behind the second funnel several decks further down, by the main staircase and passenger lifts servicing the first-class accommodation.

In all, 1,260 passengers, including three stowaways, were aboard
Lusitania
as she sailed into the Hudson River at lunchtime on 1 May. They included munitions and equipment manufacturers, shipping men, convalescent soldiers and men hoping to enlist. The war had slowed trade. Of 540 first-class berths only 290 had been filled and down in third class there were only 367 out of a possible 1,200. There was, though, a noticeably large contingent of children on board. As well as thirty-nine babies there were a further thirty-nine young girls and fifty-one little boys.

There was plenty to keep Audley occupied in first class, including the opulent gold-and-white lounge with its stained-glass ceiling. Right outside his cabin was the outstanding feature of the ship, the double-tier first-class dining room with its elaborate marble columns. The Verandah Café was open all along one side and filled with greenery, hanging baskets and wicker chairs to resemble a pavement café ashore. The ship's orchestra played music before the furniture was unbolted for dancing and for those who wished to remain active out on deck there were games of shuffleboard or medicine ball throughout the day.

Always present though was a worrying undertone of what they might be sailing towards. On 6 May a warning message began to be tapped out at intervals, alerting ships to the fact that a U-boat had been making a nusiance of itself off the southern coast of Ireland. Just before 8 p.m. this warning was received by the wireless operators on board
Lusitania.
A second coded alert then followed detailing submarine activity about Fastnet which was some eighteen hours away.

Captain William Turner had received much advice from the Admiralty on how to keep his ship safe, including avoiding headlands and passing harbours at full speed so as not to dawdle near submarines. At sunset that evening he gave orders for the crew to extinguish all outboard lights, to cover the skylights, draw the curtains in public rooms and darken the portholes.

That night at a concert Turner, who was not a people person and had deigned to join the event despite having once described passengers as ‘a lot of bloody monkeys', assured his charges of their safety. Nevertheless some of them slept in the public areas and some sat up in their cabins fully dressed. A number of passengers had formed a little committee to teach their fellow travellers how to put on lifebelts and one group of young men had got together and decided that in the event of an emergency it just wouldn't do to push women and children out of the way to get to their positions in the lifeboat. They would meet up towards the stern and decide amongst themselves what to do next.

At dawn on 7 May a thick fog came down. Concerned about running into shallow water as
Lusitania
sailed into the war zone, Turner was compelled to slow down to 15 knots, the top speed of the very submarine lurking in the water according to the warnings. At 10 a.m. the fog began to lift and the ship's speed picked back up as the spring day grew sunny and clear. Although they were now travelling at 18 knots, the burst of speed the passengers were expecting to carry them into port did not materialise. Some hoped that they might be waiting for an escort.

An hour later another warning came in from Queenstown on the southern coast of Ireland and Turner ordered all the portholes closed and as many of the watertight doors as possible. He doubled the lookouts, had extra men placed on the bridge and ordered the engine room to be ready to make a run for it if necessary. Nothing was being left to chance.

U-20
, under the command of 32-year-old Walter Schweiger, had finished unsuccessfully chasing an ageing British warship when she resurfaced at 1.20 p.m. The commander was called to look out on a conspicuously large ship coming into view, ‘a forest of masts and stacks'. The crew of the U-boat didn't know it, but 14 miles to the south-west it was the
Lusitania
emerging over the horizon. Possibly unaware of the ship's identity, they submerged immediately and began racing towards her as fast as they could; but at 9 knots when under the surface it couldn't possibly be fast enough to catch her. They got within 2 miles but
Lusitania
was heading away from them. It appeared as though Turner and his ship had been lucky.

Some twenty minutes later
Lusitania
came within sight of the Old Head of Kinsale, blissfully unaware that Schweiger had her in his sights. Owing to the fog Turner had been travelling further towards land as a precaution but he had since reverted to his original course. The ship jolted and began making for the Coninbeg lightship, some four hours north-east off the coast of County Wexford. He had unwittingly played right into
U-20
's hands. As Schwieger looked through the periscope the
Lusitania
had turned straight for him. ‘She could not have steered a more perfect course' if she had been trying to give him a target to fire at. Schweiger was not about to lose his chance. He closed to within half a mile and at 800 yards a single bronze torpedo shot out of the
U-20
and made straight for the passenger liner.

On the starboard side of the
Lusitania
one of the lookouts had just come up on deck when he saw two white lines racing towards her. He grabbed a megaphone and began hollering to the bridge. Captain Turner was nearby and he ran up the stairs to the bridge on hearing the commotion. He arrived just in time to see the torpedo strike his ship in between the second and third funnels on the starboard side, right where Audley Drake's cabin was situated.

Many of Audley's fellow first-class passengers were finishing lunch or out walking on deck. There was a loud bang, a shaking sensation and a column of white water shot up and cascaded down on the deck amongst smoke and fire. A rumbling came from deep inside the ship and almost instantly a secondary explosion went off. Turner immediately ordered the ship turned towards Kinsale some 10 miles away. The steering had failed and his next inclination was to try to bring her to a stop but steam pressure had plummeted. The
Lusitania
continued to plough helplessly through the calm sea. The main staircase outside Audley's cabin, leading from the lower portion of the first-class dining room, was already beginning to fill up, overrun with passengers in a state of rising panic attempting to push their way up on deck. The ship had immediately begun to list to starboard. Four minutes after the torpedo struck, whilst many were still dazed and wondering what to do,
Lusitania
's electrical supply failed completely. Much of the inside of the ship was rendered pitch black in an instant. Terror-stricken passengers felt their way along darkened passages and up staircases to try to get out into the open.

Unlike the
Titanic
disaster, so fresh in people's minds as they ran towards the lifeboats, the
Lusitania
would not take some two hours to sink. She now had about fifteen minutes until she plunged beneath the waves and, as yet, she still had more than 1,200 people on board.
Whether or not passengers and crew stood a chance of being saved was a lottery.

A group of butchers jumped inside a food lift to try to reach the upper decks. They became trapped and others who had found a way out were haunted by the sounds of them hammering in the tiny enclosure that would take them to their watery graves. A young mother ran to fetch her baby daughter and suddenly remembered that the woman in the next cabin had a toddler. She burst into the cabin and there he was, having been put down for a nap. She tried to pick him up but the little boy was too heavy and she could not carry both. She had to leave him behind.

The ship's bow was beginning to dip below the surface and the list had now reached some thirty degrees. Thanks to the recommendations following the
Titanic
disaster there were more than enough spaces available for everybody on board in twenty-two boats slung from davits as well as twenty-six more collapsible ones with folding sides stacked about the boat deck. Passengers were swarming up from all classes to make their escape, some of them screaming.

The ship's list was growing worse. People began naturally running to the port side of the ship, which was rising higher and higher away from the water. Launching boats was proving to be futile here though. They clunked against the hull as the crew tried to launch them, spilling frightened passengers into the water some 60ft below. The lack of seamen left one officer shouting for help from male passengers to try to push more than two tons worth of lifeboat away from the ship so it could be launched safely, whilst beating off men trying to jump in. One boat smashed on to the deck and rolled along it, crushing those in its wake. Others that managed to get to the surface crashed on to people who had fallen out as they flailed in the water.