The Titanic Secret (37 page)

Bernard Hutchinson hadn’t taken his eyes off the approaching ship for the last three minutes.

The
Titanic
was off his port bow – at that moment, it was at about red zero-three-zero-thirty degrees to the left of the bow– and still steaming ahead at about twenty knots. Hitting it was not going to be easy, he knew that. It was a relatively high-speed crossing target, but the advantage he had was that he knew its course and speed would remain steady, so calculating the weapon release point was a comparatively easy mathematical exercise. He’d done it twice already and checked it three times, and he knew that his calculation was correct. Then it would all depend on how accurately the torpedoes conformed to their specifications – on how their actual speed matched what the weapons were supposed to travel at, and how straight their course was through the water.

He looked at his stopwatch, waiting for precisely the right moment to order weapon release. Then back to the eyepieces, watching the ship’s approach through the periscope.

‘Standby forward torpedo room,’ he ordered. ‘Ready tube one.’

‘Tube one ready, sir.’

And then something completely unexpected happened. Like some enormous primordial sea creature, a huge dark mass seemed almost to rise from the deep, directly in front of the
Titanic
, so large that, from Hutchinson’s viewpoint, it obscured the deck lights around the bow of the vessel.

It was a massive iceberg, and as far as Hutchinson could see, the ship was heading straight for it.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

On the bridge of the speeding liner, all was quiet and peaceful. All the instruments, the dials and the gauges, were displaying normal readings. The ship was travelling through the water at over twenty knots, so fast that to come to a dead stop from that speed would take the vessel almost half a mile.

But stopping, quickly or otherwise, was not the intention. The
Titanic
, along with her sister ship the
Olympic
, had been intended by the White Star Line to provide the fastest possible crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, from Southampton to New York, and on this, the ship’s maiden voyage, the captain was clearly determined to produce a time that other ships would find difficult to beat. Conditions were almost perfect. The sea was calm and the night was dark but clear, and the captain had retired to his cabin after instructing that he was to be called only if visibility dropped, when he would then decide if a reduction in speed was necessary.

Two lookouts, Fredrick Fleet and Reginald Lee, were posted in the crow’s nest, with responsibility to advise the bridge of any obstacles that they saw. Due to the replacement of one of the ship’s officers, they had no binoculars – the only pair the ship possessed were in a locker in the cabin previously occupied by that original officer, and nobody apparently knew they were there – and they were relying on their eyes to spot obstacles in the water ahead of the speeding liner. But in fact the night was so dark that binoculars might not have been much help to them.

During their watch, neither man had seen anything to warrant sounding the alarm, but that changed, with horrific suddenness at twenty-three thirty-nine Eastern Standard Time.

A huge dark-blue, almost black, mass suddenly loomed out of the darkness, directly in front of the ship, and frighteningly close.

‘My God,’ Fredrick Fleet muttered, as he strained his eyes to make out what the object was. At the same time, he reached over and grabbed the pull cord to ring the ship’s bell mounted on the mast, ringing it three times to indicate that an object had been sighted.

Then he grabbed the telephone fitted in the crow’s nest, and by then he knew exactly what the object was.

The phone was answered by the Sixth Officer on the bridge below.

‘What do you see?’ the officer asked anxiously.

‘Iceberg right ahead,’ Fleet replied.

‘Thank you,’ the officer said, then rang off.

At that moment, the iceberg was under 400 yards in front of the speeding
Titanic
, less than half the distance the ship would need to come to a complete stop. There was only one possible option. They would have to try to steer around it.

William Murdoch, the First Officer on the bridge had sighted the iceberg at almost the same moment, and reacted immediately.

‘Hard a’starboard!’ he ordered, although the iceberg was slightly to the right of the bow.

The order was a hangover from the days of vessels steered by tillers, when to turn a ship to port, to the left, the tiller had to be pushed all the way to the right, to starboard.

The helmsman immediately turned the wheel all the way anticlockwise. At the stern of the ship, the huge single rudder swung to the left in response.

Even before the helmsman had completed this task, Murdoch had seized the engine-room telegraph and rung ‘All stop’ and then ‘All reverse full’.

In the engine room far below, alarm bells rang and engineers raced to comply with the emergency order from the bridge. But to actually achieve this was quite a complex operation.

First, the three massive propellers driving the
Titanic
forward would have to be stopped completely. Then reverse gear would have to be engaged, and finally steam pressure would have to build up again before the propellers would be able to start turning in the opposite direction. All of that would take time, but more importantly the sudden cessation of thrust would also make the ship less manoeuvrable and harder to turn. Arguably, this order from the bridge made a collision with the iceberg more, not less, likely.

On the bridge, the First Officer activated the switches to close the watertight doors below deck, isolating the forward compartments, as a precaution in case the ship did hit the floating mass of ice and suffer any damage.

Almost immediately, the ship’s forward speed started to reduce, both by the cessation of power to the three huge propellers, and by the turn away from the massive iceberg. But the
Titanic
was still travelling quickly, and the iceberg was looming ever closer, its bulk seeming to virtually fill the sea in front of the liner.

But now the bow of the ship was moving slowly but steadily to port, to the left, towards the open water beyond the iceberg. It looked as if they’d been lucky, as if the vessel would manage to avoid a collision. It all depended on the shape of the iceberg below the waterline, on the submerged mass of ice that they couldn’t see.

And then, just over half a minute after the iceberg had been sighted, the
Titanic
reached it. The bridge crew watched in amazement as the huge, dark-blue bulk of the floating castle of ice passed down the starboard side of the ship, so close that they felt they could almost reach out and touch it. They’d been incredibly lucky, but it looked as if they’d done it. They’d actually managed to miss it.

Then the
Titanic
shuddered slightly, a sensation that was barely even noticeable to most people on board. On the bridge, the officers and men could see the bulk of the iceberg move very slightly in the water, and immediately they knew what had happened.

The ship had hit the incompressible mountain of ice but it was only a glancing blow. It was even possible that the hull had not been breached, the impact had been so gentle. Personnel were despatched to the bow section of the ship to inspect the damage, with orders to report back to the bridge immediately.

In the meantime, the
Titanic
would come to a complete stop, just in case. Disaster had been averted.

14 April 1912
HMS
D4

Through the periscope, Bernard Hutchinson had seen the
Titanic
slow down dramatically, and watched its aspect ratio change as the ship had turned away from the submarine, or rather manoeuvred to avoid the iceberg.

‘Tube one ready, sir,’ the forward torpedo room reported again.

‘Wait,’ Hutchinson ordered, his entire attention fixed on the scene he was looking at through the periscope.

Far from travelling at high speed from left to right in front of the submarine and providing perhaps the most difficult target of all, the ship now appeared to have come to an almost complete stop. He had no idea whether or not the
Titanic
had actually hit the iceberg and suffered damage, or if there was some other reason for the ship’s manoeuvres. What he did know was that he would now have to throw away his firing solution and recalculate it.

But as long as the ship was stationary, and more or less directly in front of him, the new firing solution would be the simplest possible. All he would have to do was aim the boat straight at the target and release the weapons.

The only problem was the iceberg, which lay in the water between the submarine and the
Titanic
. He would either have to move his boat away to get a clear shot at the ship, or wait until the
Titanic
herself manoeuvred away from the floating lump of ice. But even as he watched the ship through the periscope, he saw foam appearing at the rear of the
Titanic
and realized that the vessel was still moving, albeit slowly.

‘Ten degrees left rudder,’ Hutchinson ordered. ‘Revolutions for two knots.’

As he listened to his orders being acknowledged, Hutchinson guessed that that would be enough. That would swing the bow of the submarine slightly to port, which would bring the forward torpedo tubes to bear on the
Titanic
as soon as it moved out from behind the iceberg.

And then he could issue the orders which would complete his mission.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

Once it was clear that the bow of the vessel had only grazed the side of the iceberg, the
Titanic
was steered over to starboard to move the ship’s stern clear of the ice and to prevent any further possible contact, while the officers on the bridge awaited the damage report.

Below the waterline on the starboard bow of the
Titanic
, several of the steel plates of the hull had buckled with the force of the ship’s impact with the iceberg, rivets popping and tearing free, but had only opened up a small wound on the side of the ship, very close to the bow. Ice-cold water started to pour in through the hole and slowly began to fill the single compartment which had been breached: the forward peak tank.

When the officer returned to the bridge, the captain ordered the pumps to be started, confident that they would easily be able to cope with the volume of water entering the ship. But with only a single compartment holed, even without running the pumps, the
Titanic
would be in no danger: the ship had been designed to stay afloat with four of the forward compartments flooded. The impact with the iceberg was an irritation, but not a danger. The ship would have to complete the voyage at reduced speed, obviously, and they’d have to keep an eye on the adjacent compartments, just in case the watertight bulkheads somehow became damaged, but that was all.

The vessel’s arrival at New York would just be a little later than planned. No records would be broken this time, no headlines made.

14 April 1912
HMS
D4

‘Check weapons state,’ Hutchinson ordered, as he saw the dark bulk of the
Titanic
begin to emerge from behind the iceberg.

‘Both tubes ready, sir.’

‘Very good,’ he said.

The target vessel was moving very slowly, possibly barely having steerage way at that moment, but a flurry of foam from the stern of the ship showed that the propellers were again turning, driving it forward. Hutchinson knew he would never have a better opportunity than this. With a silent prayer that their Lordships in the Admiralty actually knew what they were doing, and that – for whatever utterly incomprehensible reason – his actions could be justified, he made his decision.

Again he checked the direction of the submarine’s bow, looked across at the
Titanic
, mentally assessed the speed the ship was now moving at – only about two or three knots – and then acted.

‘Ready tube one.’

‘Tube one ready, sir.’

‘Fire one.’

The submarine lurched slightly as the weapon was released. Hutchinson clicked a button on his stopwatch. ‘Ready tube two.’

‘Tube two ready, sir.’

‘Fire two.’

Again they felt the lurch as the second torpedo was blown out of the tube by compressed air.

‘Close the outer door.’

Hutchinson focused his entire attention on the huge ship about half a mile ahead of him. For a moment, as he watched the twin wakes produced by the weapons, barely visible in the darkness, he thought he’d over-estimated the speed the
Titanic
was travelling at. It looked as if both torpedoes would pass a few yards in front of the ship.

But then the vessel seemed to speed up, and he saw two distant flashes, one after the other, right by the ship’s bow, as the two eighteen-inch Whitehead torpedoes slammed into the side of the
Titanic
and exploded. Each warhead contained 200 pounds of explosive and, allied to the damage the ship had already suffered, either of them on its own would have been enough to sink the vessel. The two together just made the ship’s fate inevitable.

Hutchinson watched for a few moments. He’d done what he had been ordered to do. Now he had no other option but to follow his other instructions and leave the scene. He carried out a complete sweep around the boat through the periscope, making sure there were no other dangerous lumps of floating ice around, then took a final glance back at the doomed ship, still floating apparently serenely on the dark water, and issued his orders.

‘Right full rudder. Steer zero-nine-zero. Revolutions for five knots.’

Immediately, the submarine began turning to starboard and started picking up speed.

14 April 1912
RMS
Titanic

The impact with the iceberg had been so gentle, and so insignificant, that very few of the passengers on the ship were even aware that anything had happened. When the two torpedoes struck the bow, the situation was entirely different.