A Higher Form of Killing (46 page)

Another charge made by the German government was that the
Lusitania
was carrying Canadian troops. If the troops were “organised and armed” their presence would under international law have made her a troop ship, which could legitimately have been sunk without warning. However, no survivors’ accounts mention any organized body of troops. Dudley Malone and other U.S. customs officials testified on June 4, 1915, that “the
Lusitania
did not have Canadian troops or troops of any nationality on board,” adding that since the war began she had never done so.

In 1973 the Canadian Ministry of Defence checked whether any unaccompanied male passengers of British nationality (there was no separate Canadian nationality until 1947) whose journeys began in Canada and who died in the sinking were listed in the Canadian Book of Remembrance for May 7, 1915, as servicemen dying on duty. There were none. Neither was there any evidence in the ministry’s records of Canadian troops being on the
Lusitania
.

The German accusation that the
Lusitania
was carrying contraband was entirely correct. Her supplementary cargo manifest given out by the New York customs house after the sinking states that the
Lusitania
was carrying 4,200 cases of rifle bullets, 1,250 cases of unfused shrapnel shells, and 18 cases of percussion fuses. The rest of the cargo was, by the admission of both the British and U.S. administrations, “nearly all contraband” such as material for uniforms and leather belts. Nevertheless, the issue of contraband was, as the U.S. authorities later stated, irrelevant to the circumstances of the sinking. The presence of contraband would have justified a German vessel stopping and searching the
Lusitania
under the Cruiser Rules, impounding her cargo, and seizing the vessel as a prize or destroying her after making proper provision for the safety of the crew and passengers. It did not justify a “sink on sight” policy.

Two aspects of the
Lusitania
’s cargo have been queried. First was whether the declared munitions were as described in the manifest or whether the shrapnel shells were filled and the fuses contained explosives—both charges denied by the Bethlehem Steel Company at the Mayer hearing. A recent researcher has shown that the individual shell weight of eighteen pounds derived from the manifest and other shipping documents was that of an unfilled shell—a filled one would have weighed twenty-two pounds. Divers have retrieved examples of the fuses. They contain no explosives. Second was whether the
Lusitania
was carrying additional munitions to those on her manifest, either undeclared or listed as something else to disguise them. Numerous attempts have been made to confirm this theory, not least by German agents in the United States after the sinking. None have succeeded. One of the main items suspected of concealing clandestine munitions was a large consignment of furs but there is plenty of evidence that these were indeed furs. Many were washed up on the Irish coast after the sinking, dried, and resold.

One of the key findings of Bob Ballard’s exploration of the wreck was that there was no damage to the area of the ship around the cargo hold and that therefore whatever its contents, they had not exploded and contributed to the sinking as the British government had feared.

If munitions did not account for the second explosion and the speed of the sinking, then what did? An engineering report commissioned by this author for an earlier book suggests that where the torpedo hit—about 160–180 feet from the bows at the forward end of boiler room one near or at a main bulkhead—was one of the few places where the
Lusitania
’s structural integrity could have been as badly damaged as it was. The initial hole punched by the torpedo would have been about twenty feet long and ten feet high. Water would have immediately begun to penetrate the vulnerable starboard coal bunker which ran the length of the vessel. Just as it had in the
Hogue
,
Aboukir
, and
Cressy
, with their similar designs, when they were torpedoed by
U-9
, it produced an immediate list and a speedy sinking.

Because the steering was disabled almost at once and the engines could neither be stopped nor reversed, the ship’s forward momentum would have pushed more water into the hole and loosened further rivets over the eighteen minutes of life left to the
Lusitania
. On the very conservative assumption that the rate of seawater flow into the ship was only 10 percent of the potential, traveling at a speed of eighteen knots, the liner would have been taking in over eight hundred tons of water per minute. This is without the later effect of water flowing through open portholes of which witnesses attested there were many. The starboard list allied to the bows’ downward position, and the forward momentum produced twisting and bending pressures, causing the stern to lift and rotate as described by Margaret Mackworth and others, further increasing the strains on the hull and internal structures and causing them to fail more quickly. Therefore, the main factor in the
Lusitania
’s speed of sinking was where the torpedo hit and the effect it had on the structure, not the secondary explosion, which did, however, undoubtedly occur.

Apart from munitions, which can now be discounted, other theories for the cause of the second explosion have been a coal-dust explosion in the nearly empty coal bunkers or a similar particulate explosion in the aluminum powder being carried aboard. Certainly coal, like many types of dust including not only aluminum powder but also everyday substances such as flour, talcum powder, and sawdust, can ignite if subject to a spark or flame while in a uniform mixture with air. The torpedo’s impact and explosion would have created the necessary ignition sources. However, suitable conditions for an explosion were unlikely. The bunkers were not insulated and separated from the cold sea only by the hull plating. Seepage of seawater into the hull was an inherent problem in all vessels. Moisture migrated toward the bottom of the ship to produce pools of bilge water. Also, warm moist air from the boiler rooms would have gotten into the cooler bunkers and condensed. The dampness of the bunker would have prevented the dust being shaken into the air to form an explosive aerosol. The location of the stored aluminum powder and its robust containment make an aluminum-dust explosion equally unlikely.

Reliable witness reports of dense moist steam following the second explosion and enveloping the decks strongly suggest that the liner’s power plant was involved. No other suggested cause produces steam. The second explosion was reported as loudest by those on the decks, suggesting it occurred in a boiler room where sound could be transmitted to the deck via the funnels and vents. Some experts have suggested a boiler lost water as a result of the torpedo strike and consequently exploded. However, the second explosion does not seem to have been large enough nor does the amount of steam and smoke observed seem commensurate with such a big explosion.

Engineering calculations also show that a boiler explosion would have been equivalent to around five hundred pounds of TNT—a third more than the content of a torpedo warhead. Additionally, there were survivors from the first and second boiler rooms, something that would have been highly unlikely had a boiler exploded.

Therefore, the engineering study suggests the cause of the second explosion was indeed a steam explosion, not of a boiler but of one or more of the steam lines that carried steam from the boilers to the turbines. The probable cause was either thermal shock of cold seawater on hot metal or shock and vibration created when the torpedo detonated. Captain Turner certainly believed a steam line explosion occurred. He told the Mayer hearing: “The torpedo burst the steam pipe and put the engines out of commission.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always I am grateful to Michael, my husband and coauthor, without whom this book would not have been written.

I would also especially like to thank the following for giving generously of their time and expertise: Dr. Tim Cook, Canadian War Museum; Dr. Janet Howarth, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford; Kim Lewison, Neil Munro; Professor Holger Nehring, University of Stirling; Paddy O’Sullivan, Dirk Ullmann, the Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft; Donald Wallace FRCS, Dr. Ingrid Wallace, and Dr. Mike Wood.

In the United Kingdom the help of the staff of the British Library; the London Library; the Bodleian Library; Churchill College, Cambridge; the National Maritime Museum; the Merseyside Maritime Museum; the National Archives; the BBC Written Archives Centre; and the Cunard Archives was invaluable. I am also very grateful for the insights of
Lusitania
survivor Audrey Lawson-Johnson, née Pearl, and Joe Wynne for his recollections of George Wynne. In the United States I must thank the staff of the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, Virginia. In Canada, I am indebted to CBC for access to taped interviews with
Lusitania
survivors and to the staff of the Canadian War Museum. In Ireland I much valued the assistance of the Cobh Museum and the National Maritime Museum and in Germany the help of the archivists of the Militärarchiv, Freiburg, and of Bernd Hoffmann of the Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin.

I would like to thank my mother, Florence Faith, for all her many years of encouragement.

I also much appreciate all the help, advice, and encouragement of my agents Bill Hamilton in London and Michael Carlisle in New York and of George Gibson and all his team at Bloomsbury.

NOTES AND SOURCES

To help simplify the notes, I used the following abbreviations and designations to identify some of the main sources:

ARCHIVES

• BBC. Interview transcripts in the production files for two programs—
Fifty Fathoms Deep
and
Who Sank the
Lusitania
?—
containing much unused material and a file about salvage operations between 1982 and 1987 which are in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Written Archives Centre, Caversham Park, UK.

• CBC. Lengthy taped interviews (around eight hours in total) with
Lusitania
survivors and a member of the
U-20
’s crew recorded by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for its 1965 program
Rendezvous with Death
.

• Churchill Archives, Churchill College, Cambridge University.

• Cunard archives. The archives of the Cunard Steamship Company, Liverpool University, Liverpool, UK.

• German Military Archive, Freiburg. The Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, Freiburg, Germany, which holds the German naval files for the period.

• Fisher Collection, Churchill College, Cambridge University.

• The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, which houses the extensive papers collected by Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan for “The
Lusitania
Disaster.”

• IWM. The archives of the Imperial War Museum in London include a large collection of recorded and written interviews and memoirs of those who experienced the events described in this book—British combatants, pacifists, other civilians, and German soldiers and sailors—and a large amount of correspondence with
Lusitania
survivors (the Prichard collection) as well as transcripts of the Kinsale inquest (Special Miscellaneous Collection V5). References are prefixed (IWM/R) for recorded interviews and (IWM/D) for written material.

• The Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, VA, which holds a collection of letters from
Lusitania
survivors and their relations collected in the 1950s by A. A. Hoehling and M. Hoehling for their book
The Last Voyage of the
Lusitania.

• MPG—Archive zur Geschichte der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Dahlem, Berlin, which holds papers relating to Fritz Haber’s career collected by his former student Johannes Jaenicke after the Second World War, including some of Haber’s own letters and interviews with friends and colleagues.

• NARA. National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland, and New York, which holds many of the key political documents for the period, papers describing the German spy rings in America, and the statements of American survivors given to Consul Frost. Unless otherwise specified, material quoted is from microfilms M 580 197, M 580 198, and M 973 187.