It's like a cock-up only much bigger
Jun. 11th, 2024 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileIn 2017 at a Harvard Bookstore Warehouse Sale I picked up a copy of a book by Erik Larson, best known for The Devil in the White City, which I have still not yet read. I have read the disturbing and fascinating In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, although I hadn’t as of this particular Warehouse Sale. I don’t even think I picked this up out of any particular interest in World War One; I don’t think I particularly remembered from high school history why the Lusitania was important off the top of my head. No, I only remembered looking at my great-grandfather’s immigration papers many years ago, and that he had come over to the US on it, and at the time taking note of that because it was a recognizable and notable ship.
Anyway, if you too have a complete blank spot where your World War I naval history should be, the Lusitania was not a military ship. It was a real big fancy passenger steamer, operated by the Cunard line, and it remained a passenger steamer throughout the war, as it was so big and fancy that transforming it into a battleship would be prohibitively fuel-intensive. It was officially a British ship, but on its 201st and last voyage it was coming out of New York with a load of American passengers, which meant it was supposed to be treated as neutral, both because it was a civilian merchant vessel and because America was still neutral. However, Germany–despite the risk of inducing America to join the war on the opposite side–was getting increasingly bold about using its terrifying new technology, U-boats, to sink basically anything that got too close to the British Isles. The torpedoing of the Lusitania, which sank the behemoth ocean liner in merely 18 minutes and had a casualty count of over a thousand–more than half the people on the ship–was one of the highest-profile German atrocities that ended up drawing the US into the war.
Dead Wake gives us a practically minute-by-minute account of the ship’s final crossing, with accounts of many different passengers, the ship’s brave but taciturn Captain Turner, the goings-on within the secretive Room 40 within the British Admiralty, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and the infamous submarine U-20 under the command of Walther Schweiger. The pacing is quite good, and builds up a lot of narrative tension even though you basically know where the story is going. This cinematic pacing is somewhat unfortunately bolstered in time-honored fashion by that most shopworn of dramatic devices, the Obligatory Romantic Subplot, provided in this case by the recently bereaved President Wilson and his newfound lady friend Edith Bolling Galt. My other major criticism of the book is that there are no pictures. (I am much more surprised by this second criticism than I am by the first.)
The bulk of this book is given over to recording in fine-grained narrative detail what happened during that fateful week, and in the time before and after it as is relevant. But the various lawsuits and inquests in the aftermath do raise some interesting, if somewhat under-explored questions about why precisely it happened. Obviously, the German submarine warfare policy bears primary responsibility, but there seem to have been a number of negligent or at least questionable decisions made about the Lusitania’s safety on the part of the British Admiralty, raising the disturbing specter of a conspiracy to leave the ship exposed in the hope that eventually something would happen to draw the Americans into the war. The book doesn’t take a hard line on this, just relating the bare bones of the controversy. It certainly seems plausible enough, but it is also still plausible that it could have been, as one historian put it, “an unforgivable cock-up.”
Overall I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Anyway, if you too have a complete blank spot where your World War I naval history should be, the Lusitania was not a military ship. It was a real big fancy passenger steamer, operated by the Cunard line, and it remained a passenger steamer throughout the war, as it was so big and fancy that transforming it into a battleship would be prohibitively fuel-intensive. It was officially a British ship, but on its 201st and last voyage it was coming out of New York with a load of American passengers, which meant it was supposed to be treated as neutral, both because it was a civilian merchant vessel and because America was still neutral. However, Germany–despite the risk of inducing America to join the war on the opposite side–was getting increasingly bold about using its terrifying new technology, U-boats, to sink basically anything that got too close to the British Isles. The torpedoing of the Lusitania, which sank the behemoth ocean liner in merely 18 minutes and had a casualty count of over a thousand–more than half the people on the ship–was one of the highest-profile German atrocities that ended up drawing the US into the war.
Dead Wake gives us a practically minute-by-minute account of the ship’s final crossing, with accounts of many different passengers, the ship’s brave but taciturn Captain Turner, the goings-on within the secretive Room 40 within the British Admiralty, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and the infamous submarine U-20 under the command of Walther Schweiger. The pacing is quite good, and builds up a lot of narrative tension even though you basically know where the story is going. This cinematic pacing is somewhat unfortunately bolstered in time-honored fashion by that most shopworn of dramatic devices, the Obligatory Romantic Subplot, provided in this case by the recently bereaved President Wilson and his newfound lady friend Edith Bolling Galt. My other major criticism of the book is that there are no pictures. (I am much more surprised by this second criticism than I am by the first.)
The bulk of this book is given over to recording in fine-grained narrative detail what happened during that fateful week, and in the time before and after it as is relevant. But the various lawsuits and inquests in the aftermath do raise some interesting, if somewhat under-explored questions about why precisely it happened. Obviously, the German submarine warfare policy bears primary responsibility, but there seem to have been a number of negligent or at least questionable decisions made about the Lusitania’s safety on the part of the British Admiralty, raising the disturbing specter of a conspiracy to leave the ship exposed in the hope that eventually something would happen to draw the Americans into the war. The book doesn’t take a hard line on this, just relating the bare bones of the controversy. It certainly seems plausible enough, but it is also still plausible that it could have been, as one historian put it, “an unforgivable cock-up.”
Overall I found this to be a thoroughly enjoyable read.