LATER, A WOMAN WHO CLAIMED TO BE SCHWIEGER’S FIANCÉE told a newspaper reporter that the attack on the Lusitania had left Schwieger a shattered man. (The reporter did not disclose her name.) When Schwieger visited her in Berlin after his return to base, she had no idea, at first, that it was he who had torpedoed the ship. “All we thought of was that one of the fastest and biggest English ships had been sunk, and we were all very glad,” she said. But Schwieger seemed not to share the elation. “Of course, his mother and I saw right away that something dreadful had happened to him. He was so haggard and so silent, and so—different.”
Schwieger told her the story of the attack. “Of course he couldn’t hear anything, but he could see, and the silence of it all in the U-boat was worse than if he could have heard the shrieks. And, of course, he was the only one in the U-boat who could even see. He didn’t dare let any of the others in the U-boat know what was happening.” After the attack he took the boat straight back to Germany, his fiancée said. “He wanted to get away from what he had done. He wanted to get ashore. He couldn’t torpedo another ship.”
The woman’s account, while compelling, stands at odds with Schwieger’s own War Log. If Schwieger felt any sense of remorse, he did not express it by his actions.
Just five minutes after taking his last look at the Lusitania, he spotted a large steamer ahead, coming toward him, and prepared to attack. He was supposed to keep two torpedoes in reserve for the voyage home—ideally one in the bow, one in the stern—but this was an irresistible target, a 9,000-ton tanker. Schwieger ordered full ahead, to position U-20 in front of the ship, stern-first, so that he could use one of his two stern tubes. At 4:08 P.M. he was ready. The shot was lined up perfectly: a 90-degree angle with the target’s course, at a point-blank range of 500 meters, about a third of a mile. “Conditions for our torpedo very favorable,” he wrote in his log; “a miss out of the question.”
He gave the order to fire. The submarine shivered as the torpedo left its tube. Schwieger waited for the sound of impact.
A long silence followed. As the seconds ticked past, he realized something had gone wrong.
“As periscope is submerged for some time after torpedo had been fired, I am sorry to say that I could not ascertain what kind of a miss it was,” he wrote in his log. “The torpedo came out of its tube correctly, and either it did not run at all or at a wrong angle.” He doubted that anyone aboard the steamer even noticed.
Schwieger resumed the voyage home. He surfaced to increase speed and recharge his batteries. From atop the conning tower, he saw the smoke trails of at least six large steamers in the distance, inbound and outbound, but made no further effort to attack. As it was, this would prove to be his most successful patrol. In the course of traveling a total of 3,006 miles, 250 under water, he had sunk 42,331 tons of shipping.
THE STEAMER Schwieger had fired upon was a British oil tanker, the Narragansett, headed for New Jersey, and contrary to what he imagined, everyone aboard was very much aware of the near miss. The ship’s first officer had spotted the periscope, and the captain, Charles Harwood, had ordered a sharp turn and maximum speed.
Harwood reported the encounter by wireless. At the time of the attack he had been responding to an SOS from the Lusitania, and had been racing to the scene, but now he suspected the SOS had been faked by the submarine to lure his ship and other would-be rescuers.
His telegram, relayed to the Admiralty’s War Room in London, read, “We proceeded with all possible speed 3:45 p.m. sighted submarine about 200 yards on our starboard quarter, submarine fired torpedo which passed ten yards astern of us, maneuvered ship and got all clear; submarine was seen astern 10 minutes later 4 P.M.… Saw no sign of Lusitania believe call to be a hoax.”
Captain Harwood changed heading and fled away from the last reported location of the Lusitania.