WHAT HAPPENED NEXT CAME AS A SURPRISE TO CAPTAIN Turner. Even though the cause of the disaster was obvious—an act of war—the Admiralty moved at once to place the blame on him. Anyone privy to the internal communications, or “minutes,” flung between the offices of senior Admiralty officials in the week after the disaster could have had no doubt as to the zeal with which the Admiralty intended to forge a case against Turner. In one, Churchill himself wrote, “We sh’d pursue the Captain without check.”
Before the effort could get started, however, the coroner in Kinsale, Ireland, John J. Horgan, convened an inquest of his own, much to the Admiralty’s displeasure. Horgan claimed the responsibility fell to him because five of the Lusitania’s dead had been landed in his district. The inquest began the day after the sinking, Saturday, May 8. Horgan called Turner as a witness and after hearing his testimony praised the captain for his courage in staying with the ship until the last moment. At this, Turner began to cry. Horgan, in a later memoir, called the captain “a brave but unlucky man.”
On Monday, May 10, the coroner’s jury issued its finding: that the submarine’s officers and crew and the emperor of Germany had committed “willful and wholesale murder.”
Half an hour later a message arrived from the Admiralty, ordering Horgan to block Turner from testifying. Horgan wrote, “That august body were however as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the Lusitania against attack.”
THE ADMIRALTY was far more prompt in laying out the contours of its strategy for assigning fault to Turner. The day after the disaster, Richard Webb, director of the Admiralty’s Trade Division, circulated a two-page memorandum, marked “Secret,” in which he charged that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s instructions that called for him to zigzag and to “give prominent headlands a wide berth.” Instead, Webb wrote, Turner had “proceeded along the usual trade route, at a speed approximately three-quarters of what he was able to get out of this vessel. He thus kept his valuable vessel for an unnecessary length of time in the area where she was most liable to attack, inviting disaster.”
Webb made a formal request for an investigation by Britain’s Wreck Commission, under Lord Mersey, who had led inquiries into the losses of many ships, including the Titanic and the Empress of Ireland.
On Wednesday, May 12, Webb intensified his attack on Captain Turner. In a new memorandum, he wrote that Turner “appears to have displayed an almost inconceivable negligence, and one is forced to conclude that he is either utterly incompetent, or that he has been got at by the Germans.” In the left-hand margin, First Sea Lord Fisher, in his wild fulminating hand, jotted, “I hope Captain Turner will be arrested immediately after the inquiry whatever the verdict of finding may be.”
The Admiralty took the unprecedented step of insisting that key parts of the planned inquiry, especially the examination of Turner, be held in secret.
U.S. CONSUL FROST sensed early on that the Admiralty’s soul had hardened against Turner. On Sunday, May 9, Frost paid a call on Admiral Coke, senior naval officer in Queenstown, accompanied by two U.S. military attachés who had just arrived from London to help arrange the return of American dead.
Admiral Coke openly criticized Turner for sailing too close to shore and too slowly and read aloud the warnings that had been sent to the Lusitania on Friday. But Consul Frost was surprised at how little detail these messages contained. “Bare facts only,” Frost noted, later. “No instructions or interpretation. It is true that Turner should have kept farther out; but to my mind it seemed that the Admiralty had by no means done their full duty by him.”
One of the American attachés, Capt. W. A. Castle, wrote his own account of the meeting and noted that a particular subject was glaringly absent from the conversation. “I was struck by the fact that the Admiral while seeming to be desirous of justifying the Admiralty in its measures of protection, did not mention the presence of any destroyers or other Naval vessels.” Castle added that during his train trip back to London he had discussed the subject with a fellow passenger, a Royal Navy lieutenant, “who spoke quite frankly, although I suppose of course confidentially, and said that he could not understand nor could his brother officers, why so many torpedo boats of the old type, which could make 25 knots an hour without difficulty, and would be just the thing to protect an incoming steamer, are left at various wharves, instead of being used for this purpose, and said that had they placed one of these to starboard, another to port, and another in front of the Lusitania, she could not have been torpedoed.”
WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere.
The Admiralty found added motivation to do so when, on May 12, wireless stations in Britain’s listening network intercepted a series of messages from the then homebound U-20, which upon entering the North Sea had resumed communication with its base at Emden. At the Admiralty these messages drew an unusual degree of attention. Room 40 asked all the stations that had intercepted them to confirm that they had transcribed them correctly and to provide signed and certified copies.
In the first message of the series, Schwieger reported: “Have sunk off the South Coast of Ireland, one sailing ship, two steamers, and LUSITANIA. Am steering for the mouth of the Ems.”
The Admiralty received it at 9:49 A.M.; the decrypted copy was marked “Most Secret.” This message confirmed that the culprit had indeed been U-20, the submarine that Room 40 had been tracking since April 30.
That afternoon, Room 40 received the intercept of a reply sent to Schwieger by the commander of Germany’s High Seas Fleet, which read, “My highest appreciation of Commander and crew for the success they have achieved. Am proud of their achievement and express best wishes for their return.”
Then came a third message, sent from Schwieger to his base. After detailing the latitude and longitude of his attack on the Lusitania, Schwieger noted that he had sunk the ship “by means of one torpedo.”
This was a surprise. By now the prevailing view in the world’s press was that the Lusitania had been sunk by two torpedoes and that these accounted for the two major explosions reported by passengers. But now the Room 40 cognoscenti knew without doubt that Schwieger had fired only one torpedo.
And this, they understood, raised sensitive questions: How could a single torpedo sink a ship the size of the Lusitania? And if there was no second torpedo, what exactly, caused the second explosion?
They recognized, also, that Schwieger’s message had to be kept secret at all costs, for it was precisely this kind of special knowledge that could tip Germany to the existence of Room 40.
BY THE TIME the Mersey inquiry began, on June 15, 1915, the British government had undergone one of its periodic upheavals, amid controversy over the shell shortage on the western front and the failure, at great cost in lives and ships, of Churchill’s plan to force the Dardanelles. New men ran the Admiralty. Fisher had resigned, and Churchill had been jettisoned. These changes, however, caused no easing of the campaign against Captain Turner.
After preliminary public testimony from several witnesses, including Turner, who briefly described his experience in the disaster, Lord Mersey convened the first of the secret sessions and again called Turner to the witness box. The Admiralty’s lead attorney, Sir Edward Carson, attorney general, questioned the captain in harsh fashion, as if the proceeding were a murder trial with Turner the prime suspect. Carson clearly hoped to prove that Turner had ignored the Admiralty’s directives, in particular its instructions to keep to a midchannel course.
Turner testified that by his own standards he was in midchannel. Under ordinary circumstances, he said, he passed the Old Head of Kinsale at distances as close as a mile. Indeed, one photograph of the Lusitania shows the ship steaming at full speed past the Old Head at the maritime equivalent of a hair’s breadth. At the time of the attack, the ship by Turner’s reckoning had been a dozen miles off, maybe as many as 15. (Years later a diver would pinpoint the wreck’s location at 11¾ miles from Kinsale Head.)
Carson also badgered Turner as to why the Lusitania was moving at only 18 knots when it was torpedoed and challenged the wisdom of the captain’s plan to reduce speed in order to arrive at the Mersey Bar off Liverpool at a time when he could sail into the harbor without stopping. Carson argued that if Turner had zigzagged at top speed he could have evaded the submarine and, owing to the time consumed by the frequent course changes, would still have made the bar on time. Carson let pass the fact that although Turner was not deliberately zigzagging, his several changes of course that morning to set up his four-point bearing did describe a zigzag pattern, with fatal result: the last starboard turn put him directly in U-20’s path.
Turner’s own lawyer, Butler Aspinall, Britain’s leading expert in maritime law, did his best to sculpt Turner’s story into a coherent account of the Lusitania’s last morning and to win for him Lord Mersey’s sympathy. “I mean to say, we have the very great advantage of knowing so much now which was unknown to him then,” Aspinall said; “we are sitting upon the matter in cool judgment, with an opportunity of looking at the charts, and the circumstances under which we are dealing with it were not the circumstances under which the Master would have an opportunity of dealing with it.”
In all, Lord Mersey heard testimony from thirty-six witnesses, including passengers, crew, and outside experts. At the conclusion of the inquiry, he defied the Admiralty and absolved Turner of any responsibility for the loss of the Lusitania. In his report, Mersey wrote that Turner “exercised his judgment for the best. It was the judgment of a skilled and experienced man, and although others might have acted differently and perhaps more successfully he ought not, in my opinion, to be blamed.” Mersey found Cunard’s closure of the ship’s fourth boiler room to be irrelevant. The resulting reduction in speed, he wrote, “still left the Lusitania a considerably faster ship than any other steamer plying across the Atlantic.” Mersey laid blame entirely on the U-boat commander.
Turner doubtless was relieved, but, according to his son Norman he also felt he had been unjustly treated. “He was very bitter about the way in which, at the enquiry … it was sought to fix the blame on him for the sinking, and particularly to try to condemn him for being on the course he was.” Lord Mersey seemed to share this sentiment. Soon afterward, he resigned his post as wreck commissioner, calling the inquiry “a damned dirty business.” Cunard retained Turner on its roster of captains.
At no time during the secret portions of the proceeding did the Admiralty ever reveal what it knew about the travels of U-20. Nor did it disclose the measures taken to protect the HMS Orion and other military vessels. Moreover, the Admiralty made no effort to correct Lord Mersey’s finding that the Lusitania had been struck by two torpedoes—this despite the fact that Room 40 knew full well that Schwieger had fired only one.
Nor did the inquiry ever delve into why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy—the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?
There is silence on the subject in the records of Room 40 held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom and Churchill College, Cambridge. Nowhere is there even a hint of dismay at missing so clear an opportunity to use the fruits of Room 40’s intelligence to save a thousand lives.
The question perplexed at least one prominent naval historian, the late Patrick Beesly, who, during World War II, was himself an officer in British naval intelligence. Britain’s secrecy laws prevented him from writing about the subject until the 1970s and 1980s, when he published several books, including one about Room 40, said to be a quasi-official account. There he addressed the controversy only obliquely, stating that if no deliberate plan existed to put the Lusitania in danger, “one is left only with an unforgivable cock-up as an explanation.”
However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. “As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy,” he said, “I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship.” But, he said, “on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.” So much was done for the Orion and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the Lusitania. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, “If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances?”
The absence of an escort also surprised Cunard’s lawyers. In a lengthy confidential memorandum on the Mersey inquiry, written to help a New York attorney defend the company against dozens of American liability claims, Cunard’s London firm wrote, “With regard to the question of convoy, Sir Alfred Booth hoped and expected that the Admiralty would send destroyers to meet & convoy the vessel. There were destroyers at Queenstown and no explanation has been given as to why there was no convoy except Mr. Winston Churchill’s statement that it was impossible for the Admiralty to convoy Merchant ships.” The memo left unsaid the fact that the Admiralty earlier in the year had in fact made provision to escort merchant ships.
It was a question that also troubled passengers and crew and the citizens of Queenstown. Third Officer Albert Bestic wrote, later, that in light of the German warning in New York and the Admiralty’s awareness of new submarine activity, some sort of protective force should have been dispatched. “Even one destroyer encircling the liner as she entered the danger zone would have minimized the danger, if indeed have not rendered the Lusitania immune from attack with a resulting loss of lives.” One of Cunard’s most prominent captains, James Bisset, who had served under Turner and was captain of the HMS Caronia when it met the Lusitania off New York shortly after departure, wrote in a memoir, “The neglect to provide naval escort for her in the narrow waters as she approached her destination was all the more remarkable as no less than twenty-three British merchant vessels had been torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats near the coasts of Britain and Ireland in the preceding seven days.”
As to whether an escort really could have prevented the disaster, Turner himself was ambivalent. “It might,” he said, during his testimony at the Kinsale coroner’s inquest, “but it is one of those things one never knows. The submarine would have probably torpedoed both of us.”
ANOTHER MYSTERY centered on the second explosion within the Lusitania. Its cause would be debated for a century to come, with dark talk of exploding munitions and a secret cargo of explosive materials. There may indeed have been a hidden cache of explosives aboard, but if so, it did not cause the second explosion or contribute to the speed at which the ship sank. The myriad accounts left by survivors fail to describe the kind of vivid cataclysm such an explosion would produce. The rifle ammunition was not likely to have been the culprit either. Testing done several years earlier had determined that such ammunition did not explode en masse when exposed to fire, and this prompted the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor to approve the shipping of such cargoes aboard passenger vessels.
A more plausible theory held that when the torpedo exploded, the concussion shook the ship with such violence that the nearly empty coal bunkers became clouded with explosive coal dust, which then ignited. There is evidence that such a cloud did arise. One fireman, who had been standing in the center of a stokehold, reported hearing the crash of the torpedo and suddenly finding himself engulfed in dust. But this cloud apparently did not ignite: the fireman survived. Here too, survivors’ accounts don’t depict the kind of fiery convulsion such an ignition would have produced. Subsequent investigation by forensic engineers concluded that the environment in which the ship’s coal was stored was too damp, in part from condensation on the hull, to foster the ideal conditions necessary for detonation.
What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line, carrying steam under extreme pressure. This was Turner’s theory from the beginning. The fracture could have been caused by the direct force of the initial explosion, or by cold seawater entering Boiler Room No. 1 and coming into contact with the superheated pipe or its surrounding fixtures, causing a potentially explosive condition known as thermal shock. The fact is, immediately after the torpedo exploded, steam pressure within the ship plummeted. An engineer in the starboard high-pressure turbine room reported that pressure in the main line dropped “to 50 pounds in a few seconds,” roughly a quarter of what it should have been.
IN THE END, Schwieger’s attack on the Lusitania succeeded because of a chance confluence of forces. Even the tiniest alteration in a single vector could have saved the ship.
Had Captain Turner not had to wait the extra two hours for the transfer of passengers from the Cameronia, he likely would have passed Schwieger in the fog, when U-20 was submerged and on its way home. For that matter, even the brief delay caused by the last-minute disembarkation of Turner’s niece could have placed the ship in harm’s way. More importantly, had Turner not been compelled to shut down the fourth boiler room to save money, he could have sped across the Atlantic at 25 knots, covering an additional 110 miles a day, and been safely to Liverpool before Schwieger even entered the Celtic Sea.
Fog was an important factor too. Had it persisted just a half hour longer, neither vessel would have seen the other, and Schwieger would have continued on his way.
Then there was the almost miraculous fact that Schwieger’s attack even succeeded. Had Captain Turner not made that final turn to starboard, Schwieger would have had no hope of catching up. What’s more, the torpedo actually worked. Defying his own experience and the 60 percent failure rate calculated by the German navy, it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Not only that, it struck precisely the right place in the Lusitania’s hull to guarantee disaster, by allowing seawater to fill the starboard longitudinal bunkers and thereby produce a fatal list. No one familiar with ship construction and torpedo dynamics would have guessed that a single torpedo could sink a ship as big as the Lusitania, let alone do so in just eighteen minutes. Schwieger’s earlier attack on the Candidate required a torpedo and multiple shells from his deck gun; his attack later that same day on the Centurionrequired two torpedoes. And almost exactly a year later, on May 8, 1916, he would need three torpedoes to sink the White Star liner Cymric, which even then stayed afloat for another twenty-eight hours. All three ships were a fraction of the Lusitania’s size.
Moreover, Schwieger had overestimated the ship’s speed. He calculated 22 knots when in fact the ship was moving at only 18. Had he gauged the speed correctly and timed his shot accordingly, the torpedo would have struck the hull farther back, amidships, possibly with less catastrophic effect and certainly with the result that the many crew members killed instantly in the luggage room would have survived to assist in launching the lifeboats. The steam line might not have failed. If Turner had been able to keep the ship under power, he might have made it to Queenstown, or succeeded in beaching the ship, or even leveraged its extraordinary agility to turn and ram U-20.
However, it also seems likely that if the Lusitania had not been so visibly crippled Schwieger might have come back for a second shot.
Really the only good piece of luck that Friday was the weather. The water was preternaturally calm, the day sunny and warm. Even a modest sea would have swept survivors from their floating oars and boxes and planks of wood, and likely swamped overloaded lifeboats. At one point, survivor Ogden Hammond’s boat had seventy-five people aboard; its gunnels were only 6 inches above the water. The benign conditions of the day saved scores of lives, if not hundreds.