Tuesday, May 7

by Ed Voves

In 1920, a bit of debris from the recent Great War was retrieved from the Delaware River near Philadelphia. It was a battered life jacket marked with the name of a vessel that had succumbed to a submarine attack thousands of miles away, off the coast of Ireland: Lusitania.

The sinking of the British passenger ship on May 7, 1915, by the German U-20 was one of the pivotal events of the 20th century. Aptly subtitled "an epic tragedy," Diana Preston's new account of the Lusitania's last voyage reflects the reality of the period in a way that few other books on World War I have matched. Preston's gifts as a writer of narrative history place her in the company of Barbara Tuchman and a handful of other historians who have revealed the Great War as a staggering human tragedy that forever altered the way people think and act.

With commendable skill, Preston depicts the Lusitania tragedy as a historic clash between a deadly new weapon system and a code of maritime law dating back to the 1500s. Merchant vessels, including neutral ships carrying military supplies, had long been a legitimate target. There were, however, guidelines called the Cruiser Rules, which stipulated that ships had to be warned before attack.

Walter Schwieger, the commander of U-20, made no effort to comply with these rules. But was his surprise attack an act of "willful and wholesale murder," as the Irish coroner's inquest proclaimed?

With meticulous attention to detail, Preston probes the "fog of war" surrounding the Lusitania. The ship was not an auxiliary vessel of the Royal Navy, as other passenger liners were. It was not armed, though more than four million rounds of rifle bullets and 1,250 cases of artillery shells were stored on the ship.

The Lusitania sank with terrifying speed: in 18 minutes. Only one torpedo was launched, so it was internal explosions, caused by exploding ammunition or a detonation of the ship's boilers and coal bunkers, that accounted for her rapid demise. Preston shows that it was almost certainly the latter case.

The Lusitania had been launched in 1906, and her construction reflected the Edwardian ethos of the time. The ship was built for speed and the comfort of her passengers. Enemy attack from beneath the waves was unimaginable.

No one would ever think that way again after May 7, 1915. Preston's vivid reconstruction of the dying moments of the Lusitania's passengers and crew, more than 1,200 of whom were killed, is unforgettable. The images of the ship's lifeboats overturning and hurling women and children to their deaths, of people trapped in elevators banging frantically on the metal grillwork, and the sickening scenes as the dead were brought to Queenstown, Ireland, will stick in the reader's mind long after the self-serving polemics of the German and Allied governments are forgotten.

Preston's book is likely to become the definitive account of the Lusitania tragedy. But it must be said that it has a unique merit as a tract for our post- "9/11/01" times. One has only to read the account of a survivor who recalled that the sinking ship sounded like "the collapse of a great building during a fire" to know the reason why.

World War I opened a century of revolution and war. Few Americans today can understand it. We did not learn much about it in school, and when we think of the randomness of how it started, the vaingloriousness of how it was promoted, the bullheadedness of how it was conducted and the nastiness of how it was ended, we are left scratching our heads. What was in our great-grandparents' minds?

One of the things in their minds was the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania by the German submarine U-20. It killed 1,201 people, most of them British and Canadian. The fury against Germany was intense: In Victoria, B.C., the public rioted, and the authorities declared martial law.

The sinking of the Lusitania did not get America into the war. Congress declared war almost two years later. But it horrified American opinion, and it pushed Germany into a corner over the issue of unrestricted submarine warfare, which eventually did bring America into the war.

Historian Diana Preston's account of the politics of the sinking in her new book, "Lusitania," is masterful, and is the book's strongest point.

There is President Woodrow Wilson, seemingly neutral but actually not, making demands of the Germans that U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan could not stomach. There is British First Sea Lord Winston Churchill, a future leader of World War II, who had a motive not to pass on the Admiralty's warnings to the Lusitania and may have conspired to do just that. There are the leaders of Imperial Germany, split between the belligerent navy men and the cautious Kaiser, embarrassed for his country.

Was the Lusitania a legitimate target? By world standards in 1915, it was not. By the standards of World War II, Preston says, it clearly was. Preston argues provocatively that for Germany to win World War I, it would have had to isolate Britain as much as Britain had isolated Germany. To do that it would have to sink liners like the Lusitania, which were carrying munitions, food and other goods. Avoiding civilian casualties was a "mistake" that would not be made by either side in World War II.

Preston lets the reader in on much more than the people in 1915 were allowed to know. People did know there was a threat from German submarines, because the Germans said as much. But Lusitania passengers were told that the ship, which went 25 knots, was too fast for submarines — and indeed, no ship traveling at more than 14 knots had been torpedoed. But Cunard Lines, the Lusitania's owner, did not mention that it was leaving one boiler unused, slowing the ship to 21 knots to save coal.

Preston notes, as other writers have, that Lusitania was carrying munitions as the Germans claimed. The British board of inquiry explained the two explosions on the ship as the hits of two torpedoes, even though the Admiralty knew from radio intercepts that there had been only one.

The Germans lied, too. They said they had sunk the Lusitania by accident, when they had actually sent U-20 out to stalk it.

All sides "spun" the story. No government, she writes, was "hesitant to twist the facts, or use the disaster, for its own political ends." All citizens who believed their governments unreservedly were misled.

Preston connects other stories to the Lusitania. One chapter is a fascinating essay on the development of submarines as "independent, offensive, strategic weapons." Another chapter is an essay on the transatlantic liners. Sandwiched between narratives of history and politics is a welter of stories, of survivors and victims. This collection of personal accounts is the centerpiece of the book, but it fits oddly into the rest of the narrative, which follows decisionmakers rather than a swarm of passengers jumping for their lives.

People sometimes confuse the Lusitania with the Titanic, which went down only three years before with a similar loss of life. The Titanic made for a self-contained drama, a sinking with no particular meaning other than as a 2-1/2-hour stage for passengers and crew to make interesting moral choices.

The Lusitania went down in 18 minutes; there wasn't time for a lot of thought. Its interest is outside of itself: why it was sunk, and what was made of it. Preston does a fine job of explaining those who brought to this stately ship a purpose — all of them smart and some of them grand, and none quite realizing where they were taking humanity in the 20th century.