No German war vessel can get her or near her." Captain Turner himself laughed off the likelihood of a torpedo attack. The hubristic officials at Cunard bragged that the Lusitania was "too fast for any submarine. Most were too busy to notice an ad the German Embassy placed on the shipping pages of various newspapers the very day of the launch, warning that all those who crossed in vessels flying the flag of Great Britain would "do so at their own risk." Larson also reveals in intimate detail the lives of passengers in the days before the final reckoning, as they went about their casual promenading and shuffleboard. Narrative tension increases in alternating chapters, as we see the two vessels drawing close to each other off the coast of Britain, one atop the waves, one beneath. The seasoned 58-year-old Englishman William Thomas Turner faces off with Walther Schwieger, the 32-year-old commander of the German "iron coffin," Unterseeboot-20. In Dead Wake, the liner's final voyage becomes a tale of two captains. And in a larger sense, the disaster could be said to have cost thousands of additional casualties in collateral damage: Anguish over the sinking, and anger at German perfidy, eventually helped prod the determinedly neutral President Woodrow Wilson to bring the United States into World War I.
A total of 1,198 people, including 123 Americans, were lost when a German U-Boat sank the Lusitania off Ireland's west coast. In his gripping new examination of the last days of what was then the fastest cruise ship in the world, Larson ( Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts) brings the past stingingly alive. Few of the present-day joggers and cyclists who pass by might recall that a century ago, on May 1, 1915, the Lusitania set sail from this berth on her last doomed voyage.Įrik Larson is here to remind us. Like whispers of the past, the engraved names of the shipping companies Cunard and White Star remain barely legible atop its rusted iron gate. Pier 54 on the Hudson River in Manhattan is padlocked and forgotten now. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Dead Wake Subtitle The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Author Erik Larson
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