At 2:05 he uttered the words that would send twelve hundred men, women, and children to their deaths. "Away torpedo."
With a loud hiss of compressed air, the torpedo shot from the tube.
Powered by a little four-cylinder engine turning two counterrotating propellers, it drove through the water at twenty-two knots with its depth set at nine feet. Though he had underestimated the liner's speed, Schwieger watched with great satisfaction as the churning wake beat a trail straight for the massive starboard hull of the helpless Lusitania.
It was a textbook bow shot from only seven hundred yards. It seemed to Schwieger as if Lusitania steamed right into it. The torpedo slammed into the great liner just aft of the forward mast, shredding hull plates and blowing a hole as large as a barn door. Damage was serious but not fatal. Half expecting the ship to continue as if it were merely stung, Schwieger was stunned by what he witnessed in the next few seconds.
The first explosion was followed by an even larger one that twisted the entire bow on an angle, causing the ship to heel over almost immediately on a fifteen-degree list. Thousands of tons of water poured into what had now become a gigantic cavity. Controversy would later erupt over whether Lusitania was holed by two torpedoes, a sympathetic explosion from the coal dust in the empty bunkers, or the detonation of 1,248 cases of three-inch shrapnel shells clandestinely carried in the forward cargo hold.
It is an enigma that continues to this day.
Turner stiffened when the lookout's dreaded cry of "Torpedo on the starboard side!" rang out. He rushed over to that side of the bridge wing just as the explosion rocked his ship. "Close the watertight doors!" he roared above the fading rumble. Disaster followed catastrophe. A second, much larger, thunderous blast entirely different from the first shook the deck under his feet. The list came so quickly he barely was able @to grip a handrail to keep from spilling over the side.
Down deep, in the depths of his soul, William Turner knew his ship was doomed.
Within seconds, the tranquil scene under a peaceful sky and calm sea deteriorated into mass confusion. There was no panic, but everyone milled around the lifeboats without benefit of direction.
Passengers frantically searched for loved ones or wandered about the decks as if lost. The chaos became ever worse as Lusitania, still underway, began her roll to starboard in unison with her plunging bow.
Turner telegraphed "Full astern" to slow the progress of the ship, but problems with the turbines-one of the main steam pipes split open-prevented the order from being carried out. The helmsman spun the wheel to bring Lusitania around, but the rudder refused to respond.
Lusitania continued moving ahead with just enough speed to swamp the lifeboats as they were lowered into the rushing water.
Only six lifeboats out of forty-eight carried by the ship floated away intact. Most were badly damaged or destroyed when they slid forward toward the bow, crashing through other boats and crushing any passengers who stood in the way.
Many of the crew in the engine room were either killed outright or swept upward on a torrent of water cascading through the hatches that remained open. In the radio room, second wireless operator David McCormick tapped out, "Come at once. Big list. Ten miles Old Head Kinsale." The message was heard and everything that could float rushed to the scene.
Alfred Vanderbilt remained impassive. It was not his nature to show emotion. Other than stopping a child running past, to secure his life jacket properly, he awaited death stoically like a grand lord.
Charles Frohman, it was said, quoted Peter Pan to frightened passengers. "Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life."
Crippled by arthritis, he waited until water washed over the deck.
Then he simply stepped over the side, followed by his faithful valet, Stainton, and drowned.
A bounty of one thousand pounds was offered for Alfred Vanderbilt's body. But neither he nor Frohman was found.
The Cromptons, along with their six children and nanny, were lost.
Turner was alone on the bridge, a solitary figure staring up at the decks of his ship that loomed above him. He hung there clutching a railing as the bow of Lusitania plunged down until it struck a granite outcropping three hundred feet below the surface. Twisting, as if rotated by some unseen hand, the great Cunard liner slowly slid under the water. Swept away by the surge created by underwater turbulence, Turner found a small wooden chair and used it for a float until he was plucked alive from the Sea by a fishing trawler.
Lusitania was gone. Her death throes lasted only eighteen minutes.
When the final count was tallied, 1,198 passengers and crew, out of 1,958 who had sailed from New York, were lost. Following on the heels of the Titanic, which took 1,500 with her in 1912, and the Empress of Ireland with 1,000 dead in 1914, Lusitania's loss was especially staggering. Looking back, it seems incredible that so many maritime disasters with such heavy numbers of dead all occurred in the short span of three years.
It would take another thirty years before the record was broken during World War II by Russian submarines that sank the German passenger liners Willhelm Gustloff, General Steuben, and Goya, which were carrying refugees fleeing from the avenging Red Army.
The combined death count from the three torpedoed liners came to 18,000.
His face clouded with disbelief that a single torpedo had caused one of the world's great ocean liners to completely disappear in just eighteen minutes, Schwieger downed his periscope and gave orders for First Officer Weisbach to set a course for Germany.
Awarded the Iron Cross for his work in the Irish Sea, Schwieger was to sink several other ships in the coming year, but then his luck slowly began to run out. The end for U-20 came the following year in October of 1916. Because of a faulty compass, U-20 ran aground on a shoal just off the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark during a heavy fog.
Schwieger quickly sent an appeal for help to the nearest German naval base. An entire fleet of torpedo boats and destroyers responded.
The Germans correctly assumed that, if the British Navy had intercepted the SOS, they would have sent every warship within a hundred miles to destroy the U-boat that sank Lusitania. If successful, the result would have been heralded as a great naval victory.
Tow lines were attached, and the effort to pull U-20 off the shoal began at the first high tide. But nothing went right for Schwieger and his boat this day. The sands of the shoal, no more than a hundred yards from the beach, gripped the submarine in a tenacious grip. Ropes and chains broke several times. With each wave U-20 sank deeper into the bottom. Schwieger decided the project was hopeless and ordered explosive charges placed in the bilges.
The crew evacuated their vessel, taking all papers and personal belongings. Except for blowing a few holes in the bottom of the hull, the following explosions had little effect on the U-20. Schwieger left her there with heavy heart, immune to the death and destruction they had caused together.
Given command of the U-88, a big new boat of the latest design, Schwieger took most of his old U-20 crew with him. He continued to harass British shipping for another year. Then on September 17, 1917, U-88 struck a British mine and sank with all hands. Walter Schwieger had challenged fate once too often.
U-20 sat abandoned and rusting in the sands of Jutland until 1925.
Then, for some unexplained reason, the Danish Admiralty decided to destroy the infamous submarine and ordered charges of dynamite to be set around the wreck. Using nearly a ton of explosives, they blew off the upper deck and conning tower. A hail of shattered metal was thrown over a wide area. One of the men who placed the charges fell asleep in the engine room and went unmissed until after the explosion.
Incredibly, he staggered out of the wreckage and swam onto the beach with only a few cuts and bruises.
During her brief life, U-20 sank over twenty ships and caused the deaths of nearly fifteen hundred men, women, and children. Her evil deeds are engraved on the tombstones of her victims. Forever linked with Lu
sitania, she was slowly covered over by sand, her final resting place eventually forgotten.
Germany's early undersea boats had sunk an incredible 4,838 ships during World War I, 2,009 more than their descendants in World War II.
In the latter war, Nazi U-boats destroyed 4.5 million tons of shipping as against 11 million in 1914-18.
The horror of the next war will not be ships sunk by torpedoes fired from submarines, but rather entire cities and nations destroyed by missiles launched from silos in their hull.
I'd Rather Be in Hawaii
June 1984
There are worse places than the North Sea, but I can't think of any when you're on a sixty-four-foot boat being pounded by fifteen-foot waves. This was my third voyage into those wicked waters, and being a tad mentally deficient, I looked forward to the trip. My first two expeditions were failed attempts to find John Paul Jones's ship, Bonhomme Richard.
Now my objectives were even more ambitious. The six-week expedition was divided into two phases. The first three weeks were to be spent searching for H.M.S. Pathfinder, U-20, U-21, and several of the battle cruisers that sank during the great sea battle between the British and German fleets off Jutland, Denmark. The second phase of three weeks was dedicated to finding the World War II troop transport Leopoldville and the famed Confederate raider Alabama, which went down after a furious battle with Union frigate Kearsarge, off Cherbourg.
Altogether, we assembled a target list of nearly thirty lost ships.
Whoever coined the phrase "biting off more than you can chew" must have had me in mind. Actually, it was more a case of trying to hit ten birds with one stone. In for a penny, in for a pound. Go for broke, think big, or go whole hog. If original sayings were worth a dime and cliches a dollar, I'd go for the big money every time.
My wisest contribution was allowing two weeks out of the six I'd scheduled to be lost due to rotten weather, problems with the boat, or our detection instruments. You can't second-guess the unknown, but you can allow yourself some leeway. When planning your project, always, always figure in nonproductive time. You'll be very disappointed if you don't.
Nearly two years of research went into the effort. Correspondence was heavy between me, Bob Fleming, and British and German naval archives. A mass of material was accumulated from English, Scottish, German, Dutch, and Danish fishemien, who knew the sea the way they knew the decks of their trawlers. A pile of nautical charts were assembled, studied, and marked. For the Alabama, we examined French records of the famous battle. I sat for half an hour in front of Renoir's painting "The Sinking of the Alabama" that hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Letters, diaries, and contemporary news reports were also examined.
The first setback we encountered was the conflicting position reports on World War I shipwrecks. Their last known positions as recorded by the British Admiralty and Imperial German Navy did not match the positions marked on the fishermen's charts. Nor were the fishermen's data very accurate, as we were about to find.
Take for example the wreck of Invincible, a British battle cruiser that was hit by a lucky shot and blown up, taking all but six of her thousandman crew with her. In the general area where she was thought to have gone down, there were eight different position markings for an unknown ship within a three-mile radius.
How, I wondered in awe, could they misplace a 562-foot-by-78-foot, 17,250-ton battle cruiser? But they did. We stumbled on her wreck a good mile or more from the nearest estimated position. It is a fact, however, that fishermen are quite reluctant to give away locations of good fishing grounds or the snags and hangers that catch their nets.
They figure if they know the exact position where fish congregate or the spot they lost a $5,000 set of nets, they're better off not enlightening their competitors. So when pumping a fisherman on a wreck site, you have to be very polite and diplomatic while wondering if you're being sold stock in a company that manufactures rumble seats and buggy whips.
My plane was late coming into London and I missed my connecting flight to Scotland, so I sat around Heathrow and read British tabloids for the latest dirt before my flight to Aberdeen was called. Arriving three hours late, I ran into a distraught Bill Shea wandering the arrival gates like a lost soul. Bill was afraid I had been abducted by alien Scotsmen and began to think perhaps he was doomed to spend eternity in the Aberdeen airport.
We hailed a cab and drove to the dock, where we found the boat I had chartered, the same one I had used to search for the Bonhomme Richard five years previously. Solid, tough Arvor III was built in Buckle, Scotland, sometime in the 1960s. Her first owner, a wealthy Frenchman, wanted a yacht that could cruise the roughest seas in the worst weather nature could throw at her. So he decided on a stouthulled Buckle Boat used by fishermen making a hard living in the North Sea. Not many pleasure yachts are designed around a fishing trawler. Arvor was probably the only one of her kind.
Powered by two big diesels, she cruised at a complacent eight knots.
Her main saloon and staterooms were paneled in deep red mahogany and quite large. Besides a commode, the head in the main stateroom provided a bidet. The first time I tried it, I turned the handle too far and reversed my anal canal while striking my head on the deck above.
Arvor III was ideally suited as a search and survey vessel. Solid and stable as a work platform, her living quarters were comfortable and efficient. If you walked by her on a dock, you probably wouldn't give her a second look. Not fancy, she looked quite ordinary. She was painted a no-nonsense black with white upperworks and was immaculate inside and out. I was blessed to get her, and I was doubly blessed with her remarkable crew.
In all my travels, I've found no finer people than the Scots.
Despite their reputation for thriftiness, they're generous in a host of ways. Try and buy a Scot a drink. His cash is in the bartender's hand before your fingers touch your wallet. If you're cold, they'll give you the coats off their backs. Courteous, considerate, no favor goes ignored.
They're a tough and hardy people. My dad used to tell a story about the Scots when he served in the German army in World War I. Yes, my father fought with the bad guys. I also have an uncle who shot down fourteen Allied planes. Anyway, Dad used to describe the French as mediocre fighters, the British as tenacious bulldogs, the Americans as real scrappers. "But my German comrades took anything they could all dish out. It was only when we heard the bagpipes from the 'ladies from hell' that we oozed cold sweat and knew a lot of us wouldn't be going home for Christmas."
Arvor's skipper, Jimmy Flett, is a Scot any man would be proud to boast of having as a friend. Honest, with integrity nine miles long, you wouldn't give a second thought about trusting him with your life, your wife, and your bank account. Jimmy had been torpedoed twice during the war, one of the few who survived an oil-tanker explosion.
Later, when he captained a coastal passenger-cargo ship, he brought her through one of the worst storms on record in the North Sea.
A grateful government wanted to present him with a medal. But Jimmy refused to receive it unless his chief engineer was given one as well.
Because, as Jimmy put it, "if he hadn't kept the engines running under impossible conditions, everyone on the ship would have drowned."
The bureaucrats refused to give a medal to Jimmy's chief engineer, so he stuck to his guns. His only reward for saving so many lives is a photograph of the medal he never received.
Our first mate was John, who had been one of Jimmy's crew the night they fought the terrible storm. Quiet, most helpful, John was a presence seen but seldom heard. Colin Robb, our cook from Oben on the rugged northeast coast of Scotland, never was at a loss for words.
The only problem was none of us Americans could fathom his brogue.
Bill Shea and I thought that after a couple of weeks we'd become accustomed to his enunciation and understand what he was saying. I'm sorry to report that when the expedition closed down six weeks later, we were still failing Scot's Brogue Translation Course I-
A. However, we did become especially adept at listening to Colin tell a joke.
Unable to comprehend a single phrase, Shea and I would wait patiently until Colin paused. Then, assuming the punch line was given, we'd laugh.
Amazingly, we pulled it off the entire voyage without Colin's catching on. At least we think we fooled him. Maybe we didn't. Colin never confessed.
The British trucking system being what it is, we were delayed by four days while waiting for our equipment to arrive. The side scan sonar, magnetometer, and underwater camera had been air-freighted from the States three weeks earlier and were sitting in a London warehouse.
With little to do while living on the boat beside the Aberdeen dock, Shea and I wandered the town.