World War I. The dumb ass war. A Serbian man shoots Archduke Ferdinand the heir to the Austria Hungarian Empire. They catch the guy and execute him, but that doesn't stop Austria Hungary from declaring war on Serbia all on the basis of the actions of one man. Then Germany, a friend of Austria Hungry, thought this would be a great time to invade Belguim just because maybe not realizing that France and England would not stand for it. I once saw a political cartoon that showed a bar scene that showed pictures of men fighting with tags of things they were saying such as you can't hit Belguim. The men had names of countries on their shirts. Underneath it said World War I. It was pretty accurate because that war was a big barroom brawl. Sadly this barroom brawl resulted in the death of somewhere between nine and fifteen million with six and a half million noncombatant deaths. On top of that in France, there was an area of 460 square miles that was marked off as unhabitable and off limits known as the Red Zone. The land had arsenic in it and there were unexploded shells including gas shells. There were dead bodies still left on the fields. Over the decades they have been able to shrink that area a bit but people still find unexploded shells on the land that has been cleared. Germany was forced to pay $33 billion in restitution to the countries involved that they finally paid off in 2010. You hear about things like that and some of the other things that they did that I will mention in this review and you can't help but agree with it even though it will be these restrictions that will be a part of what causes World War II.
The Lusitania with its 189 Americans, 949 British, 71 Russians, 15 Persians, 8 French, 6 Greek, 6 Swedes, 3 Belgians, 3 Dutch, 2 Italians, 2 Mexicans, 2 Finns, and 1 traveler each from Denmark, Spain, Arengintia, Switzerland, Norway, and India passengers was a top of the line cruise ship of the Cunard company. It was the fastest cruise ship with the ability to go 25 knots. Its captain, William Thomas Turner, was a very experienced captain who had been through most everything on the seas. He was an excellent navigator, though he was not one to want to chit chat with the passengers, which is why Cunard hired a staff captain, James "Jock" Anderson to interact with the passengers and eat dinner with them. One of the problems was that Cunard refused to hire anyone that was not British and with the war, it was difficult to find qualified sailors so most of their staff had little or no experience on a ship. While in dock they came across Gertie Morton who was escaping his indenture to another ship and bought a ticket on the Lusitania along with his brother Cliff who was also escaping his indenture. When crew members of the Lusitania find out they offer them jobs aboard the ship for free fare. The brothers tell them that there are others on their ship who would be interested in this and the Lusitania picks up eight qualified sailors.
Room 40 is a secret room in the Old Building known to the Admiralty as O.B. The secret room was known to precious few outside of those who worked inside of it. First Lord Churchill who was in charge of the Navy and First Sea Lord Fisher who was second in command and in charge of day to day operations. This room supposedly reported to Admiral Oliver the Admiralty's chief of staff, but in reality, they reported to Commander Hope who was put there by the chief of naval intelligence Captain Hall and to Churchill himself, bypassing Fisher. They had gotten hold of a copy of a German codebook and were busy deciphering coded messages. The problem was they weren't necessarily using the information. They would use it for defense measures but not for offensive measures. They had to keep the fact that they had the code a secret or the code would change so they couldn't respond to everything they heard about.
At first, during the war, both sides saw no use for submarines. Until one fateful day when a U-boat targeted the ship Aboukir and torpedoed it and it quickly sank. The Hogue was right there by it and went in to rescue survivors and also got torpedoed. Then the Cressy also tried to rescue survivors and it also got torpedoed and sank. After that, the Navy made it a policy that a ship must not ever come to the aid of a torpedoed ship lest it gets sunk. They would send smaller lesser vessels in later to rescue survivors.
U-20 left Germany with a directive to go to Liverpool to sink ships there. A submarine ship can stay underwater for 80 nautical miles and only go maybe 9 knots and it would run on a battery. While above water it would run on diesel and could run up to 15 knots and go a total of 5,200 nautical miles. They had 250 shells and seven torpedoes two of which they were supposed to hold back for the return journey. Kplt. Walther Schwieger was in charge of the submarine and reported to no one, unlike a ship who reported back to his superiors for instructions. By all accounts, he was a good captain. He treated his men well and was very good to them. However, he targeted a hospital ship and a Dutch neutral ship leaving England that would have not been carrying munitions or anything for England so there would have been no reason to target it. He missed both ships. That was another thing, torpedoes missed 60% of the time.
President Wilson buried his wife on August 11, 1914. He thought he'd never recover from the loss. He went into a deep depression. Then in the spring, he meets Edith Gault and he is enchanted. Edith is the first woman to receive a driver's license in Washington D.C. She is also a widow and while she enjoys her time with the president she turns down his eventual proposal because she feels she doesn't know him well enough and because of his position. She's not sure she wants to marry a president. Wilson is miserable again. What Wilson isn't doing is concentrating too hard on the politics of the world around him. The Gulflight, an American merchant ship was sunk by the Germans killing three and causing the captain to have a heart attack and die. He has yet to come out and say anything about it.
The Lusitania was forced to take on passengers from the ship Cameronia because that ship was put into service for the war. The passengers thought they were lucky to be on the luxury liner that travels so fast. This delay of boarding the passengers and a delay of getting the Captain's niece off of the ship would cost the Lusitania time and they would be off schedule leaving port.
Charles Lauriat, husband and father of four, from Boston owned one of the most famous bookstores that also published books under the name Estes and Lauriat. He was planning to set out to London for a buying trip. Also, he planned on visiting the granddaughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, with whom he had bought the illustrations of his work for a steal. He wanted her to provide notes to go with them and he wanted to have them taken out of the scrapbook they were in and properly mounted. He also borrowed a friend's copy of Charles Dicken's own personal copy of A Christmas Carol with notations in the margins from a court case Dicken's was involved in about it. Someone in England wanted to look it over and he offered to have him look at it.
Theodate Pope, a forty-eight-year-old feminist from Connecticut was the first woman from that state to receive an architect's license. She was also a Socialist who counted among her friends Mary Cassatt, William, and Henry James. She was also interested in "psychical" research which was why she was traveling to London with her friend Edwin Friend. She suffered from bouts of depression and once sought out a cure from Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell who argued that one should not move from bed at all and that women should not work as it exhausted them and caused nervous complaints. Charlotte Perkins Gillman wrote critically of him in her short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper". Theodate realized that work made her less depressed and quit Dr. Mitchell's care and went back to her architecture, but depression would haunt her and while on the ship she was particularly depressed.
Also aboard were the theater great, Charles Frohman, who had made Ethel Barrymore and brought Peter Pan to America dressing Maude Adams in the classic costume forever creating how we see Peter Pan, and also produced the stage show Sherlock Holmes that created the image we have of him. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I, son of Cornelius who was a part of the "Just Missed It" club a group of fortunates who had tickets for the Titanic but didn't sail on it. He was on his second marriage and was a bit of a rake.
It's no secret that the U-20 sinks the Lusitania. But how it happens as one torpedo would never sink a ship of that size is a tale of its own. What did Room 40 know and what did they do to prevent it if anything? Did Churchill want something to happen so America would enter the war? Was Captain Turner at fault? Who survives and who doesn't. Besides the precious cargo Lauriat was carrying there was also artwork by Monet, Rubens, Titian, and Rembrandt aboard. Did any of it survive? Of the 1,959 passengers and crew, only 764 survived. 1,195 died. 791 remained missing bodies. of the 33 infants aboard only 6 survived. Among the dead were 123 Americans. That's a tragedy of immense proportions and the great misconception is that it lead America to enter World War I. It didn't. We wouldn't enter the war for another two years. The Germans redefined war with this act. Before there were gentlemanly rules of behavior for war that left civilians out of it even though the Lusitania was carrying war supplies for Britan. Hitler who fought in this war would come along twenty years later and do much worse. U-boats would become better made in the later years of World War I and do more damage and in World War II become a true menace.
The Lusitania was another ship that thought it was safe from the U-boats because of its speed and because they thought they'd have a British ship escort like other cruise ships had had in the past. It's kinda like the Titanic thinking it was unsinkable. No one thought the Germans would fire on them. But the Germans had declared in the newspapers that all Allies' ships were under attack. Heck, they were firing on neutral ships now too. This book takes you aboard the ship as it sails and then sinks as well as the people involved behind the scenes such as Room 40, President Wilson and those aboard the U-20. Larson is an amazing writer and gathers together pieces of documents written by those who were there that really makes you feel as though you are in their shoes. You can almost sympathize with the U-boat sailors and their hard and deadly life. The larger-than-life Churchill who saved Britain during World War II takes on a much different look in this book--a more realistic one. To say I loved this book would be an understatement. This is a drop everything and read this book now book. I recommend it in the highest possible way.
Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Wake-Last-Crossing-Lusitania-ebook/dp/B00N6PD3GE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536748944&sr=8-1&keywords=dead+wake+erik+larson
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