Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age by Greg King & Penny Wilson

Author:Greg King & Penny Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781466876378
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-02-23T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Leslie Morton had gone on duty at noon that Friday, taking up his place on the foredeck of Lusitania’s starboard bow as an extra lookout.(1) At 2:10, he spotted “a thin streak of foam making for the ship at a rapid speed” some five hundred yards in the distance, followed by the wake of what he took to be a second torpedo. “Torpedoes coming on the starboard side!” he shouted through his megaphone.(2) Morton was supposed to wait until his warning had been acknowledged; instead, he was racing across the deck to tell his brother John when he felt “a shock all over the ship. It shook me off my feet.”(3) This “tremendous explosion,” he recalled, was “followed instantly by a second one.”(4)

No one heard Morton’s warning: a critical thirty seconds passed before Thomas Quinn, high up in the crow’s nest, grabbed his voice tube and reported to the bridge.(5) “There’s a torpedo coming, Sir!” Captain Turner heard Second Officer Percy Hefford shout; almost immediately, Lusitania shuddered from the explosion.(6) As “smoke and steam” rose over the ship, Turner felt a second explosion; this, he thought, “may possibly have been internal.”(7)

Watching through his periscope, Schwieger saw his torpedo hit the “starboard side, right behind the bridge.”(8) With massive force, the projectile pierced the hull, buckling steel plates and loosening rivets as it exploded, leaving an ugly, yawning hole of perhaps ten feet by twenty feet and shooting a geyser of water and debris into the sky. As Lusitania moved forward, the debris rained back down with such force that it tore Lifeboat No. 5, hanging over the starboard side, from its davits and sent it crashing into the sea.(9)

Precisely where the torpedo hit has always been a subject of some controversy. From Schwieger’s account, it seems to have struck Lusitania somewhere below the bridge, at a critical point where bulkheads separated Boiler Room No. 1 from a transverse forward cross bunker and a longitudinal bunker used for reserve coal along the ship’s starboard side. The sea rapidly flooded through the hull; bunkers meant to shield the ship’s machinery from possible damage now concentrated the flooding on the starboard side, causing an almost immediate list of some 15 degrees, a situation exacerbated by Lusitania’s great height. The sea streamed through open watertight doors, flooding into the forward bunker and cargo holds and pulling Lusitania down by the bow; it swept aft, almost immediately spilling into the forward boiler room. The ship’s continued progress through the sea forced even more water into the breach and added to the rapid flooding, as did numerous portholes that had been left open.(10)

Schwieger clearly saw the two explosions, “rather a small detonation, and instantly afterward a much heavier one.”(11) He described this as “unusually heavy,” with a cloud of debris reaching back “far beyond the first funnel.” Steam, coal dust, and more debris shot through the ship’s ventilators and over the decks; Schwieger thought that coal or a boiler might have exploded. The ship, he recorded, “heels over to starboard very quickly.

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