Allison:
It should be known, I am reluctantly fond of Erik Larson. I have eagerly anticipated all of his books, yet just before cracking the spine of each one I have struggled with wanting to read him. I think, “Eh, do I really want to read about (insert historical event here)?” The answer, immediate from the first page, is always a resounding “YES!” Dead Wake proved no different. The book details the sinking of the British passenger liner, the Lusitania, by a German submarine during World War I. Due to the deaths of 123 Americans on board, the tragedy is often considered the final impetus igniting the US against Germany. Larson’s book corrects this misconception, the US did not declare war with Germany for another two years, but stops short of considering why or how Americans were eventually engaged. It could be argued that America in WWI is not the story Larson is telling, but by the end of the book, I was left with an aching “and then what happened…” knowing there was so much more that followed.
But as a fan of Larson, I know better than to expect a
thorough history. Rather he is a fine curator of detail. He carefully selects
each piece of minutiae to architect a world, without an academic’s concern for
accuracy, but with a storyteller’s aesthetic for marvel. Some of my favorite snippets of
world-building came appropriately at the beginning of the book, and somewhat
inappropriately, have little to do with the Lusitania. For example, Larson
gives us a peek at the week before the Lusitania’s departure, including
newspaper reports like the following: “A Bridgeport, Connecticut, man presented
his girlfriend with an engagement ring and handed her one end of a ribbon; the
other end disappeared into his pocket. ‘A surprise,’ he said, and urged her to
pull it. She obliged. The ribbon was attached to the trigger of a revolver. The
man died instantly” (43). These details don’t contribute to movement of plot,
but they provide rich atmosphere. So many strange and wonderful tidbits are
offered to pique the reader's attention.
This strategy of novel, yet incongruent detailing works
well with the multitude of characters Larson introduces as travelers on
the Lusitania. We feel personally connected to many of the passengers because
they are resurrected, fleshed with nuanced beauty and I was happiest in this book when riding on-deck with his selected cast. But, the quirk of this technique fell flat when dealing with the heavy hitters of the book. A narrow depiction of President Wilson in love-struck ineptitude and Churchill as a bullish conspirator were uncomfortably two-dimensional. Wilson’s grief
over the death of his wife, and his subsequent courtship of Edith Boling Galt is fascinating, sure, but as this is all we are offered of his role in WWI, the telling is manipulative. We are to believe that Wilson was stifled with romantic
distraction while thousands of French and English were dying daily in
trenches. The book also suggests Churchill may have denied the Lusitania
appropriate aide, or ignored warning, with the intent that if sunk by Germans,
the loss of Americans might slap Wilson to reaction. Maybe there’s truth
muddled into this story Larson’s woven with swooning excerpts from
love letters and callous posturing by Churchill, but it certainly is not the
full picture. It is an interpretation of history for the purpose of suspense.
Speaking of suspense, how does one generate suspense
over a historical event in which we all know the ending? The boat sinks. Anyone
could glean as much from the title Dead
Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. Larson fantastically builds to
this moment. First we learn of all the warnings, all the premonitions the major
characters either heeded or did not—most obviously, the ads taken out by the
German navy in many major American newspapers, promising commercial passengers
sailed at their own risk. We are introduced in vivid detail to so many of the
fated passengers, we anxiously speculate which ones will make it from the ominous or
hopeful clues provided. The passengers’ near misses and naïve conversing of “What
if” does get tiresome, if only because as we traverse the crossing, the
inevitability of the Lusitania’s demise takes on a grimness that eclipses the
deck-frivolity—the oblivious, almost
cheerful, “submarine fever.” I found most fascinating the depiction of the
U-boat and its captain, Schwieger, who fires the fateful torpedo. I caught
myself forgetting whose side I was on, often charmed by, and even rooting for
the affable crew. That my emotions were drawn to the supposed villains of the
book was a surprise to me, and a real credit to Larson’s suspenseful rendering.
Overall, the book was certainly flawed, maybe more so
than his others, but I relished nearly every page. Like most books, I read the
bulk of it on my commute in the subway. I was reading along, absorbed in the
novelty of turn of the century ocean travel—week-long and celebratory, essentially
a cruise, like a vacation before the real
vacation of destination—but in this era, it was also a commute. The most
widely accessible commute between continents, on a massive ship populated by so
many strangers and friends, and families alike, and it occurred to me that I commute daily with hundreds of
strangers in a potentially vulnerable vessel. I pay no heed to news and board the train, but sometimes I benignly “What if” a
disaster, not unlike the passengers on the Lusitania. Sometimes I look around at the faces of the people sharing so intimate a space
during rush hour and wonder who they are, who they might end up if tragedy
struck us all. Which of us would be heroic? Which of us courageous, which simply
ill-fated? An uneasy significance of the Lusitania became suddenly tangible to
me 100 years later.
One line offered during the sinking, punched me
straight in the gut, and I gasped aloud with tears on the subway. I was so
shaken, I couldn't be embarrassed by the curious glances of my fellow travelers,
who had no idea what I had just experienced. I just had to close the book for a
moment and come up for air. In the end, to me, that is good storytelling.
Wes:
Dead Wake
presents the true story of the last voyage of the Cunard liner, Lusitania, as
it sails from America to Liverpool, England, in the early stages of World War
I. Larson presents virtually every key aspect of the 1915 saga based on his research
of existing records. The narrative has four basic perspectives: the voyage of
the ship itself; the patrol of the attacking submarine; the political aspects
and ramifications of ocean going submarines against unarmed merchant vessels;
and, the British intelligence efforts in tracking and combatting the U-Boat
menace. The book ends giving some aftermath details of the personal tragedies
and the political outcomes of the disaster.
The captain, William Turner, in his
third separate stint on this same ship, made several decisions that seemed to
lead directly to the torpedoing, many of which, if any variance occurred other
than what did, the event would have been avoided. The First Lord of the
Admiralty at the time, Winston Churchill, afterwards fixed the blame on Turner
but the Royal Navy certainly was not innocent in the affair. The Lusitania
arrived off the SE coast of Ireland without escort, with vague orders, lacking
detailed threat intelligence, moving on three engines instead of 4 to save fuel,
and not zigzagging in order to meet its schedule. Turner’s only reported failure
was not sailing in the center of the St. George Channel as directed but the
ship was approaching the channel several miles off the coast. Many “acts of
God” seemed to conspire to put the Lusitania right in front of the U-20 at the
critical moment. Turner even turned the ship at the last second to allow his
Exec to line up four coastal bearings as a means for determining his exact
position relative to the middle of the upcoming channel and exact time and distance
to the Mersey (Liverpool) sand bar.
Proud that he was able to secure the
U-20’s actual patrol log, Larson details virtually every aspect of the
submariner’s life aboard an early submersible. He reports the key events in the
entire voyage out and lists the attacks Captain Schwieger made in the Irish
Sea, threat aspects of which were never passed to the Lusitania. Nor were 23
ships sunk near Britain in the previous week reported to Turner. Schwieger in
fact was about to give up on the fast 4-stacker he saw but couldn’t catch
despite perfect weather until it suddenly made a starboard turn right into his
line of fire. The Germans, who could not communicate with the subs out on
patrol, left attack discretion entirely up to their sub commanders. Schwieger
made the choice to send his last “good” torpedo into the Lusitania and
considered it a valid and lucrative target.
Larson spends
a lot of ink describing the entire course of the war and highlights the
importance of submarine operations to the Germans. One gets a sense of
helplessness for the British, who without depth charges or sonar (asdic to the
Brits), could seldom effectively attack the submariners unless they stumbled
upon one while it was surfaced. The activities of President Wilson, Bryant, and
House depict the ambiguity of the American reactions to the war. Churchill’s
clear goal was to get the US into the war. Based on his recorded comments, he
apparently was willing to risk important shipping to German attack to make that
happen. Whether the Lusitania was bait for that was hinted at by Larson from
the lack of escort, vague communications, and the failure to divert the
Lusitania to the then-secure northern route. In the end, Wilson, the
self-proclaimed progressive, took two more years to bring the U.S. into the
war.
An interesting aspect of the story
was the activity of “Room 40” which had copies of the German codebooks and codebreakers
could actually look up the code groups needing only to decipher the coded key.
Their task was far easier than the “Ultra” process was in World War II. They
could quickly read every German radio message but leaders still had the problem
of which messages to react to overtly, thereby revealing the knowledge that
they could break the German cyphers. This aspect was new to me: the tragedy
being that they could not pass all the known aspects to the Lusitania in the
clear without potentially divulging their own capability.
Just as in my
readings of the Titanic disaster which happened three years earlier, the heart
of the book is the happenings after the torpedo (iceberg) hit. Larson mentions
many of the passengers – some make it under incredible perils, others don’t. But
the experiences of those who lived portray the scope of the disaster where
1,198 lives were lost, 764 survived, and over 600 bodies were never found. It
was amazing that the ship went down in only 18 minutes while many other much
smaller ships hit with one or multiple torpedoes lasted far longer. Only six of
21 lifeboats got away and none of the 26 collapsibles properly employed. The
tragedy expanded greatly by the relatively warm 55° water but even then, people
could survive only about two hours in the water. Ships could not reach them for
2 or more hours from Queenstown (now Cobh) as the one British warship of high
speed was kept back because of the U-Boat threat. The long aftermath was sad,
especially Larson’s view of the death photos and the stories of many of the
lost washing up on shore weeks or months after the sinking.
This book was
a good read but it had way too much info on irrelevant items. I could not
figure out why Wilson’s love affair with Edith Galt was so prominent, or why so
much detail on submarine technical operations was necessary. The title’s
relevancy was also unclear. The issue of the second explosion was never
effectively explained – to the end, it was reported that the ship was struck by
two torpedoes. The results of the major investigations were also only cursively
examined, an item which was of great interest to me in the Titanic case. It was
interesting and coincidental to have Winston Churchill, the American author,
mentioned as well as Henry James, now obscure authors of other books I have
recently read. Overall, I rate this book as a 5 on my scale of 1-10.
