Review of Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

The sinking of the Lusitania is still controversial a century later.  Below is my review as submitted to the Sturbridge Times Magazine for the August, 2015 issue.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

By Erik Larson

Crown, 2015

Hardcover, 448 pages

ISBN-10: 030

ISBN-13: 978-0307408868

List: $28.00 Amazon: $15.40

Book review by Richard Morchoe

Just over a hundred years ago a great ship sank off the coast of Ireland during a brutal war. In and of itself, that should not have been a major historical event. Many vessels would be sunk during that conflict, yet the torpedoing of RMS Lusitania generated the most controversy and is so even today.

There are many reasons for that, maybe the biggest one is wrong. If you went to school in this country in the 50s or 60s, it was easy to come away with the impression that the sinking of the ocean liner was the casus belli that led our country to fight Germany in the First World War. As a history nerd, I knew there were others, but the timeline had escaped my awareness.

Setting things straight for me was journalist Erik Larson in his book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. According to the author, “I always had the impression, shared I suspect by many, that the sinking immediately drove President Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany, when in fact America did not enter World War I for another two years-half the span of the entire war.”

That's a nice bit of information for those of us with historical myopia, but it is hardly the whole book or even the most important aspect. I had not read anything by Erik Larson, and though that does not make one's life an empty desert, I have been missing out. An author of several books, the man knows how to spin a yarn.

I have a personal reason for reading Dead Wake. Much of my family comes from near where the sinking took place. The Lusitania went down just off the Old Head of Kinsale, a peninsula jutting out into the sea in Southern Ireland. Some of my relatives still farm in the area.

Ireland is an old country and it is not the biggest event to have happened in the region. Kinsale has suffered invasions and massacres and battles. The town itself celebrates its Spanish connection far more than the Lusitania. That said, the demise of the Cunard Liner is not forgotten.

As I was reading the book, it seemed Mr. Larson displayed a tad of Anglophilia. Nothing wrong with that. England is the mommy country, from whom we get some useful ideas such as trial by jury and habeas corpus.

The author referred to the harbor officially called Cobh as Queenstown, the name given it by the occupying British. It seemed he was favoring the Empire's cause.

Except, that is probably more your reviewer's paranoia. Later in the book he would note some possible skullduggery by the Admiralty.

On Page 183 he gives an account of the failure of to provide support for the liner as it approached Ireland. There are lapses and incompetencies in wartime and that may have been all that it was. Or it may have been a bit more sinister, as leaving in the lurch a ship that carried not only passengers, but valuable military cargo.

Larson notes that in a letter Churchill had sent to the head of the Board of Trade, hoping for shipping along the coasts, he wrote, “For our part we want the traffic-the more the better; and if it gets in some trouble, better still.” Was Winston hoping for a disaster?

The captain, William Thomas Turner was born to go to sea. He knew his trade and did his best to sail the ship safely and was at his post until nothing else could be done. If anyone was not to blame, it was him. No matter, Churchill relentlessly tried to pin the blame on him.

World War II may have been his finest hour, but World War I, when you add in Gallipoli, was not a great four years for Winston.

Larson's book is not all about the politics and military policy. He takes you from before the ship sails, to the boarding to cast off and on to the ocean all the way to the fatal encounter with the German submarine. The author goes with you on the sub, U-20 to feel the primitive conditions of what was high tech back then.

Shipboard life is not scanted and it is almost as if we are traveling with them. Passenger Gertrude Adams wrote of it, “There were so many on ship that it really was like living in a town. One saw fresh people every day & never knew who they were.”

There were many interesting voyagers, not the least Theodate Pope and her platonic traveling companion, Edwin Friend. They were both leading lights in American Spiritualism. Pope would survive. Her friend was not so lucky and she would have nightmares of searching for him. She never found him but her spiritualist set claimed to have been visited by him on occasion.

Larson's bio says he is a journalist and not a historian. Dead Wake is an entertaining read, but a student of history would have no reason to scorn it.