The Sinking of the Andrea Doria

That's creative back-covering, Mr. Kung. I like it. It's a little loopy but it works.

I finished “Dead Wake” yesterday. Although I recommend two or three other books by the author, this isn’t one of them.

Most of his books are about a confluence of events: The Chicago World’s Fair and a serial killer, for example. It helps to break the story up and give you more history. In “The Dead Wake,” we get little of that. We could have followed the building of the Lusitania as a backstory. Or the development of the u-boat. Or even more on the history of luxury passenger liners.

Instead we get just glimpses of some of those things sometimes. Mostly we are inundated with trivial facts about the passengers. To the extent that this gives us a glimpse (as it sometimes does) of what existing on a luxury liner was like, that’s all good. But too often it is a great bore.

It does finally finish well with a blow-by-blow account of the sinking which happened in 18 minutes. Even this fact is skimmed over. It’s remarkable that such a ship could sink so fast. In fact, it is the prime fact of the incident. And yet in the end we’re left guessing about the reason for that. For example, Larson gave an account of another much smaller ship that sank at the time. It took two torpedoes to do so, and even then it took many hours.

The torpedo is said to have cause a great horizontal gash across the hull. Why? The secondary explosion (likely to a high-pressure steam line rupturing) has little forensic evidence explained in regards to how that contributed to the quickness of the sinking. The boat just went down fast. Period.

Sadly, in the end, Captain Turner was still insisting he did everything possible. Clearly this is not the case. Clearly exactly no one (but a few passengers….one who had earlier pleaded with the captain, with some small success, to allow him to lead some preparedness exercises regarding the life vests) did even remotely all that was possible.

The passengers were lambs to the slaughter. I think Larson’s innate namby-pambiness prevents him from calling a spade a spade.

There are no good guys here. The worse guys are the Germans. But even they gave fair warning in published ads in the newspaper. How often does an enemy do that for you?

Eighteen minutes and passengers who are mostly on board for a luxury cruise are a bad combination for survival. Few knew what to do. Had they simply covered themselves in grease, donned a life jacked, and jumped overboard and swam away from the sinking ship, they may have survived quite nicely. The weather was incredibly calm and mild.

And in this case, (for whatever reason — again, not explained) there was no danger from being sucked down by the ship. But the main danger seemed to be stuff falling on people from the upper decks. So getting away from the sinking ship was an imperative. The lifeboats were so badly managed, they killed many people in attempts to launch them. Any kind of grease (or just multiple layers of clothing) would deal with hypothermia.

Strangely, because it was certainly on the minds of the British Admiralty to draw America into the war, they immediately went to work trying to disgrace Captain Turner. The author I think rightly put this down to the Admiralty trying to deflect blame from itself. There were destroyers sitting idle in Queenstown (now Cobh) Ireland as the Lusitania passed.

Churchill himself apparently lied his way through this, insisting that the Lusitania had taken two torpedoes, for example, when via intelligence he knew that the Germans had used only one. He was sacked and rightly so. He dismissed the incident with the words that the British Navy couldn't possible protect commercial shipping. This was disingenuous since at that point the Admiralty was all but in charge of commercial ships.

More about the ongoing war would have benefited this book. But finally at the end we do run into why the Germans (after Lusitania) escalated their attacks on neutral shipping. They had (someone had) a six-month plan that was guaranteed to bring the British to their knees.

Ironically, the British were already losing ships at an unsustainable rate. One out of four ships leaving a British port would be sunk. At the time of the Lusitania, they had but a few tens of u-boats. Soon they had a hundred. But by baiting the Americans in the war with the German policy of unrestricted war on neutral shipping (and a careless attempt to try to get Mexico to enter the war as an ally), Wilson was soon sending destroyers to Britain, which is exactly what they needed and it saved their bacon.

Perhaps Larson understand that most men do not read now. They are too busy playing video games. Much of this book seems written as if women are the market. There is far too much gossip about the onboard characters. Some of it was fine but there was just far too much of it. A dozen other things might have been emphasized instead of it. So in the end, I can’t recommend this book. Bu the same token, it’s certainly not horrible.

The United States declared war on Germany on April 5, 1917. The Lusitania was sunk on May 7, 1915.

If you had quizzed me before reading this book, I would have said the the United State quickly declared war after the sinking of the Lusitania. But now I see that wasn’t so. The sinking of the Lusitania was a contributing factor but not the deciding factor.

The deciding factor was Germany basically declaring war on the world’s shipping. Wilson phrased it as “Making the world safe for democracy.” There was certainly a lot of truth in that.

We do get some interesting details on submarine warfare. At the time, the odds of a German torpedo actually working was about 40%. Even then, if you can steer the target ship so that the torpedo strikes only a glancing blow, your odds are much better in not receiving a fatal blow.

The captain of the U-20 that sank the Lusitania had a policy (it might not have just been his own) to always run at a depth below however far the keel of the largest surface ship could reach. The soundness of this approach was confirmed when a British war ship of some type ran directly above him at one point in the sub’s patrol in and around Ireland.

The Germans had various kinds of torpedoes. They used some kind of gyroscopic one and it worked. The book also says that it’s doubtful that the on board munitions could have had anything to do with the second explosion. Subsequent tests of the gun ammunition in crates confirmed that the ammunition does not explode.

I don’t know if divers have been able to determine via the wreckage just what the second explosion was. But the consensus seems to be that it was the one that brought the ship down so quickly.

Here’s someone’s animation of the event: A Real Time Sinking Animation

Larson mentions the Q-ships. I would have rather learned a bit more about them and less about some of the minutia of the Lusitania passengers.

Further reading online about the Lusitania suggests that Larson didn't do a good job of giving even an overall picture. But you do get a lot of history in this. But did I really need to read about President Wilson's schoolboy love affair? Like I said, at this point it seems Larson had aimed this book toward women. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But it's funny to me that it's so obvious.

Here's one on The Battle of the Coral Sea from the same guy.

I remember both 1970s movies, Tora, Tora, Tora and Midway.  Both treated the Japanese fairly.  Neither is a documentary, but as historical movies they follow the history well.  A Night to Remember is a similar case, about the sinking of the Titanic.