“Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania”, by Erik Larson

 

 

480 pages, Broadway Books, ISBN-13: 978-0307408877

 

On May 7^th, 1915, the HMS Lusitania, the pride of the British Cunard Line, was torpedoed by the German Unterseeboot U-20, 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland, not far from Queenstown. She sank in 18 minutes, taking 1198 passengers and crew down with her, including 123 American citizens and even three German stowaways; there were only 764 survivors. Of the twenty-two available life boats only six managed to be launched, while many of the passengers who drowned did so because they had incorrectly donned their lifejackets and could not keep their heads above water; seeing as many of the crew were killed by the initial torpedo attack and couldn’t assist with the lifeboats, and that the passengers weren’t trained how to use their life jackets, there can be little surprise as to why there was such a great loss of life.

 

All of this and more is recorded in Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson, in which said crossing is recreated in minute detail as to the movements and motivations of all involved. The respective captains of Lusitania and U-20, many of the passengers and crew of the doomed vessel and the powers that be of all the nations involved. These include the men who inhabited Room 40 in the British Admiralty who were responsible for breaking the German codes and transmitting the information to British and Allied forces, or President Wilson, trying to keep the still-isolationist United States out of war while wrestling with the loss of his first wife. We even get to meet Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, as he shuttles back and forth between England and France in the wake of the sinking.

 

But it is still HMS Lusitania and her doomed passengers that is at the forefront of Dead Wake, and by introducing the reader to these cursed souls, Larson humanizes this most avoidable of tragedies. We see these fellow human beings, civilians traveling from the New World to the Old for personal or professional reasons; essentially, these score-or-so passengers are representative for the 2000+ souls on the ship whom we never meet or get to know. Joseph Stalin said in 1947 that “[i]f only one man dies…that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics”. While this is no doubt Stalin being his typical compassionate self, I think the sonovabitch was on to something: it is impossible for a human being to fathom the deaths of such a large number of people, but quite easy to imagine a few. By shrinking the number, Larson makes the horror more accessible to the average person.