Dead Wake review

A review of Dead Wake by Erik Larson. From the blurb.

From the #1 "New York Times" bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the "Lusitania," published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the disaster On May 1, 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants. The passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone, and for months, its U-boats had brought terror to the North Atlantic. But the "Lusitania" was one of the era's great transatlantic "Greyhounds" and her captain, William Thomas Turner, placed tremendous faith in the gentlemanly strictures of warfare that for a century had kept civilian ships safe from attack. He knew, moreover, that his ship--the fastest then in service--could outrun any threat. Germany, however, was determined to change the rules of the game, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. Meanwhile, an ultra-secret British intelligence unit tracked Schwieger's U-boat, but told no one. As U-20 and the "Lusitania" made their way toward Liverpool, an array of forces both grand and achingly small--hubris, a chance fog, a closely guarded secret, and more--all converged to produce one of the great disasters of history. It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour, mystery, and real-life suspense, "Dead Wake" brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope Riddle to President Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love. Gripping and important, "Dead Wake" captures the sheer drama and emotional power of a disaster that helped place America on the road to war.

My highest praise for historical narrative is that it meets the standards of Walter Lord, author of, among many other books, A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic. Erik Larson is writing in the same league as Lord. Faithful reconstruction of the event, an eye for detail and for illuminating side stories, his is a compelling narrative.

I have read a number of accounts over the years of the Lusitania, both books and articles and this is probably the best. Highly recommended.

Passages that caught my attention.

It is often the case that the imagination grasps an idea long before practical men do. It is not that practical men are stupid or the imaginative are more gifted. It is mostly a product of hindsight bias. Forecasts are a dime a dozen and most are forgotten because they were wrong. But a few are remembered because they turned out to be prescient. A very few turn out to be prescient for the right reasons.

Only a few prescient souls seemed to grasp that the design of the submarine would force a transformation in naval strategy. One of these was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, a year and a half before the war, wrote a short story (not published until July 1914) in which he envisioned a conflict between England and a fictional country, Norland, "one of the smallest Powers in Europe." In the story, entitled "Danger!," Norland at first seems hopelessly overmatched, but the little country has a secret weapon - a fleet of eight submarines, which it deploys off the coast of England to attack incoming merchant ships, both cargo and passenger. At the time Doyle conceived his plot, submarines did exist, but British and German naval commanders saw them as having little value. Norland's submarines, however, bring England to the verge of starvation. At one point, without warning, the commander of the submarine fleet, Capt. John Sirius, uses a single torpedo to sink a White Star passenger liner, the Olympic. England eventually surrenders. Readers found that last attack particularly shocking because the Olympic was a real ship. Its twin had been the Titanic, lost well before Doyle wrote his story.

Larson does a great job of tying together stories several times removed from the main narrative. For example, the Captain of the Lusitania is Captain Turner. Turner survived the sinking of the Lusitania. He survived the sinking of a later ship he commanded during the war. Larson weaves in the tragic information that Turner's youngest son's ship was also torpedoed in World War II and that he did not survive.

One of these intriguing passages, mentions an event of which I have heard a number of accounts over the years. In fact, NPR had a segment on this just the other day; 100 Years Later, What's The Legacy Of 'Birth Of A Nation'?

Here is Larson,

Another item, this out of Washington, reported President Wilson's unhappiness at the fact that critics continued to take him to task for allowing the film, The Clansman, by D.W. Griffith, to be screened at the White House. It was May now; the screening had taken place February 18, with Wilson, his daughters, and members of the cabinet in attendance. Based on the novel The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, which was subtitled An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the film described the purported evils of the reconstruction era and painted the Klan as the heroic savior of newly oppressed white southerners. The film, or "photoplay," as it was called, had become a huge hit nationwide, though its critics, in particular the six-year-old National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, decried its content and held protests outside movie theaters, prompting Griffith to give the film a more palatable name, The Birth of a Nation.

Seems like ancient history but the next couple of sentences are evergreen for politicians and the gist could be quoted from innumerable articles today.

On Friday, April 30, the president's personal secretary, Joseph Tumulty, had issued a statement saying, "The President was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it." Wilson had agreed to the showing, Tumulty said, as a "courtesy extended to an old acquaintance."

Here's another. I was quite aware of the later Victorian era interest in psychic phenomena and the various efforts to either disprove or validate and the involvement of many leading intellectual lights. But this is the first time I have read, I believe, of William James's involvement. Of one such group:

Its membership included dozens of scientific and literary notables, among them H.G. Wells, Mark Twain, William James, and Oliver Lodge, a leading British physicist who would lose his own son to the war in September 1915 and spend the rest of his life trying to reach him beyond the veil. From time to time Theodate had assisted Lodge and James in an investigation of Mrs. Piper, the medium, for which James convened seventy-five seances. The medium's apparent talents so resisted his attempts to debunk her skills that James came to believe she might be legitimate. "If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black," he wrote, famously, "you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper."

After the sinking of the Lusitania, bodies were collected for identification and then burial at the nearest coastal town, Queenstown, Ireland. The whole process was wrenching, made more difficult by the fact that survivors and bodies came ashore at different times. All was confusion and chaos.

The dead were placed in three makeshift morgues, including Town Hall, where they were placed side by side on the floor. Whenever possible, children were placed beside their mothers. Survivors moved in slow, sad lines looking for lost kin.

There were reunions of a happier sort as well.

Seaman Leslie Morton spent Friday night looking for his brother Cliff on the lists of survivors and in the hotels of Queenstown but found no trace. Early the next morning he sent a telegram to his father, "Am saved, looking for Cliff." Next morning he went to one of the morgues. "Laid out in rows all the way down on both sides were sheeted and shrouded bodies," he wrote, "and a large number of people in varying states of sorrow and distress were going from body to body, turning back the sheets to see if they could identify loved ones who had not yet been found."

He worked his way along, lifting sheets. Just as he was about to pull yet one more, he saw the hand of another searcher reaching for the same sheet. He looked over, and saw his brother. Their reaction was deadpan.

"Hello Cliff, glad to see you," Leslie said.

"Am I glad to see you you to, Gert," Cliff said. "I think we ought to have a drink on this."

As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, "so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did."

A most enjoyable read. Highly recommended