NONFICTION
“Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania”
by Erik Larson
Crown, 450 pages, $28
They had been warned.
With war raging across the ocean, an eclectic group of passengers gathered in New York City in May 1915 for a trans-Atlantic voyage aboard the great Lusitania, a majestic, swift and towering vessel that catered to the pampered classes and was the pride of the safety-conscious Cunard shipping line.
Everyone knew the risks. En route to Liverpool, the Lusitania would be passing through a German-declared war zone off the coast of Ireland during an era in which submarine warfare was ascendant.
Many shrugged off the peril. Built sturdily — a “passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship” — the Lusitania also found protection in the hubris of man.
A U-boat’s single torpedo sank her in 18 minutes.
In the hands of a lesser craftsman, the fascinating story of the last crossing of the Lusitania might risk being bogged down by dull character portraits, painstaking technical analyses of submarine tactics or the minutiae of WWI-era global politics.
Not so with Erik Larson. In “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania,” the author’s latest masterful fusion of history and storytelling, the former Wall Street Journal reporter effortlessly re-creates the collision course taken by Capt. Turner and the man who would destroy his ship, Kptlt. Walther Schwieger, commander of Unterseeboot-20.
Engaging in a favored chronological newspaper storytelling technique called a “tick tock” that exploits Larson’s print journalism roots, the author invites readers on a journey of parallel tracks. He escorts us as we join the Lusitania’s passengers readying for their voyage, departing from the New York wharves, sharing the quotidian rhythms of life aboard the ship, fretting or not fretting about the German warning and, ultimately, dying or surviving catastrophe.
At the same time, Larson opens up the cramped quarters of a German submarine, illuminating the tensions of a dangerous life beneath the water and the zeal of the men commanding that country’s undersea arsenal.
As has become his specialty, Larson wrestles disparate narratives into a unified, coherent story and so creates a riveting account of the Lusitania’s ending and the beginnings of the U.S.’s involvement in the war.
At the same time, Larson tries to answer the nagging journalistic questions that inevitably arise from such a focused examination about what went wrong. “Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair,” Larson writes, “why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?”
What if the Lusitania had not spent extra time taking on passengers from another ship? What if the heavy fog that day had lasted just a bit longer? What if the U-boat’s torpedo had struck a different part of the vessel?
“In the end,” Larson concludes, “Schwieger’s attack on the Lusitania succeeded because of a chance confluence of forces. Even the tiniest alteration in a single vector could have saved the ship.”
About the Author
