As the torpedo advanced, the water rushing past its nose turned a small propeller, which unscrewed a safety device that prevented detonation during storage. This propeller slipped from the nose and fell to the sea bottom, thereby exposing a triggering mechanism that upon impact with a ship's hull would fire a small charge into the larger body of explosives. A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection. The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake".Explaining the circumstances of Dead Wake to my daughter -- three years after the Titanic disaster, another "unsinkable" luxury ocean liner was sent to the briny depths with catastrophic loss of life; though this time not at the hands of a rogue iceberg but by its intentional torpedoing by a cold-blooded U-boat commander -- she marvelled at how she, a second year University student, had never even heard of the Lusitania, remarking that this second sinking has all the markings of the bigger story. As we approach the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, this book is not only timely, but one could argue, is long overdue.
Author Erik Larson put an incredible amount of research into this book, and with information from the memoirs, journals, and letters of the Lusitania's passengers and crew, the writings in contemporaneous newspapers, memoirs of historical figures of the time, and even the logbook of the U-boat's commander, he is able to create a narrative that is rich in detail and story. With chapters that introduce all of the major players and then alternate between the happenings during the Lusitania's final crossing, chapters that outline the progress of WWI and other world events, and chapters from the point of view of the submarine, even though the reader knows the fate of the mighty ship, Larson is able to create and maintain tension in Dead Wake, and for the most part, it's a very enjoyable reading experience.
So, why is it only enjoyable "for the most part"? I am often impatient with authors (like Laura Hillenbrand, for example) who feel the need to cram every interesting fact they discover into a creative non-fiction book like this. Even though Larson has fifty pages of footnotes at the end (where he has put most of the details he couldn't squeeze into the book itself), he still indulges in sharing plenty of facts that serve no purpose to the story. For example, after his first wife died, President Wilson became interested in a woman, Edith Galt, who, we are informed, was the sister-in-law of a man who inherited the prominent jewellery store that was repairing Lincoln's watch when the Civil War broke out. The watch, the store, the brother-in-law, none of these matter. As a matter of fact, other than the detail that the Lusitania sailed from New York City and something like 10% of its passengers were Americans, this isn't really an American story at all and the long sections about Wilson's pursuit of Edith served zero purpose in the big picture. At the beginning, Larson stated that he thought he remembered being taught that the sinking of the Lusitania precipitated America's entry into WWI, but since they didn't enter for a further two years, I suppose the case can be made that examining Wilson's priorities at the time can clear up that misconception, but since the ship's sinking didn't affect Wilson's official stance of neutrality and the response of the U.S. didn't affect what was happening over there, everything set in Washington D.C. felt extraneous to me (yet I can't, in the end, fault an American writer for telling the story from his own perspective).
And then, there's the writing. Larson did do a good job of making this historical event read like an exciting adventure tale, but often his prose felt indulgent. Sometimes it was cutesy: Another arrival was George Kessler…Bearded and spectacled, evoking a certain Viennese psychoanalyst…. Sometimes it was intrusive, as when the author waxes philosophical upon the passengers with the surname "Luck": Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history. And sometimes attempts at the poetic veered towards the inane, as in this description of a sunrise at sea: Early on Monday morning U-20 was sailing through a world of cobalt and cantaloupe.
But, for every useless detail and clumsy turn of phrase, Larson does unveil interesting facts. One rare bookseller was travelling with both William Thackery's own hand-drawn illustrations and Charles Dickens' personal copy of A Christmas Carol, complete with his marginalia detailing a legal matter involving the book -- almost as much as I worried for the lives of the passengers that Larson introduced me to, I wondered at the eventual fate of these irreplaceable artefacts. The details revealed during the Lusitania's sinking were as fascinating as anything I've seen on film: the image of those dead people who had put their life jackets on upside-down, now bobbing bum to the air in the ocean; the lifeboats either crushing people waiting on deck or being dropped directly onto another lifeboat as it floats down below; the little boy with measles, separated from his very pregnant mother, who was forever after haunted by a fellow passenger's testimony of seeing a woman give birth in the open sea. And the conspiracy theories that abounded after the disaster were also fascinating -- could Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) have sacrificed the Lusitania in order to draw America into the war?
Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed to Liverpool by the Royal Navy -- the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path?
Erik Larson is, reputedly, a giant in the genre of creative non-fiction, and based on Dead Wake, I'd be interested in reading some of his other work. This wasn't a total win for me, but that was mainly due to execution. I certainly appreciate the exhaustive research that went into the writing of this book, I learned a lot, and for that reason, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone. Four stars for content, 3 for writing style, rounded down because I can't quite use the word "love" in this case.
And I really hate to nitpick about the over-Americanisation of this story (which is why I'll say this here instead of on goodreads, lol), but I wish this had been written be a Canadian. WWI was when our country really came into its own (it's no coincidence that In Flander's Fields was written by a Canadian), and in contrast to the scenes of Woodrow Wilson mooning after Edith Galt, our government was in war mode; our Prime Minister nearly taken down by his desire to introduce conscription to bolster the army in the face of crushing losses. While this time was truly exciting from our Canadian perspective, Larson doesn't even state how many Canadians were on board the Lusitania, lumping them in with the other "British subjects" (and it took me about ten seconds to google the number -- 360 Canadians, twice the number of Americans).
Of course, like I said in the body of the review, I don't blame Larson for focussing on what was interesting to him (and to the majority of his potential readers), but for a purportedly nonfiction tale, it smacks, somehow, of bias; a cherry-picking of facts.
