![]() They saw it as being so immense, so well built, so safe, and so well equipped with lifeboats in the wake of the Titanic disaster that even if it were hit by a torpedo, no one imagined this thing actually sinking. They saw this ship as so fast it could outrun any submarine. Today, you think: “Oh, my gosh, what were they thinking? Why did this ship even set sail from New York when there was a war zone declared and German submarines were everywhere, attacking without warning?”īut people at the time didn’t see it that way. It’s very important, doing the kind of history that I do, to always keep the reader in the era’s point of view-POV, as screenwriters call it. But wasn’t the Lusitania cloaked in the same myth of invincibility as the Titanic? Should the ship ever have set sail? Some passengers canceled out of security concerns. The German High Command actually warned of an attack. They said: “If you enter these waters, you do so at your own risk.” The rest, as they say, is history. Then, along comes the Lusitania in May 1915 in waters that Germany had determined to be a war zone. But the Germans had started sinking merchant vessels, often without warning. ![]() It was hard enough to imagine the German Navy going after merchant vessels. The Lusitania was thought to be immune from such an attack because nobody could possibly imagine it. The submarine proved to be a very effective weapon in that respect and one that Germany decided to use in a major break with naval warfare against merchant and civilian vessels. What’s happening at sea is that Germany recognized England was an island nation, and that one way to bring England to her knees was to destroy as much seaborne commerce as possible. We all know about the horrific land battles. Put the Lusitania into the historical context of the war between Britain and Germany for control of the seas. It’s an allusion to a number of things, but primarily to the track left by the torpedo that sank the Lusitania. And that was called, at one time, the dead wake. But in the case of a liner, the wake can persist for many thousands of yards, if not miles, behind the ship. There’s the live wake, I suppose you could call it, which comes off the engine. An obvious question: Why is your book called Dead Wake?ĭead wake is an old maritime term for the disturbance that remains on the water long after a boat has passed. In his new book Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, best-selling author Erik Larson takes readers inside what he calls “a disaster of monumental proportions.” From his home in New York, he explains how, as with the Titanic, a concatenation of events caused a catastrophic tragedy how Britain’s top-secret anti-submarine intelligence unit, Room 40, may have organized a cover-up after the event and what it felt like to come face-to-face with the morgue photographs of the dead. ![]()
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