IN LONDON, CAPTAIN HALL SAW THAT HIS NEW SCHEME for “mystifying and misleading the enemy” was beginning to have an effect.
It was a prime example of the kind of gamesmanship at which he excelled. His goal was to convince German military commanders that a British invasion of Schleswig-Holstein, on the North Sea, was imminent, and thereby cause the Germans to divert forces from the main battlefield in France. Teaming with an officer of Britain’s domestic counterintelligence service, MI-5, Hall had supplied German espionage channels with detailed, but false, information, including a report that over one hundred warships and transports were being massed in harbors on Britain’s west and south coasts, rather than the east-coast ports that were typically used to resupply Britain’s continental forces. As a final touch, Hall persuaded the Admiralty to order a halt to all ship traffic between England and Holland starting on April 21, the kind of order that might precede the launch of an invasion.
German military leaders were at first skeptical, but this new announcement proved persuasive. Room 40 listened in on wireless messages sent on April 24, from a German station at Antwerp. “An untried agent reports from England: Large transport of troops from south and west coast of England to Continent. Large numbers of troops at Liverpool, Grimsby, Hull.”
Then came the orders to Schwieger and commanders of the other five U-boats instructing them to depart and to destroy anything that resembled a troop transport.
Room 40 kept close watch on U-20. The boat’s frequent use of wireless provided rich detail about its course and speed. At 2:00 P.M. on Friday, April 30, the submarine reported its location. Two hours later, it did so again, and it continued making reports every hour until midnight, and every two hours thereafter until eight o’clock the next morning, Saturday, May 1.
THE DISCOVERY of the new U-boat foray came against a backdrop of mounting threat.
The Admiralty received dozens of messages reporting submarine sightings, most false, but still unsettling. An Irish policeman claimed to have spotted three U-boats traveling together up the River Shannon, an unlikely scenario. Off England’s east coast a steamer picked up an unexploded torpedo floating in the sea, with markings that identified it as belonging to U-22, a sister to Schwieger’s submarine. Off the southeast tip of Italy a young Austrian U-boat commander named Georg von Trapp, later to gain eternal renown when played by Christopher Plummer in the film The Sound of Music, fired two torpedoes into a large French cruiser, the Leon Gambetta. The ship sank in nine minutes, killing 684 sailors. “So that’s what war looks like!” von Trapp wrote in a later memoir. He told his chief officer, “We are like highway men, sneaking up on an unsuspecting ship in such a cowardly fashion.” Fighting in a trench or aboard a torpedo boat would have been better, he said. “There you hear shooting, hear your comrades fall, you hear the wounded groaning—you become filled with rage and can shoot men in self defense or fear; at an assault you can even yell! But we! Simply cold-blooded to drown a mass of men in an ambush!”
ON SATURDAY, May 1, citing the new sortie by U-20 and the other U-boats, the Admiralty postponed the departures of two warships that were scheduled to hold gunnery practice in the open sea.
At some point that day, through Captain Hall, the Admiralty learned of the German Embassy’s advertisement published in New York that morning that seemed to warn passengers against traveling on the Lusitania. By day’s end the news was known to every Briton or American who happened to read a newspaper. The ship’s date of departure and its expected arrival in Liverpool a week later were now in the foreground of public awareness.
But Room 40 and those officials privy to the Mystery knew much more: that the German wireless station at Norddeich was broadcasting the Lusitania’s schedule and that the six newly dispatched U-boats were now en route. Room 40 also knew that one of those boats was U-20, a prolific killer of ships and men, and that it was making its way toward a patrol zone in waters visited by every Cunard freighter and liner bound for Liverpool, and soon to be traversed by the Lusitania itself.
Although this accumulation of facts—a fresh swarm of submarines, a grand liner under way in the face of a public warning—would seem a stimulus for sleepless nights among the top men of the Admiralty, neither the new surge in U-boat activity nor the imminent arrival of U-20 was communicated to Captain Turner. Nor was any effort made to escort the Lusitania or divert it from its course, as the Admiralty had done for the ship the preceding March and for the Transylvania and Ausonia in January.
Like everyone else at Cunard, Captain Turner had no idea Room 40 even existed.
THE ADMIRALTY’S focus was elsewhere, on a different ship that it deemed far more valuable.
WASHINGTON