The Admiralty issued its most comprehensive set of instructions in February 1915, in a secret memorandum that captains were to store “in a place where it can be destroyed at a moment’s notice.” The document revealed a mixture of na?veté and sophistication about the nature of the submarine threat. It called the deck gun of a submarine “an inferior weapon” and stated, “Gun-fire from most submarines is not dangerous.” The instructions also advised that if a vessel got hit with a torpedo, there was no need to worry: “There will generally be ample time for the crew to escape in the boats, if the latter are kept ready for service.” The memorandum evaded entirely the matter of passengers and how they might fare under the same circumstances.
But it also embodied a realistic appraisal of the vulnerabilities of U-boats and urged captains to exploit these at every opportunity. “If a submarine comes up suddenly close ahead of you with obvious hostile intention, steer straight for her at your utmost speed, altering course as necessary to keep her ahead.” In short, the Admiralty was asking merchant captains to transform their ships into offensive weapons and ram their attackers. This was an effective maneuver given the inherent fragility of submarines, as would be proved a month later when the HMS Dreadnought rammed and sank Kapit?nleutnant Weddigen’s U-29, thereby avenging the dead crews of the Aboukir, the Cressy, and the Hogue. The memorandum recommended that British ships disguise themselves as neutrals whenever possible and fly false colors. “It is not in any way dishonorable. Owners and masters will therefore be within their rights if they use every device to mislead the enemy and induce him to confuse British vessels with neutrals.”
The memorandum also included a strict order, the codified effect of the Aboukir disaster: “No ocean-going British merchant vessel is permitted to go to the assistance of a ship which has been torpedoed by a submarine.”
THE ADMIRALTY later claimed that Turner possessed still another advisory, dated April 16, which reported, “War experience has shown that fast steamers can considerably reduce the chance of successful surprise submarine attack by zigzagging that is to say altering the course at short and regular intervals say in ten minutes to half an hour.” The memo noted that this tactic was used by warships in waters likely to be patrolled by submarines.
The Admiralty may have erred, however, in presuming Turner really did have this particular memo among his papers at the time the ship sailed from New York. (Cunard’s lawyers later would hedge the point with a heroic bit of legal prose in which they stated that while Cunard believed such a notice had been given to the captain, the company had no knowledge of what the delivered memo actually said.) Whether such a communiqué had in fact been delivered to Turner became a matter of debate. The Admiralty’s Board of Trade had indeed crafted a statement on zigzagging, but one prominent naval historian asserted that the advisory was not approved by First Lord Churchill until April 25 and was not actually distributed to captains and shipping companies until May 13, long after the Lusitania’s May 1 departure.
Even had this memo been in Turner’s possession, it probably would have made little impression. For one thing, the memo did not order captains to zigzag; it merely described the practice. For another, zigzagging at the time was a proposition that merchant captains considered worthy of ridicule, and that none was likely to endorse, especially not the master of a grand ocean liner. The idea of subjecting passengers, many of them prominent souls in first class, to the hard and irregular turns of a zigzag course was beyond contemplation.
NOW, IN open seas, the Lusitania maintained an average speed of 21 knots, 6 knots faster than the maximum speed a U-boat could attain while surfaced and more than twice what it could achieve while fully submerged.
This was also faster than any other civilian ship still in service. On Sunday afternoon the Lusitania quickly overtook and passed the American liner New York, with the Shakespearean actress Ellen Terry aboard.
THAT SUNDAY, Dwight Harris, the New Yorker traveling to England to get married, planned what he would do if in fact the Lusitania were torpedoed. He wrote, “I took a look around and decided that if anything did happen in the ‘War Zone’ I would go to the bow if possible.” First, however, he planned to grab the custom life belt he had bought at Wanamaker’s in New York.
ROOM 40; QUEENSTOWN; LONDON
PROTECTING ORION
THE GERMAN WIRELESS MESSAGES INTERCEPTED BY ROOM 40 caused deep anxiety within the Admiralty. But it was not the Lusitania the Admiralty was concerned about. It was the HMS Orion, one of Britain’s largest and most powerful battleships, a “superdreadnought.” The ship had undergone a refitting in Devonport, on England’s southwest coast, and was now ready to sail north to rejoin the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow.
On Sunday, May 2, Admiralty Chief of Staff “Dummy” Oliver sent a note to First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, in which he recommended that the Orion’s departure be postponed. “There will be less moon & less risk every night now that we wait,” he wrote.