Schwieger brought the submarine closer. He fired a bronze torpedo into the hull, from a distance of 500 meters (550 yards). It exploded at a point opposite what Schwieger believed to be the ship’s engine room. “Effect slight,” he wrote. The ship sagged at the stern but did not sink.
Schwieger’s gun crew began firing at the ship’s waterline as he brought U-20 slowly around to its stern. The ship’s name had been painted over, but up close Schwieger was able to read it: Candidate. His ship-identification book showed it to be a British freighter of about 5,000 tons, owned by the Harrison Line of Liverpool, a company prone to giving ships such romantic names as Auditor, Administrator, and Electrician.
Schwieger’s men continued firing until the ship’s bow rose high out of the water and the stern began to sink. He recorded the latitude and longitude of the wreck, which put it 20 miles south of the Coningbeg lightship, at about the middle of the narrowest portion of the Saint George’s Channel. The time was 10:30 A.M.
Ten minutes later, he sighted another potential target coming over the horizon, this one the biggest yet, on a course that would converge with his. Fog obscured the ship. Schwieger ordered full speed and set a course that he anticipated would put U-20 ahead of the ship and in position to fire a torpedo.
The big steamer burst from the fog, moving fast. Schwieger saw now that it was a passenger liner of about 14,000 tons. A true prize. He ordered a fast dive and raced at the highest speed his battery-powered engines could muster, 9 knots, but this proved not nearly enough. The ship was still 2 miles off and moving at full speed. Schwieger realized that the best he could do would be to position U-20 so that a torpedo would strike the liner at a glancing 20-degree angle—too oblique to be successful. He called off the attack.
Although he didn’t name the ship in his log, the liner was the Arabic, of the White Star Line, which had owned the Titanic.
AN HOUR LATER, shortly before one o’clock, Schwieger spotted yet another target, ahead and to port.
He set up his attack. This time he chose one of the newer G6 torpedoes and ordered its depth set at 3 meters, about 10 feet. He fired from a distance of 300 meters. The torpedo struck the ship at a point below its forward mast. The bow took on water, but the ship stayed afloat. Its crew fled in boats. Schwieger surfaced.
He determined that the vessel was an English freighter, the Centurion, about 6,000 tons, owned by the same line that owned the freighter he had sunk earlier in the day.
The fog again began to build. Schwieger did not want to take a chance that the Centurion would survive. He fired a second torpedo, “to make foundering sure.” This too exploded on contact, and Schwieger heard the telltale hiss of air that fled the ship as water filled its hull. U-boat commanders always found this a satisfying moment. Kapit?nleutnant Forstner, in his memoir, described how the air “escapes with a shrill whistle from every possible aperture, and the sound resembles the shriek of a steam siren. This is a wonderful spectacle to behold!” Often at this point stricken ships gave one last exhalation as water filled their boiler rooms, causing a final explosion and releasing a cloud of black smoke and soot, known to U-boat commanders as “the black soul.”
Schwieger did not wait to see the ship disappear below the surface. The fog had grown too thick. At 2:15 p.m., he submerged and set a course that would take U-20 well out to sea so that he could recharge its batteries in safety and consider how next to proceed.
Schwieger faced a decision. His fuel was running low—surprisingly so—and he had yet to reach his assigned hunting zone off Liverpool, still nearly a day’s voyage away.
LUSITANIA
LIFE AFTER DEATH