PART IV
THE BLACK SOUL
LUSITANIA
IMPACT
AS THE TORPEDO PASSED FROM VIEW BELOW THE EDGE of the deck, there was an interval when nothing happened and one could indulge the notion that it had missed or malfunctioned. “I saw it disappear,” one passenger said, “and for a bare second we all had a kind of hope that maybe it wouldn’t explode.”
In the next instant, 350 pounds of explosives detonated against the plates of the hull, at a point under the bridge about 10 feet below the waterline. Immediately the payload turned from solid to gas. This “phase change” released heat at a temperature exceeding 5,000 degrees Centigrade, 9,000 Fahrenheit, at immense pressure. As one early-twentieth-century submarine builder put it, “The side of the ship is nothing but tissue paper in the hands of these enormous forces.”