The Roar from Within

The sea came through it. The ship began to list. The list would not stop. And then, seconds after the first impact — after the torpedo’s entry forward of the bridge, below the waterline, on the starboard side — a second sound passed through the hull, through the decks, through the bones of every person standing or sitting or lying aboard the Lusitania at ten minutes past two on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, ten miles off the Old Head of Kinsale. No torpedo made that sound. It was a roar. It came from inside the ship.

Survivors would later struggle for language to contain it. What they produced, in the aggregate, was a chorus of incomprehension so consistent in its terror that the consistency itself became a form of evidence. A second, much heavier explosion. A huge column of water and debris. A geyser of steel plating, coal smoke, cinders, and fragments thrown high above the deck. Lifeboat No. 5, still seated in its davits, was knocked loose and hurled across the boat deck by the force of the plume. The ship lurched a second time — not the shudder of impact from outside, but a convulsion from within, as if something in the liner’s belly had torn itself open.

The Lusitania was built by the firm of John Brown and Company, launched on the Clyde, and designed to move at speeds no submarine could match. She was 785 feet of steel compartmentalization, her hull divided by transverse bulkheads into a chain of spaces meant to contain the sea if it ever broke in. On her maiden voyage in 1907 she had averaged better than twenty-five knots. She was the fastest passenger liner in the Atlantic trade, a ship whose designers had staked their reputations on the principle that speed and subdivision were their own forms of armor. No torpedo had ever struck a vessel of this size or complexity. No one aboard, not the crew, not the passengers, not the German submarine commander who had fired the shot, had any template for what happened next.

What happened next was that the Lusitania began to die.

The torpedo had torn a hole in the starboard side forward, and the sea was entering through it with the force of a river. But the second explosion, the roar, the geyser, the violent second lurch, did something the torpedo alone had not done. It shattered the structural integrity of the forward sections. Bulkheads that should have held collapsed or were bypassed. Watertight doors that should have sealed jammed in their tracks. The flooding, which in a properly contained hull might have been limited to one or two compartments, spread inward and downward with a speed that defied the design assumptions of the ship’s builders.

Below the waterline, in the boiler rooms, the men working the furnaces were inundated immediately. The survivors who managed to escape from the forward two boiler rooms described water not seeping but pouring, not rising but erupting, as if the sea had found not a crack but a mouth. Steam lines ruptured. The pressure feeding the turbines dropped dramatically. Somewhere in the forward sections of the ship, the complex architecture of boilers, steam pipes, coal bunkers, and cargo holds that had crossed the Atlantic in orderly industrial rhythm came apart in seconds.

The list to starboard steepened. It had begun with the torpedo’s entry, the sea pouring into compartments on one side of the hull and pulling the ship down by the bow and to the right. But after the second explosion the list accelerated past anything the crew could correct. The deck tilted. Chairs slid. Tables in the dining saloon, already cleared of lunch service, moved across the floor. Passengers who had been standing found themselves thrown against bulkheads. Passengers who had been seated found themselves standing without intending to, hauled upright by the angle of the ship.

On the boat deck, the crew began moving toward their stations. The list made the simple act of walking a negotiation with gravity. Lifeboats hung in their davits at an angle that grew more impossible with each passing minute. The ship’s engineers, below, were fighting to assess damage in compartments that were already filling. The watertight doors, the last mechanical defense between the sea and the ship’s vitals, had failed to close fully or had been blown open by the force of the second blast. The Lusitania’s subdivision, the system of bulkheads and doors that was supposed to keep the ship afloat long enough to launch every boat and save every soul, was compromised in the first seconds.

Seven hundred metres to starboard, submerged, the commander of U-20 watched through his periscope. Walther Schwieger had fired one torpedo. He recorded in his war diary that it struck the Lusitania on the starboard bow, just behind the bridge. Moments later, a second detonation followed, heavier, larger, visible from the submarine as a column of water and debris erupting above the liner’s deck. Schwieger had not fired a second torpedo. He had none ready in the tube. What he was seeing was something happening inside the ship itself, a force released by the first impact but belonging to no weapon he had deployed.

The distinction mattered. It would matter in the inquiry rooms. It would matter in the diplomatic notes passed between Washington and Berlin. It would matter in every subsequent investigation and every historical account for the next century. The torpedo had started the sequence. But the second explosion, the one that came from inside the Lusitania, the one that no German weapon had directly caused, was what turned a serious wound into a mortal one. Without it, the ship might have stayed afloat long enough for rescue. With it, she had minutes.

The question of what caused the second explosion has never been settled to universal satisfaction. The evidence is contradictory, and every account of it must hold the contradiction open rather than close it prematurely.

The first theory, and the one that surfaced almost immediately in the popular press and the diplomatic correspondence, was munitions. The Lusitania’s cargo manifest, filed in New York before departure, listed a shipment of rifle cartridges, small-arms ammunition packed in cases, stowed in the cargo holds forward. The German government would seize on this fact in the weeks following the sinking, arguing that the ship was carrying war materiel and was therefore a legitimate military target under the rules of cruiser warfare. The theory held that the torpedo’s impact, or the concussion of its detonation, had set off the cartridges in the hold, producing the second blast.

The difficulty was one of scale. Rifle cartridges packed in cases do not detonate en masse with the force survivors described. They burn. They pop. They do not produce the kind of concentrated blast that throws steel plating above the deck and knocks lifeboats from their davits. Later examinations of the cargo manifest and the known properties of small-arms ammunition suggested that the cartridges, while present, were unlikely to have been the primary cause of a detonation of the magnitude witnesses reported. But the presence of munitions in the cargo hold, the fact that the Lusitania was carrying rifle cartridges across the Atlantic on a passenger liner, would become one of the central moral and legal facts of the entire affair. It did not need to have caused the second explosion to do damage. It needed only to exist.

The second theory was coal dust. The Lusitania burned coal in her boilers, thousands of tons of it, stored in bunkers that ran the length of the hull forward and abutting the boiler rooms. Coal dust, suspended in the air of a confined space, is explosive. Under the right conditions, the right concentration, the right particle size, an ignition source, it can detonate with force comparable to a chemical explosive. The torpedo’s impact, rupturing the hull near the coal bunkers, could have dispersed coal dust into the air and provided the spark. Proponents of this theory pointed to the location of the second blast, forward, in the region of the bunkers and boiler rooms, and to the character of the debris: coal smoke, cinders, and fragments of steel thrown upward together.

The third theory was steam. The Lusitania’s propulsion system ran on high-pressure steam, generated in her boiler rooms and fed through a network of pipes and valves to the turbines that turned her screws.

The system operated at enormous pressure. If the torpedo’s impact or the flooding that followed ruptured a steam line or a boiler drum, the release would have been violent, a blast of superheated steam and fragments that would match the survivors’ descriptions of a roar, a geyser, and a catastrophic loss of power.

The witnesses who escaped the forward boiler rooms reported being inundated immediately, and the pressure feeding the turbines dropped dramatically following the second explosion. Both facts pointed toward a failure in the ship’s steam-generating plant. The failure may have come not directly from one of the boilers but rather in the high-pressure steam lines leading from them, a rupture in the piping rather than the drum, producing a blast without the specific signature of a boiler explosion.

In 2007, marine forensic investigators considered that an explosion in the ship’s steam-generating plant could be a plausible explanation for the second explosion. Though accounts from the few survivors who managed to escape from the forward two boiler rooms reported immediate inundation, the evidence pointed toward a failure of one sort or another in the steam system. In 2012, explosives researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory argued that the torpedo itself caused the catastrophic damage, and that no second substantial explosion was necessary to explain the ship’s rapid sinking.

Their experiments and evidence from the wreck suggested that the torpedo’s impact on the hull, striking near the boiler rooms, had produced sufficient structural failure to account for the speed of the foundering. Some researchers running simulations of the sinking found it difficult to cause the ship to sink as fast as it did without any additional damage beyond the torpedo’s direct effect. Others argued that the torpedo damage alone, striking near the boiler rooms, could sink the Lusitania quickly without requiring a second substantial explosion, and that the blast witnesses reported was the sound of ruptured hull plates and collapsing structure rather than a detonation.

The disagreement has never been resolved. What the record establishes, clearly, consistently, and beyond reasonable dispute, is that something happened inside the Lusitania in the seconds after the torpedo struck that was not the torpedo. Survivors heard it. They felt it. They saw the column of water and debris it threw above the deck. The commander of the submarine that fired the torpedo saw it from seven hundred metres away and noted it in his diary as a separate event. Whatever it was, cartridges, coal dust, steam, or the catastrophic structural failure of hull plates under stress, it transformed the situation from a serious emergency into an irreversible catastrophe.

The ship’s list continued to steepen. The deck was now tilted enough that lifeboats on the port side hung inward, against the hull, impossible to swing out. On the starboard side, the boats hung outward over the water but at an angle that made them dangerous to board and nearly impossible to lower. The crew needed time. The ship was not giving them any.

Below, in the engine rooms and boiler rooms, the water rose. The engineers who survived would later describe a scene in which every assumption they held about the ship’s capacity to withstand damage was overwhelmed in the first minutes. The bulkheads were not holding. The watertight doors were not sealed. The compartments that were supposed to contain the sea were filling together, as if the second explosion had erased the boundaries between them. The ship’s designer had built her to survive the flooding of one compartment, or two, or even three. What was happening now was the flooding of many, simultaneously, with the sea moving through the ship’s interior faster than any human response could match.

The Lusitania was completing her 202nd Atlantic crossing, outbound from New York and making for Liverpool. She carried 1, 264 passengers, three stowaways, and a crew of 693, a total of 1, 959 people. She had been scheduled to dock at the Prince’s Landing Stage later that afternoon. The sea was calm. The visibility was excellent. The Old Head of Kinsale was visible from the deck. Passengers had been remarking on how close to land they were, how safe the final approach felt after five days of open ocean. Some had gone below to collect their belongings for arrival. Some were still at lunch. Some were on deck, watching the Irish coast emerge from the haze.

The second explosion did not give them time. It collapsed the distance between a serious incident and a foundering, between a ship that might have waited for rescue and a ship that was going down. The list steepened past fifteen degrees, then past twenty. The bow settled. The stern rose. The ship was making way still, her engines had not stopped, or could not be stopped, and her momentum was carrying her forward and downward at the same time, the rudder useless, the helm unresponsive, the bridge unable to direct a ship that was already breaking apart beneath the feet of the man standing on it.

On the boat deck, passengers and crew struggled with the lifeboats. The davits were Cunard’s standard rig, designed for lowering boats in a stable ship at a moderate angle. The list made them treacherous. Boats on the high side could not be cleared. Boats on the low side hung too far over the water to board safely. The crew who had reached their stations found that the procedures they had rehearsed assumed a ship that was still level and still under control. They did not have procedures for a ship that was already past the point of recovery.

The second explosion had done this. Not the torpedo alone. The torpedo had opened the wound. But the second blast had torn through the forward sections with a force that overwhelmed the containment systems, collapsed the bulkhead architecture, flooded the boiler rooms, and pitched the ship into a list from which it would not recover. Whatever its cause — munitions, coal dust, steam, or structural failure — its effect was uniform: it stripped away everything between an injured liner and an open sea.

Eighteen minutes. That was what remained to her. From impact to submersion took roughly eighteen minutes; six lifeboats got away cleanly while others swamped or were crushed against her side as she rolled.

The second explosion was the mechanism. It took a ship that had been wounded and made it sinking. It took a situation in which the crew might have launched boats in orderly sequence and made it a situation in which the deck was tilted, the boats were jammed, the watertight doors were open, and the water was already at the boiler room floor plates. It compressed time. It removed options. It turned a rescue operation into a scramble for survival.

And it left behind a question that would not go away. The torpedo was German; Schwieger fired it; U-20’s war diary recorded both shot and subsequent detonation. But what followed came from within—an interaction between warhead and vessel—cargo hold and coal bunker and pressurized pipe all contributing their own violence when struck.

The ship’s structural integrity, shattered by the second explosion, was gone. The sinking was now inevitable and accelerated. The Lusitania was going down by the bow, listing to starboard, her forward compartments flooded, her boilers inundated, her steam pressure gone, her power failing, her deck tilted at an angle that made the lifeboats useless. On the bridge, Captain William Turner was about to give the only orders left to give.