The Doors That Would Not Close

The watertight doors would not close. Turner gave the order from the bridge, the standard emergency procedure, the first command in the Cunard manual for any hull breach at sea. The indicator board on the bridge told him what the ship’s electrics still knew: doors jammed, doors unresponsive, doors whose status lamps had gone dark. Some had been shattered by the force of the second explosion, their frames warped past the channels they ran in. Others had lost power before the order reached them, the electrical system that operated the remote closing mechanism already failing as seawater flooded compartments and dynamos shorted. Turner could see the indicator panel from where he stood. What he could not see was the sea pouring through openings that his order could not reach.

William Thomas Turner had been in the service of the Cunard Company since 1883. He had occupied the position of Commander since 1903 and held an Extra Master’s Certificate since 1907. Lord Mersey, who presided over the wreck inquiry two months later, would note that Turner gave his evidence truthfully and well. He was not a man given to visible alarm.

Passengers who had observed him on earlier crossings remembered a captain who walked his deck with the unhurried confidence of someone who had spent more of his life at sea than on land. On the morning of 7 May, before the torpedo struck, he had taken his usual watch on the bridge, dressed in his standard dark suit rather than uniform, a figure of routine authority on a ship nearing the end of her 202nd Atlantic crossing, bound for Liverpool from New York and scheduled to dock at the Prince’s Landing Stage later that afternoon.

Aboard her were 1, 264 passengers, three stowaways, and a crew of 693, totalling 1, 960 people. She was also carrying around 173 tons of war supplies, including 4.2 million rounds of rifle ammunition. Turner was responsible for all of them. The responsibility sat on him now as the bow dropped and the list increased and the orders he gave met the physical ruin of the ship he commanded. The ship was nearing the end of her 202nd crossing, bound for Liverpool from New York, and had been scheduled to dock at the Prince’s Landing Stage later that afternoon.

The first order, to close the watertight doors, had been the correct procedure. The Lusitania’s subdivision into separate sealed compartments, with doors that could be shut from the bridge in the event of flooding, was the engineering principle that had made large passenger steamers seem unsinkable. The Titanic had carried the same principle and the same promise. But the system depended on the doors being intact and on the electrical supply that operated them being functional. The second explosion had compromised both. Survivors from the forward boiler rooms described a detonation that buckled plates and tore internal structure. The doors in those sections were either destroyed or jammed in their frames by distortion of the bulkheads themselves. Turner could give the order. The ship could not obey it.

He turned to the next procedure. The ship must be steered toward land. The Old Head of Kinsale lay to the north and east, its lighthouse visible from the upper decks in the clear afternoon air. If the Lusitania could be run aground in shallow water, she might hold together long enough for rescue vessels to take off her people. The calculation was sound. The distance was perhaps ten miles. The ship was still making way, her screws still turning with whatever steam pressure remained. Turner ordered the helm put over to bring the ship toward the Irish coast. He had earlier discussed course with his senior officers, Captain Anderson and Chief Officer Piper, intending to bring the ship closer to land to avoid reported submarine activity. It was while steering a straight course to obtain a bearing on the headland that the attack had come.

Quartermaster Johnston was at the wheel. The Lusitania’s steering was hydraulically assisted, powered by the ship’s main steam supply through dedicated steering engines. As the list increased and the bow settled deeper, the hydraulic system began to fail. The wheel grew heavy under Johnston’s hands. The ship responded sluggishly, then not at all. The steering engines, starved of steam, could not hold the rudder against the pressure of water flowing past the hull. Turner had ordered a turn toward shore. The ship continued on her course, or near it, the rudder unable to hold the angle Johnston tried to set.

The bridge of the Lusitania stood high above the waterline, seven decks above the keel, positioned forward of the first funnel. From there Turner could see the full length of the ship: the boat deck stretching aft, the rows of lifeboats in their davits, the funnels towering above, and beyond them the stern where the Cunard flag still flew. What he saw was a ship already dying. The bow was down. The list to starboard was steepening. The deck beneath his feet had developed a visible slope. Passengers were appearing on the boat deck below him, emerging from stairways and companionways, some still carrying lifebelts they had pulled from cabin racks, others without them.

Turner had ordered all lifeboats under davits swung out before the ship entered the danger zone. This was one of the precautions he had taken.

By the 7th of May the Lusitania had entered what was called the ‘Danger Zone,’ and the Captain had therefore taken precautions. He had ordered all the lifeboats under davits to be swung out. He had ordered all bulkhead doors to be closed except such as were required to be kept open in order to work the ship.

The boats hung on their davits, ready for lowering, their covers stripped. But the list was already steep enough to make the starboard boats swing inward against the ship’s side, impossible to push clear. The port boats swung outward, dangling at an angle from their falls. Neither set could be lowered safely. The deck was tilted past the angle the launching system required. The lifeboats, the ship’s final apparatus of survival, were becoming useless directly in proportion to the rate at which the ship was sinking.

The electrical system was failing in stages. The Lusitania carried two sets of dynamos, positioned low in the hull. As the flooding advanced aft from the bow, water reached the dynamo rooms. The lights flickered. Survivors described the interior corridors going dark, then briefly bright again as backup systems cut in, then dark permanently. On the bridge, the indicator panel for the watertight doors was going blank. The engine telegraph, which communicated orders to the engine room by mechanical and electrical linkage, was losing its connection. So was the telephone system that connected the bridge to the engine room and to various stations throughout the ship. All of these depended on electrical power. As the dynamos failed, Turner was losing his ability to see what was happening inside the ship and to communicate orders to the men who needed to carry them out.

The engine telegraph went first. Turner ordered the engines stopped; there was no point driving the ship forward if she could not be steered and was shipping water faster than she could survive. The telegraph needle moved. Whether the order reached the engine room, or whether the engineers were still at their posts to receive it, could not be confirmed. The steam pressure was dropping. Without steam, the engines would stop regardless of what the bridge ordered. The ship’s forward motion was already declining, the screws turning more slowly, the way coming off the hull. A vessel without way has no steering. A vessel without steering cannot be run aground. Turner’s second order was failing as his first had failed.

The ship was going down by the bow. The list to starboard was increasing. The power was failing. The steering was gone. The watertight doors could not close. The lifeboats could not be launched. Each of these failures was a separate system collapsing, but they were not separate in cause. They all traced back to the same mechanism: the second explosion had done damage so extensive and so rapid that the ship’s designed redundancies, the compartmentalization, the backup power, the emergency procedures, the lifeboat system, were overwhelmed before they could be deployed. The procedures Turner had been trained to execute assumed a rate of flooding the ship could survive long enough for countermeasures to work. The rate of flooding he now faced exceeded that assumption.

On the bridge, Turner stood with his officers. Captain Anderson, the additional captain carried to assist in navigation, was present. Chief Officer Piper was there. Quartermaster Johnston remained at the wheel. The bridge party was small. From that height they could see the horizon, the sea, the approaching coast. Below them the boat deck was filling with passengers. The funnels tilted against the sky at an angle that should not have been there. What they could not see was the damage below the waterline, the specific compartments flooded, the exact rate at which the ship was being lost. The indicators that would have told them were going dark. Lord Mersey would later note that Anderson was unfortunately drowned when the ship went down, and he could only judge of his capacity by the accounts given of the work he did.

The ship’s wireless was still operating. The distress signal had been sent. Queenstown and other stations had received it. But wireless communication told Turner nothing about his own ship’s condition. It could bring help. It could not stop the sinking. The help that was coming, the destroyers from Queenstown, the patrol vessels, the fishing boats, was miles away. The sinking was measured in minutes.

Turner’s command authority, the authority of a captain over his ship, his crew, and his passengers, the authority that Cunard had vested in him by placing him in command of one of the largest and most famous vessels in the world, was being stripped away by the physical collapse of the systems through which that authority operated. A captain commands by giving orders. His orders are executed by officers who relay them, by engineers who adjust machinery, by quartermasters who steer, by seamen who lower boats.

Each link in the chain depends on a physical system: the telegraph, the steering engine, the davit mechanism, the electrical supply. As those systems failed, Turner’s orders became gestures. Officers on the bridge could hear him. Crew on the boat deck could not. Engineers in the engine room were losing their lighting. Seamen at the lifeboat stations were struggling with boats they could not move.

Below the bridge, on the boat deck, the scene was changing. Passengers who had been at lunch, or in their cabins, or on the open decks, were moving toward the lifeboats. Some walked. Some ran. The list made movement difficult. The deck sloped. Chairs slid. Tables in the dining saloon had begun to move. The crew assigned to the boats, the seamen who had been drilled in launching procedures, were at their stations, or trying to reach them. But the boats on the starboard side were pressed against the hull by the list. The boats on the port side hung at an angle that made them dangerous to enter. Passengers approaching the boats could see the problem. The davits were designed for a level ship. The ship was no longer level.

The crew worked at the falls. The ropes and pulleys that lowered each boat required men to stand at specific positions and operate them in coordination. The list put those positions at different heights. Men on the high side stood above the boats. Men on the low side stood below them. The coordination that drill and training produced was disrupted by the simple geometry of a tilted deck. Seamen who had practiced this procedure on a level platform in Liverpool were now attempting it on a surface angled fifteen degrees and steepening.

Turner, from the bridge, could observe this. He could not fix it. The list was a function of the flooding. The flooding was a function of the damage. The damage was beyond anything his orders could address. He had closed the watertight doors, or tried to. He had turned the ship toward shore, or tried to. He had stopped the engines, or tried to. Each order had met the same obstacle: the ship’s systems, designed to respond to command, were physically broken.

The Lusitania was a turbine steamer of 30, 000 tons. Her engines produced 68, 000 horsepower. Her hull was 785 feet long. She was one of the largest and fastest passenger vessels ever built. The scale of the ship, the very scale that made her seem safe, now worked against the men trying to save her. A ship of 30, 000 tons does not respond quickly to helm orders even in perfect condition. A ship of that size, flooding forward and listing to one side, with her steering engines failing and her power going out, responded to nothing. The mass of the vessel, the momentum of her last few knots of way, the weight of water pouring into her forward compartments, these were forces no order from the bridge could counteract.

The second explosion had done what no one on the bridge could have anticipated. The torpedo alone might have been survivable. A single hole in the bow, even a large one, might have been contained by the watertight doors and the ship’s compartmentalization. The Lusitania was designed to stay afloat with several compartments flooded. But the second explosion, the source of which the inquiry would never conclusively determine—whether coal dust in the bunkers, a steam line rupture, or something in the cargo—had broken the ship’s back. It had exceeded the design parameters. It had overwhelmed the engineering. In 2007, marine forensic investigators would consider that an explosion in the ship’s steam-generating plant could be a plausible explanation for the second explosion.

Turner’s experience, his training, his Extra Master’s Certificate, his thirty years at sea, all of these had prepared him to command a ship through emergencies. They had not prepared him for an emergency that exceeded the ship’s own structural limits within minutes of the damage occurring. The procedures he followed were procedures designed for a survivable breach. The breach was not survivable. The procedures assumed time. Time had run out.

The ship’s angle was now severe. Survivors who reached the boat deck described the slope as making it difficult to stand. The funnels, towering above the bridge, were no longer vertical. The sea, visible over the starboard rail, was closer than it should have been. The deck was approaching the water. The ship was settling not just by the bow but bodily, the entire hull losing buoyancy as flooding spread through compartments that the failed watertight doors could not isolate.

Turner gave the order to abandon ship. The order was the last command available to him. With it, responsibility passed from the ship to the lifeboats, from the vessel to the apparatus of individual survival. It was an admission that the Lusitania could not be saved. It was also an order that depended on the lifeboats being launchable. The lifeboats were not launchable. Not all of them. Not safely. Not in the time remaining.

The crew on the boat deck attempted to launch what they could. The port-side boats, swinging outward, could be lowered to the rail but not to the water. The ship was still moving, though slowing. A boat lowered into water beside a moving ship could be crushed against the hull or dragged under. The falls, the ropes that connected boat to davit, had to be released at the right moment. The men operating the falls had to judge the distance to the water, the movement of the ship, the swing of the boat. On a level ship in calm water, this was a trained procedure. On a ship listing fifteen degrees and settling by the bow, with the water rising and the deck tilting, it was a calculation that failed as fast as it was attempted.

Boats were lowered and spilled their passengers. Boats were lowered and struck the hull. Boats could not be lowered at all because the list had jammed the davits. Passengers rushed boats before the crew could prepare them. The chaos on the boat deck was not a failure of discipline. It was the product of a ship sinking faster than the lifeboat system could be operated. The crew had drilled. The boats had been swung out. The covers had been stripped. Everything that could be done in advance had been done. What could not be done in advance was making a tilted deck level or a jammed davit functional or a shattered door watertight. Of the ship’s 48 lifeboats, only six would be successfully lowered, all from the starboard side.

On the bridge, Turner watched. The ship was going down under him. The orders he had given, to close doors, to turn shore, to stop engines, to abandon ship, had each been the correct order. Each had been defeated by the physical condition of the vessel. His command had been rendered nearly impotent not by any failure of judgment but by the scale of the catastrophe. The ship’s systems, the procedures, the training, the experience, all of it was adequate for a survivable emergency. None of it was adequate for this.

The Lusitania’s bridge was going dark. The dynamos had failed. The telegraph was dead. The indicator panel was blank. The ship’s power was gone. Turner stood on a bridge without instruments, on a ship without steering, giving orders to men who could not hear them. The sea was climbing the hull. The deck was approaching the water. The ship had minutes left. The boats that could be launched were being launched. The boats that could not be launched were hanging in their davits, tilting with the ship, filled with people who could not reach the water.

The shift had come. Not by Turner’s choice but by the ship’s condition. The command to save the ship had become the command to abandon it. The apparatus of abandonment, the lifeboats, the falls, the davits, was failing as the ship’s systems had failed. The list that had defeated the steering had defeated the boats. The flooding that had defeated the watertight doors had defeated the power. The explosion that had defeated the first order had defeated the last.

The Lusitania’s deck was at the waterline now. The sea was coming aboard. The bridge, high above, was still above the water. Turner and his officers stood there. Below them, the boats were being lowered or were failing to be lowered. The passengers were at the rails or in the boats or in the water. The ship was sinking beneath all of them. The captain’s last command had been given. The ship could not obey it. The boats could not obey it. The sea was taking the ship and the people on it, and the orders from the bridge had become what orders always become when the systems that execute them are destroyed: sound on the air, carried away by the wind, reaching no one.