Throughout the rest of 1914, he was deeply troubled. But by may he is head over heels in love with a woman named edith. A 40something widow in washington, d. C. It is not clear yet whether she is going to fall in love with him back. He is writing passionate love letters to her by the dozens at this point. This is the context, war and passion. Brian you start out by saying this i first started reading about the lusitania on a whim. What was the whim . Erik when i look for the next idea, it is always a difficult time. A good friend of mine coined a term to describe it, she says that is when i am in the dark country of no ideas. When i am in that country, i always try to just read. If something occurs to me i will start looking into it. The lusitania had always been on my back burner, but i had always been reluctant to think about doing a book about it because it seems to me it is almost like, too obvious a story, too much low hanging fruit. A lot of times i want an idea that is complex enough that i can be sure there will be no competition from another writer. But i had a thing about maritime history. I think we all have this romantic, i dont know what you would call it, kind of jungian archetypal need for maritime romance. I dont know. It was something that intriguted it was something that intriguted me. I was intrigued, i didnt know anything about the lusitania. I started reading because i had nothing else on my plate. As soon as i started reading i thought this is interesting. The hows of what happened, the actual sinking of the ship. One of the details the first details that caught my attention was when i read that during the actual sinking, one fully loaded lifeboat fell on top of another fully loaded lifeboat. It opened my eyes to the fact that this is what the story is it is about this human disaster. It is not the geopolitical thing that we learn about in high school. I dont know about you, but when i was in high school i learned about the lusitania sort of on a timeline leading up to world war i. Something you know that occurred and then you forgot about it you moved on to the start of the war and so forth. So i started to read about it and i was discouraged by the fact that it seemed too obvious and also because there had been a lot done before. But, i realized five years ago that the 100 Year Anniversary was coming, which of course is going to be in may of 2015. May 7, 2015. As a rule, i am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I dont think readers care and i think it pretty much guarantees someone else will be writing on the subject. But as a former journalist, i think about, why write something today, why do it now . It may have tipped to the scale to work doing a little bit more exploration. While i was in seattle, i made a stop down in stanford which had a good amount of archival materials. It was there that two things happened. One, i got a glimpse of the fact that there was this really rich, lush, archival trove of material. Things that had not existed in that kind of quantity for any of my previous books. Things that i knew could be elements for storytelling. Second thing that happened, i was sitting at a table in this archive and one of the archivists came over and set a plank of wood down right next to me. On this plank was branded the name lusitania and this was a shard of a lifeboat that had been found on the irish coast on a beach next to the corpse of a dead lusitania passenger. It had made its way to the Hoover Institution and here it was on this table next to me. I always look for that kind of sign. I dont mean in a hocuspocus or spooky afterlife way. What i mean is there is something about having a tactile connection to the past. That is very powerful for me. I took that as a sign to keep this going and continue looking into this. And one thing led to another and suddenly i was embarked on this journey. What i found was that indeed there was such an amazing amount of original archival stuff that it would present me with an opportunity to do something that i had not, in my view, been able to achieve previously. Which was to put on my offered Alfred Hitchcock had and make this as suspenseful a work of nonfiction as i could possibly do. Thats why i took this book, it was an exercise in suspense. Brian we are going to do about two minutes of this. Lets stay quiet for a minute to get the feel of it. [silence] brian when did you do this . Erik i was with my wife aboard the queen mary ii this past january 2015. This was my second voyage on the queen mary ii. I wanted to get a sense of what it was like to actually crossed cross the ocean on a ship. Something i really thought i needed to understand. The first one was in a force 10 gale for three days. The second one was for about six to 10 days. I was shooting this through a window. It was stunning ferocity in the sea. The ship, i may say, was very stable. Brian if you look at the horizon, it doesnt move much. Erik this is a stable platform. Brian same company . Erik same company. Cunard. Different ownership now. The old archival records from the cunard ship company were separated from them. Brian what did you learn from being out there . Erik i always say to go to the scene of the crime, if you will. And, being on a ship in the middle of the ocean you can think about it, i think you understand before you sail. But there is nothing like being out there and realizing that it would be hours and hours before anyone can come to help you. I realize other things. For example, when you are in the middle of the ocean you cant smell the ocean. You know, we are all accustomed to going to the beach and having beachy smells. But you cannot smell it because theres nothing generating odor. It is sort of an empty sent. You dont smell the things that we associate with the sea. Where the sea forms a boundary with the land. You dont smell that in the middle of the ocean. Which i found fascinating. The other thing that was really striking, and this is relative to the story at hand, is that today whenever you sail on a cunard ship, before it leaves the harbor before it leaves the dock you have to muster your emergency station and you have to put on your life jacket and fitted to end strap it on, and then they give the ok to take it off. So important. I cant tell you how when you put that thing on it becomes very real, the potential threat. What can happen to you if you are in the middle of the ocean and there is a problem. Why that is reverent, in the case of the lusitania, there was no requirement and that had catastrophic results for many passengers. Brian it cruises for how many days . Where did it leave from . Where was it heading . Erik we have to be very careful about our terminology. Cunard is very adamant about this today, it is a voyage. Point to point, it was a voyage. It was bound for liverpool. Ordinarily, with the lusitania it was to be a fiveday crossing. A very fast ship. Five days was a remarkable achievement in that time. But there was one aspect that proved to be unfortunate which was that cunard, a costsaving measure, had shut down one of the boiler rooms on the ship. The fourth of for boiler rooms. One of the four. Brian one of those stacks we are seeing . Erik each one of those finals came from the boiler room below. Solely three of the boiler rooms were functioning. And that was for about seven days. It extended the trip and that became very relevant for what eventually occurred. Brian one of the things that you mention in the book is the history of coal and the impact that coal had on this whole trip. Erik yeah, it is one of the things i found very striking. Outwardly, the ship is this beautiful thing. It is clean lines, huge, glamorous, the whole deal. Inside, amazingly laborintensive with vast amounts of coal stored in the ship along what were referred to as longitudinal coal larders along the sides of the ship and the rear. The reason these were significant by the way, 6000 tons of coal for this voyage. The reason why these longitudinal bunkers were important was because they were an artifact of the original deal with the British Government to allow the ship to be built. The government specified that it wanted certain requirements. The ship had to be fast, had to be able to do 25 knots. Actually 24 and three quarters knots. And to the government specified that it had to be built to battleship specifications. These longitudinal mongers being because coal was thought to be the equivalent of armor in a ship. The British Government wanted to be able to use it as an Armed Auxiliary cruiser and about guns if they needed to. That is, to mount guns on the ship. In this case, i think the plan was for 12 sixinch guns. Which is quite a bit of armament. So the ship was essentially a glamorous ocean liner but with the whole configuration and coal storage configuration of a battleship. The thing consumed about 1000 tons of coal per day through the course of a voyage. Tremendously laborintensive. Shoveling and trimming and shoveling and trimming. 360 firemen at a time dealing with this thing. An amazing effort. Brian how do you correctly pronounce the name of the uboat captain . Erik the german is capitan lieutenant schwieger. Brian here is a picture of him. Tell us about his role. Erik going into this project i thought, fine, we have the villainhero. As i started doing research into him and the submarine and so forth, i found that i was growing increasingly sympathetic to him. He was a young guy, 30 hand some wellliked by his , crew, humane. At one point he had six dogs dachsunds aboard his ship four of which were puppies. A colleague of his in the submarine service, a fellow submarine captain, said of him after the war that he wouldnt hurt a fly. He would not hurt a fly. This patrol that he set out on and i have to emphasize, he was not in any point stalking the lusitania per se. He was not after the lusitania that is a common misconception. He was simply assigned to hunt troop transports in a certain that location. But, this voyage that he sat out on this patrol, in his case proved to be filled with mishaps frustration bad weather. I have actually heard from readers already that they found themselves rooting for captain schweiger. Which is very interesting. I didnt necessarily intend that but i dont believe in heroes, every hero has warts in every villain has potentially good qualities. Except adolf hitler, i make an exclusion for him. So it proved very interesting, looking into him. Brian in his career, how many ships did he blow up . Erik i cannot recall the specific number, but he was already, even at this point, one of germanys submarine aces. And he was so young. He was one of the few, actually, in the submarine service who had actually been in the service before the war began. So he was already very experienced. He was clearly adept, he was an ace, and he was one of the most valued members of the service. Brian lets take a look at captain turner. Tell us about him. Erik captain William Thomas turner, he is the kind of guy that if you boarded the lusitania on the morning of may 1, and you had any anxiety, you would look at captain turner and you would most likely feel that anxiety start to slip away. The kind of guy you would want he isthe kind of guy you would want as a captain. He looked fit, he looked strong, he looked like a man of substance. He was a captain who had come up through the sailing ranks. He had been a cabin boy at the ridiculous age of eight and come up through the ranks of sailing ships. He had worked his way up to become one of cunards top captains. At this point it was his third stint as captain of the lusitania. They rotated captains as they do today. Brian how many people on board . Erik another thing given the. Period, had a full passenger load. And a Record Number of children. The ship had about 2000 people aboard. That includes passengers and crew. And, a Record Number of children, interestingly. Brian going back to the submarine, how many did they roughly have . Erik 36 people. And six dogs. The dogs were not important at this point. Brian one of the things that popped out to me was when he said that in those days there was no sonar. So these sobs, or this youboat, could sit on the bottom of the ocean and nobody would know they were there. What role did that play . Erik another thing to throw into the mix first was that there was no sonar which is of course the classic trope for anyone who has seen World War Ii Submarine films, but there are also no depth charges. That would come much later in the war. The submarine was able to sit on the bottom in certain circumstances. It had to be in water that was not too terribly deep because otherwise the pressures would destroy the hull. This was significant because strangely enough, a world war i submarine was not particularly good at staying underwater. I mean it could go underwater , and was a Lethal Weapon when it was, but it couldnt stay under water for that long, and it could not travel that fast. Its maximum speed underwater was nine knots. One way would have been to sit on the bottom of sandy water in the north sea. On the other side of the British Isles on the other side of the atlantic was not in austin was not in option. A submarine had to keep moving and if it was being dogged by destroyers the whole time, which happened on this patrol, it didnt have the option of just stopping and nesting on the bottom and waiting. It had to keep moving. The problem is it had limited range, and when it reached the end of that range it would have to either surface and recharge its batteries or well, there was no other option. Imagine being followed by destroyers, as was this case, and you are traveling along at your maximum undersea speed of nine knots, your batteries are these were electric engines underwater diesel on the surface. Imagine you are running underwater injure batteries are strained and beginning to crackle. Schweiger notes in his war log , which he had thankfully left behind that had the destroyers , continued their pursuit, they wouldve had a problem potentially fatal. Brian where did you go to find the most information on captain schweiger . Erik one of the main places was the archives of the United Kingdom in london. A wonderful place. One of my Favorite Places in the world. But also, significant bits and pieces at the Churchill College and the churchill archives at cambridge. But really, the primary trove was the archive of the United Kingdom. I came across a large collection of British Naval intelligence reports which were compilations and narratives based on interrogations of captured submariners, captured german submarine crews, in which the British Naval intelligence analysts or whoever is doing the questioning asked them about their patrols, about how submarines worked, about what the tactics were, but also after asked them about what other commanders were like, what other crews were like. This was fascinating to me because it showed that there was no one type of german submarine commander. There was this very interesting span from absolutely ruthless to really very humane and kind of lazy. One guy was notorious for being a lousy shot. He could not hit a thing with a torpedo. He eventually got transferred out. But there is also a lot of comment about schweiger in those things. He was a very nice guy and that coming up that kept coming up in the report. There was a ledger actually that tracked each one of these patrols just based on something we havent gotten to but the ability of the british navy to intercept and decode German Communications essentially for most of the war. Brian you are talking about room 40 . Room 40 was where . Erik room 40 of the old admiralty building. Brian what did they mean by admiralty . Erik the people running the british navy. There is the royal navy, into the admiralty was in charge of the royal navy. Running the admiralty was the first lord, winston churchill. The first sealord was Jackie Fisher. There is a distinction. What is significant there is that Jackie Fisher was supposed to be the daytoday operating guy in the navy, and churchill was supposed to be sort of the ceo. Like the ceo and coo. But anyone who knows churchill knows but churchill is not going to take anything less than an intrusive role in the management of whatever he is managing. So a lot of conflict. Brian you pointed out the churchill was 40 and jackie was 74. Let me point out something you put on page 190. I will just go to the meat of it. And which churchill wrote that brian this is a lot to pay. How many amerikans lost their lives on this . Erik 128. Brian how many people didnt survive . Erik 1200. Brian how many people did survive . Erik about 700. There is no doubt that churchill would have welcomed that incident to get america into the war early. He had written a note to the head of the board of trade saying that we mean the traffic from america and if some of it gets trouble, all the better. The story gets complicated when the question arises as to, what ultimately happened to the lusitania . Why was the lusitania allowed to enter the irish sea without escort, without the kind of detailed warnings that could have been provided to captain William Thomas turner but was not . This has led to some very interesting speculation about was the ship essentially set up for attack by churchill or someone in the admiralty. It is interesting, i found no smoking memo and i would have found a smoking memo if it existed. That is to say there was nothing from churchill to Jackie Fisher or to someone else in the admiralty saying, lets let the lusitania go into the irish sea because we want it to get sunk. Nothing like that exists. However, there is a collection of evidence that if you try to use that evidence to prove that without there was a conspiracy a shadow of a doubt you , couldnt. But if you flip it around and pursue the null hypothesis, and try to prove that there was no conspiracy, you cant. It is the same kind of thing. I find it very interesting that a very prominent naval historian and former British Naval intelligence guy had, in a book about room 40, had said at first that his view was that lusitania was a monumental cockup. An error. A mistake. It just happened, and it was not a conspiracy. Later in life, this gentleman was interviewed and he says that he had a change of heart. New things had come out and he said that, now thinking about it, he said as much as i love the royal navy, i have come to the concl