Some of the voyage colliding with this tragedy that passengers dont know their sailing into . It is like the collision of those ideas . Note. I was drawn to the lusitania because i have this maritime thing, everyone does, the titanic, the flying dutchman, i think what happens is there is something about the idea of being any amount of what happened to you, that is what taps into my brain. The isolation of it . The isolation and romance, and suddenly that is my scandinavian roots. And from minnesota and south dakota. You won them over. Being scandinavian, and we are a seafaring people. Before su falls, we were pillaging from the sea. You were that night. We were that died. You know something about the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald. I think this kind of defies your theory because there was nothing all that glamorous. It is and worship on Lake Superior and yet it is something the the anniversary of the sinking that we observed, and talk about every year. I dont find that particularly romantic. I find that sinking and amazing event. On the great lakes and from what i understand meteorologist we the great lakes are terrible places to become incredible windstorms and the waves become something you dont even experience on the ocean. That is the fascinating part of the edmund fitzgerald. My dark fantasies tend toward the deep sea. Speaking of the deep sea i am sure we were researching this you were studying the underwater photos and video of the lusitania wreck. Not really. Really . Why . Every question so far. Thank you, erik larson, that is how it is going to go tonight. Really, let me elaborate a little bit. I did late in the process look at the under see photography Robert Ballard had done. I didnt want that to, my impression during the course of my research of what this voyage was like. I didnt want it to be this rusting hulk on the floor of the ocean which is what it is now. I wanted in my mind this great glamorous ship with all these great glamorous spaces and people walking the board and so forth. That is why i did in that way. That makes sense. Is lying in more than free hundred feet of water on its stoppards side. And i dont want to jump too far ahead but it saying very quickly. Do you know why it is lying in the position that it is . I cant tell you for sure if it is lying on the starter or port side. I am not sure in this end that that had much to do with exactly how it saying. What i do know is when it sank for much of that time, it was only 18 minutes. For much of that time it was 25 degrees list. It may well be that it is on the stock broadside but just before it went under it was so full of water and there was no imbalance and plunged underneath. Whether it wound up on its port or stoppards i cant remember but it is on its side. How does that 18 minutes thinking compare . How unusual is that . Incredibly unusual. Think about the titanic. The thing about the titanic is it was the rather leisurely sinking but there and not enough an odd way i am not making light of the sinking of the titanic. I am saying relatively speaking it was a leisurely rate of sinking. And as you know the big issue with the titanic is there were not enough lifeboats. The issue with the lusitania is there were more than enough lifeboats, more than enough lifeboats. There were 22 class a and lifeboats which you traditionally think of when you think of lifeboats but they also have a lot of collapsible boats which were stored underneath and that is how they made up the difference. The problem with the lusitania was the net result was almost the same as the titanic because half of the boats were unusable because of this 25 degree list. You can picture this. The boats on the portside once you try to let those go they swung into the superstructure. Those on the start assignment law were to the rails suddenly out eight feet from the hole. If you can imagine getting into one of these boats you are already 60 feet above the sea and now you got to cross this eight foot span, using deck chairs as ladders. One of my favorite vignettes is of little boy, of course it is a boy, takes a running leap and jumps into the lifeboat. That was the problem with the lusitania and the fact that it is saying so fast because of how it was struck. You mentioned the titanic, there is a connection with the captain of the lusitania and the titanic. To remember that right . No. No . Wasnt he being called to court . The connection i thought you with thinking of him being a cat that some point of it but theres an interesting connection with the titanic and that is on the day before departure which would have been the departure on may 1st, 1915 capt. Turner was called it to give testimony at a big titanic legal proceeding, limitation of liability proceeding in new york, the White Star Line was trying to limit its exposure to various lawsuits as a result of the sinking since the term limitation of liability hearing turner was called as an Expert Witness to testify as to the behavior of the titanics capt. And why he was going so fast through ice and turner did not approve. Capt. Turner knew that there were risks to this crossing, that he was about to undertake. A lot of the passengers knew that too. Capt. Turner i am not quite sure i agree with that. Five. What we are talking about here is on may 1st and interesting thing happened in new york. The new york newspapers that morning in the shipping newspapers which were widely read the German Embassy placed an advertisement warning anybody who is traveling on a passenger liner or any kind of merchant ship, when they enter the waters around the United Kingdom, socalled war zone that germany declared that february reiterating this worse than existed and if you settles you fail that your own risk. That did not name the lusitania but it was widely interpreted to be aimed at the lusitania because in the new york worlds, and one of these notices appeared next to the ad for cunards lusitania. Attending advertising person probably said this. Many people, somehow did not come up after the ship was a few hours out was a wonderful time to find out, captain turner knew about the warning but i dont think he was at all faced by it. I dont think he was a sailor of the old school, came up, great sailors ships, and when you get on an airliner i hate to fly i look for all kinds of cues. Can somebody else do that . Very cool and calm. I heard woody allen in a heartbeat. Turner was the kind of guy if you cant picture him, he would say yes, he is my guy. He was not fazed by the potential of submarine attack. He firmly believed that his ship was faster and bigger than anything any german submarine can tackle. That is interesting too. You describe how few people really understood how dangerous the german submarine was at that point. You have a note here that the author of Sherlock Holmes actually got it. This is one of the fascinating elements. I agree with you. [laughter] it is going to be good from here on in. The thing is whenever when i write history, the way i like to write it, one important thing is to put yourself in the point of view of the ear of. One thing that was important to grasp for me was how new the submarine was in that time. We are very familiar with it, run silent run deep, all that stuff. There was no sonar in world war i and no depth charges until after the lusitania so the submarine was brandnew and was not understood by anybody as to whether it would never be a viable weapon and a couple guys got it. One was there Arthur Conan Doyle who before the war wrote this really prescient shortstory about an imaginary european country called onorland which is obviously germany that had a handful of submarines and nonetheless managed to bring the and British Empire to its knees and that was his story which ran, he wrote it long before the war but it was published the month before the war. The other guy was jackie fisher. The admiralty hierarchy in britain, the first lord of the admiralty was winston churchill, he was the top dog in the admiralty and his number 2, essentials leave the chief operating officer jack fischer who was the first sea lord. He got it too, he understood too. He understood there were characteristics of the time that required that it be used a certain way and churchill completely dismissed that. He didnt accept the idea that a submarine would ever be used against civilian shipping. It was too of ridges to contemplate. The autonomy submarines had once they were at sea en you say once at sea, a you boat captain was free to conduct his patrol in whatever manner suited him without supervision from above. What did that translate to . What did that mean . What that translated to was extremely high risk for germany that a mistake would be made and the elephant in the room, america wouldnt climb into the war with guns blazing. It meant when you are the captain as a marine typically a young men, the 20s or Hart Senate Office building 0s, a crew of about 36, once you got out of range of german transmitters you were literally on your own. You can make any decisions you want, if he sought a target you didnt have to call back to headquarters, you just went for it. So the autonomy was both furrowing for these guys but also a huge, cute responsibility. I wonder how important it is to understand how capt. Schweiger how he interpreted that. He was one of the big submarine aces early in the war. He was a talented and tour of ships using his submarine. When i went into this i was thinking i knew there was going to be this collision course thing between the submarine and the lusitania because the captain of the ship, the captain of the submarine as did all submarine captain kept meticulous work law and the killing everything that happened from the moment he left germany to the time he returned. I knew all of that. It made an obvious narrative thing to have the lusitania and the submarine converging. In the course of researching this i came across interesting information about schweiger. I wanted him to be this classic film and. I would love a monocle like a scar and what i. I would love a monocle like a scar and what ivillain. I would love a monocle like a scar and what i. I would love a monocle like a scar and what i got was this nice guy, well liked by his friend and one of his companion said he wouldnt hurt a fly. This was after the war. I opened the book to this room 40 cadence and is this the positioning . This is the report on the positioning the one of the remarkable things about the story as i started getting into reading about it, i came to the lusitania reluctantly. I had nothing else on my plate. I was interested in the lusitania, i start reading about it, and my first archival trip really sort of cemented it. What surprised me was the role of the supersecret operation in the admiralty called room 40. Room 40 was established very early in the war. To take advantage of three nearly run that right in this events that occurred which is three different occasions early in the war the british came into possession of germanys three main code books governing almost all their wireless transmissions both naval and diplomatic. A handful got together and formed room 40 which was to take advantage of these captured code books. And use them to read wireless messages intercepted from the german navy. And they became very adept at this. One of the mysteries, one of the most interesting things about the saga is the u20 submarine send wireless message and receive wireless messages so from the beginning this room 40 new exactly what the submarines orders were, knew exactly where it was supposed to end up on patrol and during its first, this is what you are looking at its first 24 hours at sea its wireless operator send 14 position reports which the british in room 40 duly intercepted and decoded so they knew exactly where the submarine was for the first 24 hours. That is the chapter you are looking at. In the book it is 2 00, the exact location, 6 00, at 8 00 and the report ceased. Where was all this information for you to find it . It is all in the intercept, the National Archives of the United Kingdom i was delighted to find vast cashs of information all the decoded intersects they are all there. Really tremendous stuff. The thing about the german submarine commanders is faber said to be, quote garrulous they liked using their wireless they liked chatting over the wireless and i have to think part of it might be because they knew they would be dealing with this amazing loneliness comforting, but they had no clue somebody was listening they had no idea. The german navy was so arrogant to leave their codes would never be broken. How hard was that code to break . Once you have the code book. There are two elements to this as a code book. There are three litter groups. And aspiration, part of the german navy. And use the code book primarily as the first step. And scramble using a cipher. There was a lot of codebreaking and cryptographic circles. It was easy to break that seifert, and how regimented the german navy was in communication with its ships. I dont want to bore anybody with details of this betty essentially if you signal the same white ship every night at 6 00 p. M. You will eventually catch on that this is the light shed and at 6 00 p. M. This message, you know what it is saying so through that process they were unable to become very adept not only at deciphering but using the code book to break the code. I had someone in the audience earlier before we started ask me about how you discovered the level of detail even about what the passengers of the lusitania were wearing, the flower that somebody war in their pocket or something. Where is all that information to be found . I hate to say it but all that detail is in the very detailed cataloguing of personal effects found on the dead after words. Who did all the cataloging . Mostly the british navy, people in queenstown ireland, some cunard people. Cunard put out a Controversial Book after the sinking which contained every name, every body personal effects. They hoped for all these unidentified bodies might trigger recollection and say maybe that kind of thing. That is where these things came from. You are listening to other erik larson at the fitzgerald theater. His new book is called dead awake the Last Crossing of the lusitania. You can follow the thread at thethreadindy are on twitter. Lets place these adversaries, the lusitania and the you boat on collision course. The lusitania has been at sea for six days. The lusitania set sail on may 1st. The torpedoing occurred on may 7th. The submarine set out on april 30th. What has happened on the voyage of the lusitania leading up to that . Flirting a lot of shuffleboard they did play shuffleboard. They voyage until thursday may 6th was the need vengeful and probably getting teased. I dont know how many people were on transatlantic voyages. We did a voyage on the queen mary ii and we set out in november, it was midway through the research. No sooner did we leave new york harbors and we were in the force can dale. That spoke to me and my scandinavian hard. And the queen mary ii is a very stable ship even in foul weather but one of the things that came home to me on this voyage is after you leave the harbor it gets boring really fast and what it comes down to is you live from meal to meal. The same thing was happening on the ship. Meals were everything. You sit at your tables in fancy dining rooms in first class and even third class was supposed to be quite good and quite large and very good because they wanted to attract the immigrant trade. You have all this kind of cool shipboard stuff and people were writing about that. Survivors left stories about what was happening so it was very good. You have that sense of what it was like to be without sight of land in that isolation. It so did. The captain was very particular. This was not a cruise. This was in the voyage. He was very what is the difference . The queen mary ii is a point to point vessel. It does not stop in the caribbean, place to place, but it is really this amazing ship, transatlantic thing was built for everything the atlantic has to offer. The thing is when you are in the middle of the ocean there is that feeling even today, when you are out there and you can see where you are, on the course if something catastrophic where to happen and it could happen, you could strike another ship in the fog or who knows what. You are alone and nobody can get to you. Not for hours and hours. That is sobering. The most sobering thing is that now, this was not the case with the lusitania but today when you are on a ship like that, before the ship leaves the wharf, you are required to put on your life jacket, strap it on, and then take it off. I am here to tell you it gets your attention. When you put the life jacket on you realize this is real. Unfortunately that was not the case on the lusitania, they did not have to try it on. Did you have the moment when you thought would i have the presence of mind to know what to do if something happened to the ship . Yes. What would i do . Of course in the context of all the research i had done on the lusitania, july jump in . No. Do i try to get into a lifeboat . Yes. Do i hope they launch some better than the lusitania . Yes. I really thought about it. I find myself periodically, this is after the gail but walking along the deck and trying to imagine a torpedo coming toward the ship, what was it like . Because it comes i cant remember if it was 35, 45 miles an hour which is not superfast. I think you said 42. Thank you. Anytime. Here it is right here. My point being when you are standing there, you can see this thing coming because of the compressed air exhaust forms a very clear track on the surface of the seat and you would see this thing coming toward you. What, you are helpless, you know . Like that steve martin routine where he is marketing the product like an airline collision detection gives you a 20second warning . You know twentysecond is before everybody else, so what . So the lusitania has been at sea six days. What is happening under water on the you boat . As it is getting ever closer . First of all one important point to make, capt. Schweiger was not stalking the lusitania. He was not hunting for the lusitania. His orders were to look for large troop transports that were leaving from an unusual part of britain, troopships left from one side of the channel crossing to the other. German intelligence had picked up word of truth transports leaving from unaccustomed sports including liverpool or the western coasts of britain england and ireland and they were going to be doing that because that german intelligence had come to believe that britain might be planning an Amphibious Landing amphibious invasion of germany from the north sea coast so his orders were to look for these large troop transports. His patrol was just a misery of foul weather zero targets, one stretch being hunted by a patrol line o