This week on q a our guest is erik larson out with his book dead wake. With world war one being fought in europe, the lusitania liners sailed to liverpool, england with 2,000 passengers and crew on board. Cspan erik larson, your new book, dead wake, you start off first sentence, on the night of may 6, 1915, as his ship approach the coast of ireland, ccaptain William Thomas turner left the bridge and made his way to the first class lounge. What are you talking about . This is the night before the lusitania was torpedoed. The ship was that day, on friday the next day on friday, may 7th was going to enter the socalled the zone of war declared by the german navy. The water surrounding the u. K. Had become this they had designated this a zone of war. So the night before, captain turner was going into the lounge to actually talk to passengers during the intermission in the talent show, the nightly talent show, one of the features of transatlantic voyages. And he had some sobering news but also some comforting news to convey. Cspan and this is 1915. Guest 1915. Cspan may 6, 1915 . Guest may 6 is the night when this scene takes place. May 6, 1915. Cspan whats going on in the world . Guest well, whats going on in the world obviously is war. America is not in the war. The war broke out in august of 1914, and very quickly, the war has proven to the world that it is going to be a very different sort of war than anything that came before, and it has already begun to involve civilians. The german army executed civilians in belgium. There were air raids over air raids, believe it or not, in zeppelins over britain and shellings of coastal towns by the german navy. So things were darkening and changing. Poison gas had been used for the first time on a lethal poison gas had been used for the first time on the, on the battlefield. In washington, we had a grieving president wilson, very, very much a lonely, grieving man. He had lost his wife of many years in august 1914 at about the same time the war broke out in europe. And he was deeply, throughout the rest of 1914, been deeply, deeply troubled, but by now, by may, hes in love. Hes head over heels in love with a woman named Edith Bolling galt, a 40something widow in washington, d. C. Its not clear yet whether she is going to fall in love with him back, but he loves her. He is writing passionate love letters to her by the dozens at this point. Thats pretty much the context, war and passion. Cspan you really start out by saying this i first started reading about the lusitania on a whim. What was the whim . Guest you know, when i come when it comes time for me to look for my next idea, its always a difficult time. Difficult, sufficiently difficult, in fact, that my great friend and publicist, penny simon, coined a term to describe it. She says thats when im in the dark country of no ideas. And i was in the dark country of no ideas, and when im in that country, i always try to just read. You know, if something occurs to me, and say, well that sounds interesting, ill start looking into it. And the lusitania had always been kind of been on my, on my back burner, but id always been reluctant to even think about doing a book about it, because it seems to me almost like, it seemed at the time, and this goes back about five years ago, kind of too obvious a story, too much lowhanging fruit, and usually i like to have an idea thats complex enough that i can be fairly assured that theres not going to be competition from another writer. I like to have barriers to entry. But the lusitania was always there in my mind. I have a thing about maritime history. I think we all have this kind of romantic maybe, maybe sort of, i dont know what you call it, kind of jungian archetypal need for maritime romance, i dont know. So thats something that ive felt, and here was the lusitania. Titanic obviously had been done to death, not something im going to do. So i was intrigued. I didnt know anything about the lusitania. I started reading because i had nothing else in my plate. And as soon as i start reading, i thought, now this is interesting, you know, the hows of what happened, the actual the actual sinking of the ship. For example one of 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. And this just opened my eyes to the fact that this is what the story is. This is about this human disaster. Its not the geopolitical, desiccated sort of thing that we learned about in high school. You know, like, i dont know about you, but when i was in high school, i learned about the lusitania; it was sort on a timeline leading up to world war i, something that you knew occurred and then you forgot about it. You went on to the start of the war and so forth. So i started reading about it. I still was discouraged, though, by the fact that it seemed like it was too obvious, and then and also because there had been a lot done before, but i realized five years ago that the anniversary was coming, the 100th year anniversary, which of course is going to be in may, on may 7, 2015. As a rule, i am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I dont think readers care. I also feel that it just about guarantees that somebody else will be writing a book on the same subject, but being a former journalist, im always interested in like why write about something today . Why do it now . It was just enough to tip the scale in favor of maybe doing a little bit more exploration. I was living full time at the time in seattle and decided i was going to take a quick, quick hop down to stanford to the hoover institution, which i knew had a, had an archive, a collection on of lusitania materials, and 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 sort of quantity for any of my previous books. Things that i knew could be could be elements for storytelling. The 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. And on this plank was branded cthe 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 that made its way to the hoover institution, and here it was on this table next to me. I always look for that sort of sign. I dont mind that in a hocus pocus way. I dont mean that in a sort of a, you know, spooky afterlife way. What i mean is, theres something about having a tactile connection to the past that is very powerful for me. And i took it as a kind of a sign to say, yes, lets keep this lets keep this going. Lets continue looking into this. And then one thing led to another, and suddenly i was embarked on this journey. And 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 create to essentially put on my Alfred Hitchcock hat and make this as suspenseful a work of nonfiction as i could possibly do. Thats why i did this book. It was an exercise in suspense. Cspan heres some video that you shot. Were going to do about two minutes of this, and first off when we run it, just stay quiet for a minute and get the feeling of it. video plays when did you do this . Guest i was on with my wife, i was aboard the queen mary 2 on a january crossing this past 2015, and i was on this voyage, well this is my second voyage on the queen mary 2. The first one i took because i wanted to get a sense of what it was like to actually cross the ocean on a ship, something i felt that i really needed to come to understand. This was shot on the second one. Both voyages ended up the first one, for a time, in a force 10 gale, three days. And this one, it was six out of seven days we were in force 10 gale on this ship. And i was shooting this through a lower deck through a window, because it was just such stunning such stunning ferocity in the sea. It was just really amazing. The ship, i must say, was very stable. That ship, they worked it out with the queen mary 2. Cspan we can see that, if you look at the horizon, it doesnt move much. Guest yes, it doesnt move much. Theyve got the stabilizers out, you know, this is a this is a stable platform. Cspan same company. Guest same company, cunard. Cspan but not owned by the british anymore . Guest different ownership now, yes, yes. And in fact, also the archival records of the old Cunard Steamship company had been essentially severed from the company, and it was not a cspan what did you learn by being out there . Guest so much. I will tell you, you know, its i always say, always go to the scene of the crime, you know, if you will. And being on a ship in the middle of the ocean, you can think about it and think you understand before you actually sail, but theres nothing like actually being out there and realizing, even today, if something catastrophic happened to that ship, not much everybody can do for you. Hours and hours before anybody can come to help you. I realized other things, for example, when youre in the middle of the ocean, you cant you cant smell the ocean. You know, were all accustomed to going to the beach and having beachy smells and so forth. But you cant smell it because theres nothing generating odor. Its, its sort of an empty empty scent. Its kind of the air is perhaps moist and full of, you know, at times, spray, but you dont smell the things that we associate with the sea, like, like where the sea forms a boundary with the land. You dont smell that at this in the middle of the ocean, which i found fascinating. The other thing that was really striking, and this is relevant 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 in your your emergency station. And you have to put on your life jacket, fit it, 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 youre in the middle of the ocean and theres a problem. And the reason thats relevant is because, you know, in the case of lusitania, there was no such requirement, and that actually had a catastrophic result for many passengers. Cspan the cruise was for how many days . Where it did leave from . Where it was heading . Guest this would this a cspan the lusitania. Guest it was, first of all, we have to be very careful about our terminology. Cunard is very sensitive about this even today. It was a voyage. Point to point, it was a voyage. So, it was setting out from new york harbor, again, on may 1. It was bound for liverpool, which is sort of an inland port. It was the home port of all the cunard ships. And ordinarily, with the with the lusitania, it was to be a it would had been a fiveday crossing, very fast ship. Five days was a remarkable achievement in that time, but there was one unfortunate what proved to be an unfortunate aspect of this voyage, which was that cunard, in a cost saving measure, had shut down the fourth boiler room on a ship, the fourth of four boiler rooms. Cspan like those four stacks that we see. Guest each stack, each funnel, which by the way were about 24 feet across at the top. Each funnel, the smoke coming from that came from the boiler room below. So only three of the boiler rooms are functioning, which essentially extended the trip to about about seven days. They extended the trip, and that became very, very relevant for what eventually occurred. Cspan one of the things that comes through in your book is the issue of coal and the impact that coal had on this whole trip. Guest right, right. Yes, so the ship, its its one of the things i found very striking. From outwardly outwardly, the ship is, its just this beautiful thing. You know, its just clean lines, huge, glamorous, the whole deal. Inside, amazingly laborintensive with vast amounts of coal stored in the ship along, along what were referred to as longitudinal coal larders on both sides of the ship and also at front and rear. And the reason these were significant, they held, by the way 6,000 tons of coal for this, for this voyage. The reason these longitudinal bunkers were important is because they were an artifact of the original deal with the British Government that allowed this ship to be built. The government specified wanted certain requirements. The ship had to be fast, had to be able to do 25 knots, actually 243 4 knots. And the government specified that it also had to sort of essentially be built to a battleship specifications. The idea of these longitudinal bunkers being that coal was thought to be the equivalent of armor in a in a ship. And the reason for that is that the British Government wanted the ship to be configured in such a way that if the royal navy needed to, it could commandeer this ship and turn it into what was referred to as an Armed Auxiliary cruiser, that is, to mount guns on the ship. In this case the plan was, i believe, for 12 6inch guns, which is a significant amount of armament. So the ship was essentially a glamorous ocean liner, but with the hull configuration and coal storage configuration of a of a battleship. The thing consumed about a thousand tons of coal a day in the course of the voyage. Tremendously laborintensive, just shoveling and trimming and shoveling and trimming, you know, 360 firemen, you know, at a time, dealing with this thing. Its an amazing effort. Cspan how do you correctly pronounce the name of the uboat captain . Guest first of all, the german is kapita nleutnant, you know, captain lieutenant walther schwieger. Schwieger. Cspan heres a picture of him. Tell us about him and his role in this whole thing. Guest you know, initially, going into the into the project, i thought ok, fine. We have villainhero. Captain William Thomas turner, hero; villain, schwieger. As i started doing research into him and into the submarine and so forth, i found that i was growing increasingly sympathetic to him. Hes a young guy, 30, handsome, wellliked by his crew, humane. At one point, he had six dachshunds 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, he wouldnt hurt a fly. He wouldnt hurt a fly. And this patrol that he set out on, and i have to emphasize, he was not at any point stalking the lusitania per se. He was not after the lusitania. Thats a common misperception. He was simply assigned to hunt troop transports in a certain location, but this voyage that he set out on just this patrol, in his case, proved to be filled with mishap, with frustration, with bad weather, and you ive actually heard from readers already that they find themselves rooting for captain schwieger in the saga, which is very interesting. I didnt necessarily intend that, but you know, i believe very firmly i dont believe in heroes. There are no unalloyed heroes, every hero has warts, and every villain has, you know, potentially good qualities. Except adolf hitler, i make an exclusion for him. So it proved very interesting, looking into him. Cspan in his career, how many ships did he blow up . Guest 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, one of the few captains of uboats who had actually been in the service before the war began. So he was already very, very experienced. He was clearly adept; he was an ace, and you know, one of the most valued members of the service. Cspan lets take a look at captain turner and tell us about him. Guest captain William Thomas turner. You know, hes the kind of guy that if you boarded the lusitania on the morning of may 1, you know, and you had any anxiety, you would look at captain turner and you would most likely feel that anxiety start to slip away. Hes the kind of guy you would want as a captain. He looked he looked fit. He was built strong. He looked like a man of substance. He was a captain who had come up from the sailing ranks. Hed been a cabin boy at the ridiculous age of 8. He had come up through the ranks on sailing ships, had worked his way up through cunard to become one of their absolute top, top captains. And this was at this point his third stint as captain of the lusitania. They rotated captains as they do, as cunard does in fact today. Cspan roughly how many people were on board . Guest well the ship, another kind of interesting thing, given the, given the anxiety that surrounded the period, had a full full passenger load. A the ship had about 2,000 people aboard. That includes passengers and crew, so and actually a Record Number of children, interestingly. Cspan going back to the submarine, how many did they roughly have on a submarine . Guest thirtysix. Thirtysix people, yes. Cspan one of the things that popped out, i mean, as i was reading a guest and six dogs. Well, the dogs were not aboard at this point. Cspan one of the things that popped out at me that you said that in those days there was no sonar . Guest right, right. Cspan so these subs, or this uboat, could sit on the bottom of the ocean, and no one would know they were there . Guest absolutely, yes. Cspan what role did that play in this whole thing . Guest well, another thing to throw into the mix first is the fact that also, not only was there no sonar, which of course is the classic trope for all of us who have seen, you know, World War Ii Submarine films with ping, ping, you know, that whole thing. There are also no depth charges, not yet at least. 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 pressure would destroy the hull. This was significant because, strangely enough, world war i submarine was not terribly good at staying underwater. I mean it could go under water obviously. And it was very very much a Lethal Weapon when it was, but it couldnt stay underwater for very long, and it couldnt travel very fast. Its maximum speed underwater was 9 knots. One way to avoid surface attack from destroyers and so forth would have been to sit on the bottom, on the sandy bottom in the north sea on the other side of the british isles. In the deep atlantic, that was not an option. There, a submarine had to keep moving, and if it was being dogged by destroyers the whole time, as happened to schwieger on this patrol. It was being dogged by destroyers that a cspan by british destroyers. Guest by british destroyers. It didnt have the option of just stopping and nesting on the bottom and waiting until everything passed. It had to keep moving. The problem is, that limited range, and when it reached at the end of that range, it would have to either, either surface and rech