dead wake the last crossing of the lusitania summary

The Cunard shipping line had exceedingly high standards for passenger satisfaction and could boast an impressive safety record. The British viewed the ship with immense pride, and she was already a seasoned traveler, having made more than 200 successful Atlantic crossings. There was a confidence, too, that the Lusitania was too fast - the fastest ship in the world - and thus did not really have to worry about strikes from U-boats. U-20 was just one of dozens of subs circling Britain in the early months of the war, but established maritime rules prohibited attacks on civilian vessels, and no one could imagine a nation sinking so low as to attack innocents in such a manner-and the Lusitania carried her share of innocent victims, many of whom were children.

Now, 100 years after the Lusitania sank off the southern Irish coast, taking nearly 1,200 souls with her, Larson reveals the cat-and-mouse game that led to the decisive moment when a series of circumstances and unfortunate timing brought the massive passenger ship into the gunner sights of the submarine captained by the ruthless and tenacious German skipper Walther Schwieger. The terror the German submarines unleashed is the subject of Larson’s engrossing new book, “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.”

Germany proved to be a terrifying foe, adapting the engineering skills of its brightest minds to craft new methods and machines of destruction - zeppelins, mustard gas and, the most feared and destructive of all, its U-boats. Nationalism was rampant across the Western world, and tensions were running deeply beneath the surface.īest-selling author Erik Larson called the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand “the geopolitical equivalent of a brushfire, and as with all brushfires, all it takes is for someone to blow on it to make the fire burn hotter.” Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm blew hard, sending his armies into Belgium, thus forcing the military engagement of Britain. The Great War came as a shock to a world suffering from complacency and from a deep sense of isolationism.

World War I, “the war to end all wars,” marked the birth of modern warfare, transforming the battlefield into something unrecognizable.

Dead wake the last crossing of the lusitania summary