Book Review: Dead Wake… The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

by philg

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania includes more detail than you would expect to want about a ship that sank 100 years ago (Wikipedia), but Erik Larson makes it work. The magnificent cruise ship sank just after the Germans decided to start sinking merchant ships anywhere near England, a precursor of the total war that would characterize World War II. Larson describes the debate within the German military regarding the morality and wisdom of attacking civilian ships where the loss of civilian lives was inevitable. Larson says that the decision in favor of unlimited war was primarily due to popular support for submarine warfare, which the German public saw as offering a path around the stalemate in the trenches.

The significance of the event in retrospect is unclear. The U.S. did not enter World War I until two years after the sinking. If the U.S. hadn’t entered the war, however, German submarines might in fact have succeeded in crippling England. Larson says that a ship departing England early in 1917 had a roughly 1 in 4 chance of being torpedoed.

The book has a little something for everyone. There is naval architecture, social life about a transatlantic liner, family life, life on board a submarine, and a lot about English code-breaking capabilities (just as in World War II, far ahead of corresponding American efforts).

Recommended if you like history.

One thought on “Book Review: Dead Wake… The Last Crossing of the Lusitania”

  1. I thought this was not up to the standard of Larson’s Devil in the White City. There’s no real suspense in the Lusitania story – everyone knows the ship is going to sink (in order to make Titanic into an interesting movie they had to invent all sorts of fictional characters and romantic plots). The story of the serial killer H. H. Holmes was less familiar (to me at least) plus the juxtaposition of his crimes against the Chicago Exposition of 1893 created an interested dynamic.

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