Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Dead Wake by Erik Larson, 430 pages

With Dead Wake, Erik Larson, one of America’s preeminent historians, recounts a century old tale of drama, tension and political maneuvering and brings it back to life in vivid detail.

The book is every bit the page-turner as his previous Devil In The White City and In The Garden Of Beasts. Dead Wake chronicles the sinking of the Lusitania in the North Atlantic in 1915 by a German U-Boat and how that act (which killed 1,198 passengers) brought the United States Squarely into World War I.

But as Larson shows us, there is much more going on than most of us were led to believe. Told with his usual gripping narrative and crisp pacing, Larson goes beneath the waves to show how this tragedy shook a nation, fracturing American dreams of neutrality. He also delves into how and why the sinking happened and how it may have been prevented. 

 By 1915 standards the Lusitania was a transatlantic juggernaut. It was fast, luxurious and according to the Germans, loaded with munitions.  Its Captain was old school, thinking that although the Germans were torpedoing ships in the high seas that a passenger ship would be off limits. He could not have been more wrong.

Larson also explores the long controversial issue of what extracurricular cargo the ship may have been carrying with great detail. He skillfully covers all the bases of the major players, creating a robust account of complicated tragedy.

Larson’s a cast of intriguing characters includes the architect Thoedote Pope, German U Boat captain, Walther Schwieger and President Woodrow Wilson who was now given an accelerated path to war by the incident.

But perhaps the best thing about this book is that it once and for sets the record straight about the sinking of the Lusitania and the subsequent American entry into the Great War. There is no happy ending to dreadful tale. But what there is however is a compelling and detailed account of a forgotten, and important moment in history.