It is the details that animate this book - how, for example, the men aboard the U-20 breakfasted on bread with marmalade or how the women aboard the Lusitania had a separate section in the first-class reading and writing room (the curtains were silk, the carpets a rose hue) or how, to save fuel due to wartime privations, the Lusitania used only three of its four boiler rooms, adding a fateful day to its voyage.Īlong the way we learn how a submarine descends, how the buoyancy of seawater changes with temperature and salinity, and how a sub crew adjusts the air/water ratio in the dive tanks. “A feeling grew upon me that something was going to happen to the Lusitania,’’ he said later. The only two who withdrew from the voyage were Bostonians, a shoe dealer named Edward Bowen and his wife. Most of the passengers ignored those warnings - or didn’t see them.
But there was nothing jolly about the German warnings that appeared in the newspapers as the Lusitania prepared for its transatlantic voyage.
0 kommentar(er)
