What is Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania about?

Dead Wake tells the story of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat torpedoed the British ocean liner off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard, including 128 Americans. The event accelerated American public opinion toward entering the war and is one of the central incidents of World War I's escalation. Erik Larson tells it through three interweaving narratives: the passengers and crew aboard the Lusitania, the U-20 submarine and its commander Walter Schwieger, and Room 40, the British naval intelligence unit that had broken the German naval code and knew where the U-20 was operating.

That third thread — Room 40 — is where Larson's account becomes most unsettling. British naval intelligence possessed information that could have protected the Lusitania by routing it away from the submarine or dispatching a destroyer escort. Neither happened. Larson documents the bureaucratic failures, the turf battles between naval intelligence and operational command, and the possibility — which he addresses carefully — that Churchill or others in the Admiralty may have found a sinking useful for bringing America into the war. He does not accuse Churchill of deliberate conspiracy, but he makes the case that the inaction was remarkable and deserves scrutiny.

The passenger narrative centers on figures including Alfred Vanderbilt, a multi-millionaire who gave his life jacket to a young mother, and Charles Lauriat, a Boston bookseller who helped rescue survivors. Larson follows them from their embarkation in New York through the crossing — the ship's social life, the persistent anxiety about submarines, the contested decision of the captain and Cunard line to maintain speed and course — to the attack and its aftermath. The German submarine narrative follows Schwieger, whose matter-of-fact log entries contrast starkly with the accounts of survivors.

The sinking itself takes a small portion of the book; the dying took only eighteen minutes. Larson's account of those minutes, drawn from survivor testimony, is harrowing and precise. The structural problem with the Lusitania — its insufficient lifeboat provision, the difficulty of launching lifeboats on a listing ship — turned what might have been a survivable sinking into a catastrophe. Dead Wake is less interested in assigning blame than in reconstructing how a tragedy becomes inevitable through the accumulation of individually defensible decisions. It is among Larson's most accomplished books.