Sinking of the Laconia

Late on the evening of Sunday 25 February 1917 the German submarine U-50 of Kapitänleutnant Gerhard Berger torpedoed the British liner Laconia without warning. The Cunard Line ship, of more than 18,000 GRT, was sailing from New York to Liverpool with general cargo, about 75 passengers and more than 200 crew. She was hit in the Atlantic, according to the American consul in Queenstown about 150 nautical miles west of the Fastnet rock off the south coast of Ireland, and according to the uboat.net website about 160 miles west-north-west of it. According to the same website she was one of the largest ships sunk by submarines in this war, and at the same time the most notorious victim of the first month of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Laconia, built in 1911 for the Liverpool–Boston service, had served for the first two years of the war as an auxiliary cruiser, among other places off the coast of East Africa, where she supported the operation against the cruiser Königsberg. She returned to Cunard in the summer of 1916.

Two torpedoes

The first torpedo struck the starboard side at about 10.30 p.m., in the after part of the ship. The Laconia stayed afloat, and the crew lowered the lifeboats without panic. Passengers and seamen had practised this several times during the voyage. About twenty minutes later a second torpedo hit the engine room and the ship sank. The surfaced submarine came up to one of the lifeboats. Someone in the conning tower asked in broken English for the ship’s name, her tonnage, passengers and cargo, then called out that a patrol would soon pick them up, and moved off. The survivors spent several hours in the boats on a cold night before British patrol vessels, including the sloop Laburnum, took them on board in the morning. Most were landed at Queenstown (today Cobh), a dozen or so at Bantry.

According to Cunard twelve people were killed or missing: six passengers and six members of the crew. The American consul Wesley Frost counted thirteen missing in his first report. There were six American passengers on board and fourteen Americans in the crew. The deaths that attracted most attention were those of two American women from Chicago, Mary Hoy and her daughter Elizabeth. Their lifeboat was damaged during lowering and was swamped by the waves all night. Both women died of exposure and exhaustion before help arrived.

Gibbons’s report

Among the survivors was the Chicago Tribune correspondent Floyd Gibbons, who was travelling to London to take up his post. Half an hour after landing at Queenstown, on 26 February, he wrote a report that was reprinted by newspapers throughout the United States. In it he described the conversations in the smoking room just before the explosion, the dark deck lit up at the last moment, the boats on the heaving sea, the signal rockets and the death of Mrs Hoy and her daughter, which a seaman from their boat had told him about. He ended with the sentence that the Americans in Queenstown heard one question on every side: “Is it a casus belli?” According to Gibbons’s biography, his account was read out in both houses of Congress.

“Overt act”

News of the torpedoing reached Washington on 26 February, as President Woodrow Wilson was asking Congress for authority to arm American merchant ships. When he broke off relations with Germany on 3 February, Wilson had announced that he would take further steps only if Germany committed an “overt act” of hostility against Americans. In his speech of 26 February he said that no such act had yet occurred. The next day dispatches from Ireland confirmed the deaths of the American women. The newspapers wrote that in Washington the sinking of the Laconia was regarded as an “overt act” and essentially a repetition of the Lusitania affair, and that the news would hasten Congress’s decision on arming ships.

A British chronology of the war states that on 27 February Wilson declared that he regarded the sinking of the Laconia as the “overt act” he had been waiting for. No such public statement by the president could be found. Contemporary reports rather say that Wilson and the State Department did not wish to take any new steps until Congress had considered the request to arm ships. The Laconia was a British ship, not an American one, and historians point out that in legal terms her sinking was not an act of war against the United States. Even so, the affair stirred American public opinion more than the February sinkings of American ships, in which no one had been killed. A few days later the newspapers published the Zimmermann Telegram, and in March German submarines sank several American ships. On 6 April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany.