RMS Laconia

1917

Fastnet torpedo, the American women Location: Atlantic Ocean, off the Fastnet Rock, Ireland · Coordinates: 51.37°N 9.55°W · Casualties: 12 · Survivors: ~280 · Depth: 3,300 m · Cause: submarine torpedo — Torpedoed by the German submarine SM U-50 (Gerhard Berger, commanding) at 22:30 on 25 February 1917, 160 nautical miles west-northwest of the Fastnet Rock off southern Ireland. Struck by a single torpedo to the engine room; sank two and a half hours later after a second torpedo. · Fate: abyssal · not located · Type: passenger liner · Cunard Line · Tonnage: 18,099 tons · Crew: 217 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1911 Cunard passenger liner, Boston to Liverpool. Torpedoed by SM U-50 off the Fastnet Rock at 22:30 on 25 February 1917, five weeks before the United States entered the Great War. Twelve dead, including two American women lost in the sea that night, Mary E. Hoy and her daughter Elizabeth of Chicago. The specific circumstances of their deaths, reported in the American press with calculated detail, were among the events that pushed the Wilson administration into the war six weeks later. The Vessel The RMS Laconia was a Cunard Line transatlantic liner, 189 metres long, 18,099 tons, built at Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the Tyne in 1911. She was the first of the first-generation Laconia-class: a medium-sized liner intended for the Boston-Liverpool and New York-Liverpool intermediate trades rather than for the Blue Riband express service. Her service speed of 17 knots was deliberately modest; her hold volume was unusually generous for a passenger ship of her dimensions, reflecting Cunard's assessment that the profitable segment of the Atlantic trade in the 1910s was the intermediate-speed liner carrying both passengers and cargo. She made her maiden voyage in January 1912 and operated on the Liverpool-New York route through 1914. At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 she was taken into Royal Navy service as the armed merchant cruiser HMS Laconia; she served in the blockade of the Cape Verde Islands and in the reconstitution of the Royal Navy's East African squadron between 1914 and 1916. She was returned to Cunard service on the New York-Liverpool route in September 1916 after the Admiralty's review of AMC cost-effectiveness. Her return to passenger service in late 1916 placed her in the primary target zone of the resumed German unrestricted submarine warfare campaign that began on 1 February 1917. She sailed Boston-Liverpool with full passenger and cargo loads through January and February 1917 under the standing Admiralty zigzag orders. The Disaster The torpedo struck Laconia below the waterline in her aft engineering spaces. The engine room flooded immediately; her main engines stopped. Captain W. R. D. Irvine ordered the ship's company to abandon ship. The lifeboats were successfully launched in the relatively calm weather; the evacuation proceeded in a substantially more orderly manner than had been typical of earlier 1917 submarine victims. Berger surfaced U-50 at approximately 23:15 to confirm his kill and, contrary to the routine German practice of the period, offered no assistance to the survivors in the lifeboats. U-50 then fired a second torpedo at 23:25. Laconia rolled onto her port side and sank at 23:30 on 25 February 1917. Twelve people died. The relatively low death toll was the result of the orderly evacuation, the fair weather, and the proximity of the USS Mary F. Scott, a British patrol trawler that reached the scene at 02:00 on 26 February and recovered most of the survivors. Two of the twelve dead, however, were Mary E. Hoy and Elizabeth Hoy, the American women from Chicago; Elizabeth had died in the lifeboat of exposure and Mary had died of a heart attack during the evacuation. The American press coverage of the Hoy deaths was calibrated, amplified, and political. The Hearst and Pulitzer papers, which had been advocating American entry into the war since 1916, carried detailed accounts of the two American women's deaths on the front pages of their 28 February 1917 editions. The New York Times dedicate