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f7d8a99
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A boutonniere rested beside each plate. Everyone wore tuxedos. There was not a woman in sight.
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Erik Larson |
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39760c2
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His letter to Rice began, "I have on hand a great project for the World's Fair in Chicago. I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250' in dia." Nowhere in this letter, however, did he reveal the true dimension of his vision:"
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Erik Larson |
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aa0a9a7
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The Chancellor's assurances were so satisfying and so unexpected that I think they are on the whole too good to be true," Messersmith wrote. "We must keep in mind, I believe, that when Hitler says anything he for the moment convinces himself that it is true. He is basically sincere; but he is at the same time a fanatic." Messersmith urged skepticism regarding Hitler's protestations. "I think for the moment he genuinely desires peace but it ..
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Erik Larson |
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c3ad2dc
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Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne,
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Erik Larson |
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2e6b28f
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Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated skeleton. Chappell agreed. Holmes and Chappell placed the body in a trunk lined with duckcloth. An express company delivered it to Chappell's house.
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Erik Larson |
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1575e71
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The Lusitania remained a passenger liner, but with the hull of a battleship.
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Erik Larson |
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8a28bfe
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Turner, that day, was master of one of the great greyhounds of the North Atlantic--and looked the part.
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Erik Larson |
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0952b25
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Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: "Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem."
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Erik Larson |
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d255b59
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Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?
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Erik Larson |
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2c2a654
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All the ship had to do was make another turn, away from U-20, and the chase would be over.
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Erik Larson |
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173f284
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Where in May 1915 the navy had only thirty U-boats, by 1917 it had more than one hundred, many larger and more powerful than Schwieger's U-20 and carrying more torpedoes.
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Erik Larson |
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281230b
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Of the 791 passengers designated by Cunard as missing, only 173 bodies, or about 22 percent, were eventually recovered, leaving 618 souls unaccounted for. The percentage for the crew was even more dismal, owing no doubt to the many deaths in the luggage room when the torpedo exploded.
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Erik Larson |
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f8ed177
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A German admiral, Henning von Holtzendorff, came up with a plan so irresistible it succeeded in bringing agreement between supporters and opponents of unrestricted warfare. By turning Germany's U-boats loose, and allowing their captains to sink every vessel that entered the "war zone," Holtzendorff proposed to end the war in six months. Not five, not seven, but six. He calculated that for the plan to succeed, it had to begin on February 1, ..
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Erik Larson |
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623d7f6
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German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In
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Erik Larson |
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9d9768f
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If someone asks me why we did not use the regular courts I would reply: at the moment I was responsible for the German nation; consequently
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Erik Larson |
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3cbcfaa
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WHY THE ADMIRALTY would seek to assign fault to Turner defies ready explanation, given that isolating Germany as the sole offender would do far more to engender global sympathy for Britain and cement animosity toward Germany. By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather cool..
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Erik Larson |
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42e9dba
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In a conversation with a British embassy official that occurred at about this time, quoted in a memorandum later filed with the foreign office in London, Diels delivered a monologue on his own moral unease: "The infliction of physical punishment is not every man's job, and naturally we were only too glad to recruit men who were prepared to show no squeamishness at their task. Unfortunately, we knew nothing about the Freudian side of the bus..
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Erik Larson |
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803c3f6
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The fair awakened America to beauty and as such was a necessary passage that laid the foundation for men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph. It allowed him to fulfill his pledge to his parents to become the greatest architect in America, for certainly in his day he had become so. During the fair an event occurred whose significance to Burnham was missed by al..
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Erik Larson |
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3ab85b1
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There were so many items on the menu that Cunard felt obliged to print a separate sheet with suggested combinations, lest one starve from befuddlement.
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Erik Larson |
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c83b5c9
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OF THE LUSITANIA'S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195. The 3 German stowaways brought the total to 1,198. Of 33 infants aboard, only 6 survived. Over 600 passengers were never found. Among the dead were 123 Americans.
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Erik Larson |
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e2664bb
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THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city's willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world's fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. ..
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Erik Larson |
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14369eb
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Five months after the disaster, Charles Lauriat wrote a book about his experience, entitled The Lusitania's Last Voyage
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Erik Larson |
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3332ba5
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She eventually adopted the "gold collar" and married a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Wallace Riddle. She achieved her goal of creating a progressive boys' school as a memorial to her late father. She built it in Avon, Connecticut, and called it Avon Old Farms School, which exists today."
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Erik Larson |
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7677182
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A gyroscope kept the torpedo on course, adjusting for vertical and horizontal deflection. The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a "dead wake."
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Erik Larson |
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e2fb547
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Gleichschaltung.
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Erik Larson |
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ea5d2cb
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found the State Historical Society of Wisconsin to be a trove of relevant materials that conveyed a sense of the woof and weave of life in Hitler's Berlin. There, in one locale, I found the papers of Sigrid Schultz, Hans V. Kaltenborn, and Louis Lochner. A short and lovely walk away, in the library of the University of Wisconsin, I found as well a supply of materials on the only UW alumna to be guillotined at Hitler's command, Mildred Fish ..
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Erik Larson |
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ae94761
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These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need, the moment captured in an immediately famous painting by Bernard Gribble, The Return of the Mayflower.
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Erik Larson |
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7fa37bb
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locked forever in the embrace of history. Wilson signed the resolution at 1:18 P.M. on April 6, 1917. To Winston Churchill, it was long overdue. In his memoir-like history The World Crisis, 1916-1918, he said of Wilson, "What he did in April, 1917, could have been done in May, 1915."
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Erik Larson |
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7ca8df5
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Ferris had nearly gotten it right. In that single day 713,646 people had paid to enter Jackson Park. (Only 31,059--four percent--were children.) Another 37,380 visitors had entered using passes, bringing the total admission for the day to 751,026, more people than had attended any single day of any peaceable event in history. The Tribune argued that the only greater gathering was the massing of Xerxes' army of over five million souls in the..
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Erik Larson |
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db883fe
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THE FAIR HAD A POWERFUL and lasting impact on the nation's psyche, in ways both large and small. Walt Disney's father, Elias, helped build the White City; Walt's Magic Kingdom may well be a descendant. Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family's third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus. His wife, Flora, intervened; the baby bec..
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Erik Larson |
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5ac0560
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William Stead recognized the power of the fair immediately. The vision of the White City and its profound contrast to the Black City drove him to write If Christ Came to Chicago, a book often credited with launching the City Beautiful movement, which sought to elevate American cities to the level of the great cities of Europe. Like Stead, civic authorities throughout the world saw the fair as a model of what to strive for. They asked Burnha..
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Erik Larson |
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612ca66
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She lapsed into "melancholia," a sweet name for depression."
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Erik Larson |
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c084af0
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In the end, Dodd proved to be exactly what Roosevelt had wanted, a lone beacon of American freedom and hope in a land of gathering darkness.
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Erik Larson |
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b3dba45
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Only holders of a cipher "key" could divine the underlying text, but possessing the codebooks made the whole process of solving the messages far simpler. To exploit these treasures the Admiralty established Room 40."
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Erik Larson |
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9c195fe
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From the start, Churchill and Fisher resolved to keep the operation so secret that only they and a few other Admiralty officials would ever know it existed.
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Erik Larson |
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5d08f22
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paper, at least, it reported to Adm. Henry Francis Oliver, the Admiralty's chief of staff, a man so tight-lipped and reticent he could seem almost mute, and this--given the British navy's predilection for nicknames--ensured that he would be known forever after as "Dummy" Oliver."
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Erik Larson |
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f8e68df
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Within Room 40 itself, however, management of day-to-day operations fell largely, if informally, to Cdr. Herbert Hope, recruited in November 1914 to bring naval expertise to the interpretation of intercepted messages. His savvy was badly needed, for the group's staff were not navy officers but civilians recruited for their skill at mathematics and German and whatever else it was that made a man good at breaking codes and ciphers. The roster..
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Erik Larson |
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eb6628b
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Captain Hall had no direct control over Room 40--as of early 1915 his intelligence division and Room 40 were separate entities--but his name more than any other would come to be associated with its achievements.
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Erik Larson |
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969a3d6
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Under Stalin, peasants had been forced into vast collectives. Many resisted, and an estimated five million people--men, women, and children--simply disappeared, many shipped off to far-flung work camps.
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Erik Larson |
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a75e78a
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Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain's strategy had undergone a change.
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Erik Larson |
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ecbdf2c
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If the British navy acted in response to every foretold movement of the German fleet, it risked revealing to Germany that its codes had been broken. In a secret internal memorandum, Admiral Oliver wrote that "the risk of compromising the codes ought only to be taken when the result would be worth it." But what did "worth it" mean? Some of the men within Room 40 contended that much useful information was stockpiled and never used because the..
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Erik Larson |
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58f7c4f
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He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.
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Erik Larson |
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7ae04a6
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Had we been called upon by the Staff to do so," Hope wrote, referring to Oliver, "we could have furnished valuable information as to movements of submarines, minefields, minesweeping etc. But the Staff was obsessed with the idea of secrecy; they realized that they held a trump card and they worked on the principle that every effort must be made to keep our knowledge to ourselves, so as to be able to keep it up our sleeves for a really great..
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Erik Larson |
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3214602
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Room 40 had long followed Kptlt. Walther Schwieger's U-20 and kept a running record of his patrols: when he left, which route he took, where he was headed, and what he was supposed to do once he got there. In early March 1915, Commander Hope monitored a voyage Schwieger made to the Irish Sea that coincided with a disturbing message broadcast from a German naval transmitter located at Norddeich, on Germany's North Sea coast just below Hollan..
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Erik Larson |