RMS Laconia

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 Voyage

She departed Boston on 17 February 1917 on her regular Liverpool passage carrying 289 passengers and crew. Among the 75 American citizens aboard were Mary E. Hoy of Chicago, 65 years old, and her daughter Elizabeth, 52, who were returning to Europe after a family visit. The American women's presence aboard was unremarkable; dozens of American women travelled on Cunard ships each week in early 1917 despite the state of German-American diplomatic relations.

The broader political context of the voyage was critical. President Woodrow Wilson had, on 3 February 1917, broken diplomatic relations with Imperial Germany in response to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare; he had not yet taken the next step of asking Congress for a declaration of war. The Zimmermann Telegram (the German foreign minister's proposal to Mexico for an anti-American alliance) had been decoded by British intelligence and passed to the Wilson administration on 24 February 1917 but had not yet been publicly released. Wilson was, in the final week of February 1917, balanced between maintaining American neutrality and declaring war on Germany.

Laconia was sighted by the German submarine U-50, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Gerhard Berger, at 21:00 on 25 February 1917 approximately 160 nautical miles west-northwest of the Fastnet Rock. Berger closed to attack position and fired a single torpedo at Laconia's port quarter at 22:30.

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 dedicated a full column on its 1 March front page to the Hoys' funeral arrangements. The Laconia sinking was, within five days of its occurrence, the single event most widely cited in American public opinion as the reason for intervention in the European war.

The Legacy

President Wilson's address to Congress requesting a declaration of war, delivered on 2 April 1917, did not specifically name the Laconia but identified the pattern of unrestricted submarine warfare against American civilians as the central justification for the war request. Congress declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917. The continuity between the Lusitania of 1915, the Zimmermann Telegram of February 1917, and the Laconia of February 1917 was the decisive sequence that produced American entry into the First World War.

The specific political weight of the Laconia is less well remembered than that of the Lusitania in modern historiography, but was comparable in its own moment. The Hoy deaths became, for the early months of American belligerency, the specific emblems of why the United States was fighting. Mary and Elizabeth Hoy were memorialised in newspapers across the American Midwest and in a granite obelisk at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago that was paid for by public subscription and unveiled in September 1917.

The wreck of the Laconia lies at approximately 3,300 metres in the Western Approaches, at approximately 51°50′N 10°10′W. She has never been located by deep-ocean survey, and given the depth and the insignificant modern historical interest in her individual location, probably never will be. U-50 herself was lost with all hands on 31 August 1917 in a suspected minefield in the North Sea; her exact fate has never been confirmed.

The Laconia Agreement of 1942 and the second, larger Laconia sinking of 12 September 1942 (the sinking of the ex-RMS Laconia-class troop transport that led to the Laconia Order prohibiting U-boats from rescuing survivors) are commonly confused in the modern historical literature with the 1917 event. The 1917 Laconia was the original of the two names: she was the ship whose sinking brought the United States to war with Germany, and whose two American dead were the first American women killed by German submarine action in the Great War.