Was TITANIC Deliberately Sunk?

TITANIC and OLYMPIC. But which is which?

Late on April 14, 1912, Royal Mail Ship (RMS) TITANIC hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York and sank in less than three hours with over 2,200 passengers and crew aboard. Only 705 survived.

The sinking generated great interest at the time, and still fascinates today. The lessons learned from the disaster are still visible in the maritime industry, in the form of the Safety Of Life At Sea regulations. Like most big disasters – think of the World Trade Centre –TITANIC’s sinking also generated conspiracies theories. Conspiracy Corner holds that conspiracies do occur, and occur all too often, but that by no means all conspiracy theories are true. Many, like Israel being responsible for the World Trade Centre massacre, are plain barmy. We also hold that not all genuine conspiracy theories are equal. Some involve evil plots to change society, people’s behaviour, or the world itself. Others, second degree conspiracies of the middling sort, are more mundane, where the powerful seek to cover up their crimes and misdemeanours.

So, was there a conspiracy involving the TITANIC and if so, what degree of conspiracy was it? Here we analyse the conspiracy theory and set out the facts of what really happened on that fateful night in 1912, a night to remember indeed.

The conspiracy theory (the serious one, not the one involving a curse by an Egyptian mummy) doing the rounds for many years has recently been popularised by Youtube and other internet channels concerns an audacious insurance fraud. The theory is that it was not TITANIC that sank, but instead her sister-ship, RMS OLYMPIC, which had previously been badly damaged in a collision with a Royal Navy ship.

The theory goes like this. On 20 September 1911 OLYMPIC collided with RN cruiser HMS HAWKE off the Isle of Wight, causing severe damage to both ships. It is thought that as they were passing at speed, HAWKE was sucked into OLYMPIC (it can happen - see Bernoulli's principle) but as the two ships collided perpendicular to each other, I would guess that one of the ships also made a turn, probably OLYMPIC. In any event, at the subsequent Inquiry, all the blame was laid on OLYMPIC, captained by one Edward Smith, who we shall meet again later. As a result, OLYMPIC’s insurance underwriters refused to pay out.

Both OLYMPIC and TITANIC were owned by White Star Line (WSL), which in 1902 had been bought out by International Mercantile Marine Co. (IMM), owned by the American banker John Pierpont (JP) Morgan, who hoped to obtain a monopoly of the North Atlantic route by buying several shipping companies. Morgan offered WSL shareholders ten times the value of the profits generated in 1900, a particularly good year for WSL.

IMM however, was struggling to repay its debts to shipyards and its president did not believe that the company could do it. He was replaced by Sir Charles Ismay, a descendant of one of the WSL’s early owners, who took the job after being assured of JP Morgan's full support. Ismay was joined on the Board of Directors by William Pirrie, the director of shipbuilder Harland & Wolff (H&W), who built all WSL’s ships. Both were also on the Board of IMM.

The refusal of the hull and machinery insurers to pay for the repairs to OLYMPIC was a major financial blow. The damage was extensive. The ship’s starboard quarter, the area just forward of the stern end, was badly buckled above and below the waterline and the ship’s starboard propeller was bent and unrepairable. The hull girder is said to have been bent, allegedly making her a constructive total loss, meaning that the cost of repairs was higher than the value of the ship. Temporary repairs were carried out, including the fitting of a transverse bulkhead (wall), but they were just that says the theorist, and unlikely to be acceptable for long.

It is easy to conceive therefore, of ruthless, powerful and money-minded men like “the boss of bosses” JP Morgan, Ismay and Pirrie conspiring to find an innovative way out of their predicament. How about swapping OLYMPIC with the brand-new TITANIC and sinking the damaged OLYMPIC JP Morgan might have asked. TITANIC is claimed to have had a higher insurance value than the damaged ship, making the substitution in an insurance fraud financially tempting.

The ships were berthed close to each other in Belfast, where TITANIC was fitting out. All that was needed, according to the conspiracy theorists, was to change the ship’s names on the bow, stern and lifeboats and Bob’s yer uncle, the two (almost) identical ships have swapped names and OLYMPIC is now TITANIC and TITANIC now OLYMPIC. Easy.

And so off ‘OLYMPIC’ went to Southampton in the guise of TITANIC, to load passengers. It is odd, we are told, that she left with only about half her compliment of passengers, with First Class passengers being turned away, or offered 2^nd Class accommodation. Her Captain was none other Edward Smith, formerly of OLYMPIC and who surely owed the Owners a favour after the damage to that ship. Smith also replaced TITANIC’s Chief Officer with the one from OLYMPIC.

Even odder, theorists say, was that despite coal being hard to get because of a miner’s strike, TITANIC had no problem finding coal and even left with a fire in her stoke hold, where coal was stored. Also, almost all her stokers or firemen, the lads who worked in hellish conditions to shovel coal into her ravenous boilers, walked off the ship at the last moment. They must have heard something, surely?

On top of that, 50 1^st Class passengers cancelled their booking at the last moment, many, we are told, close friends of JP Morgan who himself had also cancelled his passage,and had some priceless works of art removed from the ship.

The behaviour of Steam Ship (SS) Californian, which had left Liverpool on 5 April 1912 also fuel’s the theorist’s fancy. She had the capacity to carry 47 passengers but sailed full of hard-to-get coal and empty of easy to find passengers, with just a cargo of woolly jumpers. CALIFORNIAN was owned by the British Leyland line, coincidentally part of JP Morgan’s IMM.

The behaviour of CALIFORNIAN is inexplicable say the theorists. Stopped for no good reason in the Atlantic close to the area TITANIC was passing through, it is obvious, they say, that CALIFORNIAN was there as part of the fraud, sent to collect TITANIC’s crew and passengers. Why, her Master, Capt. Lord, even went to sleep fully clothed, as did Capt. Smith on TITANIC. Titanic’s distress flares were ignored, they say, because they were the wrong colour. Capt. Lord even sent telegrams addressed directly to Capt. Smith! They must have been in cahoots, right?

Wrong. Yes, there are a few loose ends. There always are. I have investigated many maritime casualties, and it is rare that it is possible to put together a theory of causation that does not have some discrepancies or contradictions, but analysed carefully, this admittedly well-put together conspiracy theory does not hold water.

First of all, the insurance fraud’s arithmetic does not add up. According to Lloyd’s of London’s records both ships were insured for £1 million each and therefore under-insured. They had cost over £1.5 million to build (about £170 million in today’s money), the gap being covered by JP Morgan’s in-house insurance.

After the OLYMPIC’s collision, the total loss of TITANIC would have had a disastrous effect on WSL’s insurance record and the cost of insuring their other ships. Insuring TITANIC, when built the largest man-made movable object in the world, was prestigious and as the press had dubbed her ‘the unsinkable ship’ (blown up from an off-the-cuff remark by her builder that she was ‘virtually unsinkable), WSL had only paid a premium of £7,000 per ship. After the sinking, insuring WSL ships would have been much more expensive.

Obviously, anyone plotting such a fraud would also have to consider lost passenger and mail revenue. Ships like that took almost three years to build. Damage to WSL's reputation on the highly competitive Atlantic crossing would also have been significant. And there is no evidence of the claimed increase in insured value just before she left Southampton. Further and entirely predictably, TITANIC’s sinking led directly to expensive upgrades on OLYMPIC to improve her survivability.

The absence of passengers can be explained by the fact that TITANIC’s sailing had been postponed, partly because her starboard propeller had been used to replaced OLYMPIC’s damaged prop. The miner’s strike and the uncertainty of coal supplies had caused uncertainty. The ship’s maximum passenger capacity was 3,300 and she sailed with 1,324 passengers and 900 crew on board. That was sensible, as this was her maiden voyage, and not loading a full cargo of passengers would give the crew a chance to find their way around the ship and to iron out any last-minute glitches. Nothing more can be read into passenger numbers.

And the firemen/stokers? Second Mate Lightoller described them in his book ‘TITANIC & Other Ships’ in the following words: “a tougher bunch than the firemen on a Western Ocean mail boat it would be impossible to find’. Such men were notorious. They often joined a ship with only the clothes they wore, having spent all their money drinking and whoring. They were feared in every port in the world for picking fights and generally rioting when ashore. And they were the only ones in the 900 crew who knew about the plan to sink their ship?

And merely painting different names on the two ships would have fooled nobody. It was a major operation to move such ships, requiring several tugs each and harbour pilots and no such changing of place occurred. Also, though they were sister ships, they were not quite identical. The most noticeable difference was that the forward half of TITANIC’s promenade deck was enclosed by a steel screen with sliding windows, to provide more shelter, whereas OLYMPIC’s promenade deck remained open along its full length.

And then there is the sheer difficulty of it all. Nobody plotting to sink a ship – a far from easy thing to do - would rely on the slim chance of running into icebergs. Capt Smith set a southerly route to New York specifically to avoid ice. Neither he nor JP Morgan or any of the other alleged plotters could have known that the Arctic had just experienced one of its regular bouts of global warming and had shed much more ice into the ocean than is normal.

The iceberg TITANIC hit had been of enormous proportions when calved, more than two miles wide and one hundred feet tall. It had made its way unusually far south, probably because the Gulf Stream had itself moved south that year. Most icebergs that make their way south of the Grand Banks, where the collision occurred some 375 nautical miles (nm) south by east of Newfoundland, are classed as growlers,ice the size of a grand piano, or bergy bits, the size of a small house. TITANIC’s iceberg was still big, as high as the ship and weighing between half a million and two million tonnes. Nobody could have predicted that TITANIC would run in to such a monster.

Also, in the days before long range aircraft, radar, satellites and satellite navigation it would have been difficult, to say the least, to find a conveniently large berg to hit. Navigation was by sextant, measuring the height of the sun at noon and by plotting the position of the stars at night – if they were visible through the clouds. Navigators were lucky if they got the position right within a few miles, and even when I went to sea in the late 1960s it was common to arrive off the US coast over a hundred miles out of position after a cloud-covered Atlantic crossing.

But what about CALIFORNIAN? Why did she leave with no passengers and then suddenly stop for days? Easy. She was not a passenger ship. She had been built to carry cotton from the US and finished garments back. Carrying passengers was just pocket money, and she would not delay sailing waiting for them when she had a full cargo to deliver and a one to pick up. Ships are obliged to deliver cargoes with all due despatch. And she stopped because she was surrounded by icebergs.

And if there was a plot and CALIFORNIAN (sunk by a German U-boat in 1915) was there to pick up those aboard TITANIC, she was singularly unsuited for the task. CALIFORNIAN had a capacity for 55 crew and 47 passengers – a very tight fit for the more than 2,200 souls aboard TITANIC.

CALIFORNIAN’s Captain, Stanley Lord spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name and was scapegoated by those who bore real responsibility for the tragedy. If it is accepted that the two ships were in sight of each other, and that not certain, eyewitnesses estimated that they were from 8 to 19 nautical miles (nm) apart. Even if it was the lower distance, after starting her engines and making her way cautiously through the ice to then run at her full speed of 13 knots, CALIFORNIAN would have arrived too late to rescue those lost. TITANIC's flares were first seen at 00.45 and Captain Lord was not told till 01.10. It is unlikely therefore that CALIFORNIAN could have arrived much before 02.45 hours. TITANIC sank at 02.20.

Yes, there was human error involved on that clear, cold night at sea. But while those who have spent their lives navigating a desk, in complete safety in an office might not readily understand, the mistakes made by were all too human and perfectly understandable.

Conspiracy theorists maintain that the lookouts had been denied binoculars (they had been mislaid), but even without them they say, an iceberg is visible from five miles away, giving the helmsman ample time to steer the ship to safety. But they have never been to sea or seen icebergs close up. True, the night was clear, and the sea was a flat calm. But this made the berg even harder to see. There was no moon, only starlight, and not all icebergs are brilliant white. Many are blue – and it is usually the waves breaking over their base that makes them visible at night, but on the night of 14^th April there were no waves.

Lookouts first saw the iceberg when it was about 0.25 nm ahead (about 500 yards or 463 m) with TITANIC making about 22 knots (25.3 mph), giving her crew less than 40 seconds to avoid the berg. The Chief Officer ordered the helm hard a starboard (to turn the ship to port) and rang full astern on the engines and then ordered all watertight doors closed. Ironically, although the helm and engine orders were understandable, they might have made the consequences of the collision much worse.

Had TITANIC rammed the iceberg full on, at the bow, the chances are that the inevitably considerable damage would have been restricted to the fully watertight bow compartment, known as the Fore Peak, closed at its aft end by a specially strengthened collision bulkhead. Putting the engines full astern may have had an adverse effect, as doing so with the ship running at 22 knots would cause the propeller to ‘slip’ badly, doing nothing but cause froth until the ship slowed down enough for it to ‘bite’. It would probably have been more effective to ring Dead Slow Ahead, thereby slowing down the water passing through the propeller, so reducing the ship’s speed.

As it was, TITANIC turned to port and grazed the berg lightly down her starboard side. The crew on watch noticed a slight bump, but few of the passengers noticed anything. Nobody on board, including the watch on the bridge, felt in any way alarmed. Yet in two hours and forty minutes TITANIC would slip beneath the Atlantic on her two-mile voyage to the seabed, and 1,511 of her passengers and crew would be dead.

So why did she sink? Why did all those people die a cold, lonely and terrifying death? There was no conspiracy to sink TITANIC (or OLYMPIC). There was no insurance fraud. The crew did their best to save her and her passengers. The band played to keep them calm. No bandsman survived. Everyone knows about that brave band, but few know that the ship’s engineers worked heroically, unseen and unsung, to keep the lights on and pump water out of the ship. Incredibly, the lights stayed on right up to the end, only going off moments before she foundered. Thanks to the self-sacrifice of her engineers many more passengers survived than would have otherwise been the case. But they stayed on, in the engine room, with no chance of escape. All the engineers perished. All thirty-five of them.

The real reason TITANIC sank was a series of misfortunes at sea and poor design and construction on land, most the result of penny-pinching and putting cosmetic appearances above safety and practical design. And this leads us to the real conspiracy – the usual, dismal, disgraceful and disreputable cover up of bureaucratic failures by the establishment, in this case a toxic mix of financial pressures and regulatory failures by the Board of Trade (BOT), the government body responsible for approving the ship’s design and overseeing her construction.

Infamously, TITANIC did not have nearly enough lifeboats to accommodate all her passengers and crew. Yet she had four more than the number required by the BOT. She could have fitted a more than sufficient 68 lifeboats. Her designer had allowed room on deck for two rows of lifeboats but was allegedly told by WSL that ‘people don’t pay to look at lifeboats’ and one row was removed to make the deck more aesthetically pleasing. Anyhow, as everybody knew that TITANIC was virtually unsinkable, they didn’t really need that many boats, did they? After the casualty, sister-ship OLYMPIC was re-fitted with 68 lifeboats.

There have been allegations that there was panic, and that this caused some boats to be lowered into the water half full. This is nonsense. No survivor reported panic, and the half empty lifeboats are explained by the fact that in the best of circumstances lowering a full lifeboat into the water is a hazardous affair. The plan was to lower them part full, and then fill them up from a door in the hull closer to the water line. When that decision was made nobody thought that TITANIC would sink. Tragically, by the time the boats were lowered the ship was too low in the water to open the door. Later lifeboats were lowered full.

Those who dress to the Left, including Hollywood, claim that there was discrimination against lower class passengers. This is untrue. Third class passengers were accommodated on the very lowest decks, below the waterline and far from the boat deck. First class passengers were higher up, near the boats so more of them made it to the lifeboats.

But we still must explain why TITANIC sank so quickly. She was designed to stay afloat with up to four of her sixteen main compartments flooded. Five were opened to the sea after she hit her iceberg. Incredibly, her main watertight bulkheads – the very constructional item that caused her to be dubbed the unsinkable ship - were not fully watertight as they did not extend vertically up to the main deck. They were open at the top – another design change demanded by WSL and accepted by the BOT. Because of this, there was progressive flooding as the bow settled in the water. (Afterwards OLYMPIC’s bulkheads were modified.)

But why did a relatively minor impact on her starboard side result in catastrophic failure of her hull plating. For this we must turn to a passion of mine, metallurgy, a subject that may not be everyone’s cup of tea, so I’ll keep it short.

According to TITANIC’s builders, the ship should have stayed afloat for two to three days. The design flaws that contributed to the rapid sinking have been outlined above, but there was also significant material failure, specifically brittle fracture of the hull steel and failure of the hull plating rivets.

TITANIC lies in two pieces, about 700 yards (640 m) apart more than 2,000 fathoms (over two miles) deep. The bow section is mostly intact, but the stern is a tangled wreck. Silt and mud cover the point of fracture. The wreck was discovered in 1985 and since then there have been four more expeditions to the wreck site, including a purely scientific one in 1991, when a Russian submersible enabled scientists to take pictures of the wreck and recover a plate-sized piece of hull steel. Metallurgical tests on it have helped explain exactly why TITANIC sank.

The hull steel and the wrought iron rivets used to join them together failed because of brittle fracture and poor-quality material. Brittle fracture occurs without plastic deformation and is caused by low temperature, high impact loading and high sulphur content of the steel. The steel recovered from the wreck had jagged, sharp edges, like broken china, with no evidence bending or deformation. Typically, high-quality steel is ductile and deforms before breaking, but when TITANIC struck the iceberg her hull plates did not deform, they fractured.

Microstructural analysis of the steel showed high levels of both oxygen and sulphur. High sulphur content increases a steel's brittleness. Although most steel used for shipbuilding in the early 1900s had a relatively high sulphur content, that used to build TITANIC was high even for the times. The conclusion is that WSL and or her builder, H&W, used cheaper low-quality steel in her construction.

The wrought iron rivets used to join the steel plating together also failed by brittle fracture. Normally, rivets would also have deformed before failing. Microanalysis revealed elevated levels of slag inclusion, significantly reducing tensile strength and increasing the tendency to brittle fracture in freezing water. Again, WSL and or H&W had used cheaper, low-quality rivets when constructing TITANIC.

Looking at the extent and nature of the damage, I think it likely that had the usual higher grade shipbuilding steel and rivets been used, TITANIC would have stayed afloat, at least long enough for her passengers and crew to have been saved.

And so there was, after all, a conspiracy, but just the usual sordid, grubby type designed to cover up an establishment. The government convened an Inquiry of course, but no doubt you guessed that it was held by none other than the Board of Trade, one of the guilty parties, and overseen by an Establishment judge, Lord Mersey. Its general findings are risible. If anyone is interested click here for the final report. (The US Inquiry can reasonably be dismissed as farcical.)

But good did come out of the tragedy. Belatedly as usual, the Maritime Establishment walked away from vested interests and drew up sensible rules, implemented of course by the BOT. These, the Safety of Life At Sea regulations, are now under the auspices of the UN’s International Maritime Organisation (even more mendacious, tied to vested interests and prone to cover up than the old BOT in my opinion), but after the TITANIC ships had to have sufficient lifeboats on each side for the whole passenger and crew list, and watertight compartments of sufficient number were made mandatory.

If you disagree, or have any questions or require clarification, let me know in the comments below.