Remember the Tuscania

Remember the Tuscania plunges readers into the night of February 5, 1918, when a German U-boat's torpedo found a crowded US troopship in the North Atlantic—and into the century of argument, propaganda, and remembrance that followed. At its heart are the Baraboo Twenty-One, citizen-soldiers from a Wisconsin town who survived the sinking that became the deadliest U-boat attack on Americans in the First World War and the nation's first mass-casualty event of the conflict.

Steven Trout braids military history and cultural history with a dramatic pulse. He reconstructs the voyage and catastrophe in detail. Then he follows the aftershocks across newspapers, posters, cartoons, poems, and sheet music as the home front seizes on a new rallying cry – "Remember the Tuscania!" – and turns the dead into usable symbols. Trout also exposes a War Department fiasco over casualty lists that helped force reforms to identification practices (serial numbers on dog tags; rosters kept at hand aboard transports).

Remember the Tuscania draws attention to how people memorialize dramatic wartime events: the isle of Islay's windswept "American Monument," improvised funerals beneath a hastily sewn Stars and Stripes, the formation of the National Tuscania Survivors Association, and a twenty-first-century resurrection of the story back in Baraboo. Trout shows how myth overtook messy reality and how private grief often resisted public pageantry.

Trout's narrative is a riveting, deeply researched investigation that showcases the meaning for Americans of a nearly forgotten disaster and the unbreakable ties of transatlantic remembrance that it left behind.