Dear Mr. Zimmermann:
Your letter of April 1, 1938 cheered me up
a lot, for I had run into one of those periods when my efforts to develop
research had run into doldrums. Now the stuff has begun to pour in from a number
of sources in answer to my inquiries.
The arrangement you suggest for my getting
at your material on the TUSCANIA sounds excellent. I shan’t call upon you for
any effort, like indexing or Photostatting, or writing more letters to
survivors, etc., however, until I have talked with the prospective publisher.
I have a few little items you might be
interested in. One is the enclosed copy of that TUSCANIA incident which I now
have from the Red Cross files at Washington. It is for your files.
Another is the report, received from his
former partner in business here, that Lt. James Jeffers of the Red Cross, who
was active in the rescue work on Islay after both the TUSCANIA and OTRANTO
disasters, died suddenly a month ago. I had counted upon getting much material
from him.
Last week I returned from a trip across the
country in a plane, which I was fortunate enough to get a chance to make in
connection with my newspaper job. I was talking with another newspaper man about
the TUSCANIA disaster, which he vaguely recalled, when a man sitting ahead of us
cocked an ear and said:
“I recall that very well, I was on the
Baltic when it happened. We didn’t know exactly what had taken place, but we
knew something bad was in the air. We saw destroyers circling around the
TUSCANIA and we saw a few lights on her. Irvin S. Cobb was aboard our ship, and
he was running around frantically trying to find out from the Baltic’s officers
just what had happened. The incident was right down his alley and in sight of
the convoy, and yet he couldn’t get much information.”
That’s all for the present. I’ll write when
something turns up.
