The Portrayal of 2nd Officer Lightoller

While Walter Lord did his damnedest to ensure he stuck to the facts, he also pulled much of his information from inquest testimony and later research conducted with the survivors themselves. So some of what we see in the movie of the same title was based upon what Lightoller himself had said over the course of the then almost fifty years post-Titanic.

Did 2nd Officer Lightoller lie? My guess is that, at the very least, he took a few liberties with the truth. Probably out of fear, since his actions during WWII speak loudly in his favor. He was the highest ranking officer to survive; he must've feared for his very livelihood; and while I'm sure he didn't want to appear the overeager hero (a reach of the truth in the other direction, more than likely), it didn't benefit him to be the ultimate scapegoat, either, and he had to know that. He was shrewd, if nothing else, and I do believe he did his best to maintain order and follow orders. The ship was coming apart; the crew topside knew hundreds would die. But they also knew from their training that order and civility had to be maintained, and I believe we cannot impose our modern sensibilities on a different social perception. 1912 was not 2012, no matter how fundamentally wrong we know their social mores might have been. The fact is that back then, things were decidedly different.

(Actually, and please know I have the ultimate respect for all of those officers that night, Lightoller's statement to Murdoch's wife that he didn't commit suicide makes me more inclined to believe he actually did. Possibly it was too much for Murdoch, and he caved. He was a man, no more and no less after all.)

As the ultimate Monday night quarterbacks we know that chaos was the order of the night, and the one thing we're certain of is that no one was truly certain of anything. Witnesses are the most unreliable sources in the best of times. It's a human flaw. And to say, 'why did X do Y' is a bit unfair even if it is our prerogative. Remember how we felt when the Concorde crashed. In our minds we knew it was fallible - planes crash, machines fail, humans screw up - in our hearts (and never mind logic) we knew it was inevitable. But even I can remember being so shocked when it actually happened - up to that time it was the only plane that had not had a catastrophic failure or disaster. Concorde was as close as some of us will ever come to Titanic in our lifetimes.

I can't blame anyone, really, for what happened that night, no matter how much we all need the story to have a distinct villain. It was a tragicomedy, if you will, of errors, omissions, and fate; a perfect storm of events that culminated into the loss of the largest man-made object of her time and most of those aboard her.

As a US military officer - and the daughter and sister of retired US Navy sailors - I'd like to put my faith in the officers on board at the time and believe they acted as appropriately as possible under the circumstances. This leaves them open to human foible and panic and fear - equally appropriate under the circumstances. These men weren't military officers per se, but they were merchant marine, highly trained - my own father-in-law served as a merchant marine member on board the Queen Mary (my husband is British) so I know from whence I speak. They were as experienced on the seas as my father and brother were in their days. And none of them had ever seen what they became a part of until that night.

I'm not daft enough to believe that we're machines, that we're not vulnerable to white-knuckled fear. Sometimes all the training in the world just isn't enough; there was no precedent for what was happening that night (hence no lifeboat drill at the start of the voyage, not enough lifeboats to start with, an almost arrogant reliance on the power of man over nature - I could go on and on). They weren't ready for this simply because it wasn't believed to be a possibility. It's not like now, where a huge chunk of passenger safety and maritime regulation exists because of what happened to Titanic. This was pre-disaster, when all she was was the beautiful, breathtaking spectacle she was meant to be, and not the poster child for what happens when everything goes wrong.

What I think we're all forgetting is these were men, ordinary men, put in the midst of extraordinary circumstances bigger than anything we're capable of imagining. Whatever they did or didn't do that night, we'll never really know, but I believe that even in their weakest moment, they did the best they could, right or wrong, in success or failure. We learned from Titanic; we corrected many mistakes and misconceptions. But we didn't know they were mistakes until 15 April 1912, when the aftermath began.

I don't recall him(played by Kenneth Moore) being portrayed much better in that one than by James Cameron.

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I could care less, but I don’t care enough to bother.