‘A Brilliant Naval Wedding with Wollaston Girl As Bride Held Last Evening’
That was the headline of the 10 April 1913 edition of the Quincy Telegram, announcing the union of my maternal grandparents, Chester Nimitz and Catherine Freeman. In attendance at the nuptials were my grandfather’s classmate George Stewart (best man) and six ushers, all naval officers, with the exception of Catherine’s brother, Richard Rich Freeman Jr.
My grandparents first met in the fall of 1911. Lieutenant Nimitz had received orders to proceed to the Boston Navy Yard to oversee the installation of diesel engines in his next command, the submarine USS Skipjack (E-1), which was being built at the Fore River Shipbuilding Company at Quincy, Massachusetts. The senior Freemans, Richard and Mary, owned a spacious home at 40 Grandview Avenue in the Wollaston section of Quincy and were fond of inviting young naval officers over for dinner and bridge—and to meet their two daughters, Elizabeth and Catherine. They considered their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to be the one “eligible” for marriage, but it was her pretty younger sister, Catherine, who caught Nimitz’s eye. In August 1912, they became engaged.
In May 1973, after a short honeymoon, which included a trip to Texas to meet Nimitz’s family, Nimitz and his new bride were off to Germany, where he had been tasked by the Navy to study diesel engines, then in their 16th year of production in Nuremberg. At the end of August, just before heading back to the states, Nimitz visited Kiel. Just 490 miles away in Danzig (present-day Gdansk), the Imperial German Navy had just commissioned its latest submarine, the U-20, with her twin diesel engines. She and the British passenger liner Lusitania were destined to meet 21 months later.
Catherine and Elizabeth, along with their older brother, Richard, had grown up in relative comfort. Their father, Richard Rich Freeman Sr., was the wealthy manager of a ship brokerage firm headquartered on Commercial Street in Boston. Richard Rich Freeman Jr. was born on 28 October 1886. He attended Adams Academy in Quincy and graduated from Boston Latin School in 1906. In 1909, he graduated from Harvard (his sister Elizabeth graduated the same year from Radcliffe). He stayed on at Harvard for two more years, earning a graduate degree in mining engineering.
From 1911 to 1914, he was employed as a mining engineer at the Cleveland Iron Company in Ishpeming, Michigan. His salary was $1,200 per year. A photo album compiled by him during this period indicates these for him were pleasant times. In addition to pictures of the mine’s state-of-the-art excavation equipment, there are snapshots of him fly fishing, trap shooting, whitetail-deer hunting, camping, and surveying.
In late 1914, Richard was offered a position in Siberia with a Russian mining company. His salary, his new employers assured him, would be “made satisfactory to him.” On 30 April 1915, accompanied by his mother, Mary Manson Freeman, and his cousin, Alexander Freeman Jackson, he traveled by train to Brooklyn to spend the night with the Nimitzes and their young children, 14-month-old Catherine, my mother; and 2-month-old Chester Jr., my uncle.
After breakfast the next day, 1 May, they took a cab to Pier 54 on the Hudson, where Richard was to board a passenger liner for the first leg of his trip. His mother was apprehensive. That morning, the New York World had juxtaposed, just below the Cunard Line sailing schedule, a notice from the Imperial German embassy warning that Germany was at war with “Great Britain and her allies” and “vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or of her allies are liable to destruction” within waters adjacent to the British Isles. Richard would be departing at 1000 on the Cunard liner Lusitania.
Mrs. Freeman did something that any sailor could have told her was terribly bad luck: She watched as the Lusitania sailed out of sight. Just six days later, on 7 May, near the end of the liner’s voyage, at a point about 20 miles off Old Head of Kinsale in Ireland, U-20 surfaced, spotted the Lusitania, and slammed a torpedo into her midships.
It would take just 18 minutes for the Lusitania to sink.
The last 15 days of Richard’s life are best chronicled in three letters I found many years ago in the house of his sister Elizabeth (my great aunt) in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Collectively, the family refers to them as “the Lusitania Letters.” The first, chronologically, is a letter from Richard to his aunt, Elizabeth Emerson Manson, Mary Freeman’s sister. It is dated 22 April 1915 and written from the family home in Wollaston.
Dear Aunt Elizabeth–
Mary Freeman with her daughter Catherine Freeman Nimitz and son-in-law Chester Nimitz. Catherine and Chester married in 1913 and honeymooned in Germany. Less than two years later, a German U-boat would sink the British passenger liner carrying Catherine’s brother overseas to his new job. Courtesy Nimitz Family Collection Just a few hasty lines this evening to let you know that I have accepted a position in Russia and am sailing May 1st on the Lusitania. I am going over with the man whose assistant I am to be and who has been there for the last five years so that I expect to enjoy the trip greatly. We go from London to Bergen and thence to Petrograd. After that, we go over the Trans Siberian to a point on the Irtysh River, thence by boat for a week to Omsk and from there to the mine at Ridder. A long hard trip but I hope a very interesting one. I am not expecting to get a great deal of money out of it at present but it has a good outlook for the future and should at least be an interesting and instructive year if I only decide to stay for that time. I wish I were going to see you before I go but as I probably shall not I wish you the best of luck and a very pleasant time until I return. Please remember me to cousin Mollie.
With best of love,
Dick
The next letter, to Richard’s father, is on Harvard Club stationary and was written by Richard’s Harvard classmate, Dr. James Houghton. Houghton was on board the Lusitania with Richard. Neither one knew that the other was to be on the fateful voyage and were quite pleased that they would be sailing together.
Houghton described Richard’s final minutes:
On the day we were torpedoed, I was in my stateroom when we were struck and when I came on deck, I found him shortly after finding Mme Depage*, who was a member of my party. It seems he had been standing near Mme Depage by the rail and had suddenly seen the periscope pop up then almost instantly disappear and immediately [when] the torpedo started he called to Mme Depage and they both watched the torpedo coming and it struck almost under them. They were both covered with spray and soot. He was immensely pleased at having seen it and was laughing and joking about it and recounting the experience to anybody who asked about it.
I saw him several times from then on but he would dash away every few minutes when he saw some place where he could be useful. I saw him helping lower one of the boats and later saw him upon the top deck [the deck above the boat deck] disentangling ropes. He must have gone down and got his life preserver for when the order had been given that no more lifeboats should be lowered and when we were all standing about waiting for the next emergency to arise, he suddenly appeared with one. He walked over to a woman who was standing near us and said ‘Haven’t you a lifebelt?’ She answered ‘No.’ and he immediately lifted his off and told her she must take it. She protested but he wouldn’t hear a word of it but started tying it about her laughing and joking all the time saying that he was good swimmer and the belt was in his way, etc.
He then came over to us and we joked a moment or two. I suppose it seems strange to you that under such tragic circumstances there should have been so much joking and it seems strange to me now and the only way I can explain it is that we were all under terrific strain and by making witty or silly remarks we could at once cheer up those about us and relieve our own feelings.
Mme Depage noticed that he had a handkerchief about his hand and demanded to see it. He protested that it was nothing but on taking off the handkerchief we found that a piece of skin about the size of a dime had been torn from the palm of his hand by the flying wreckage of the torpedo. She scolded him for putting on the dirty handkerchief but he said he was too healthy to get any infection but she took her own handkerchief and bound it up scolding him all the while for being so careless. The wound didn’t amount to anything but it must have smarted. I suppose under ordinary circumstances nobody would have paid any attention to it but as it was it gave us all something else to think about and was welcomed as such.
After that I again lost track of him until the ship started [her] final plunge down. I saw him holding down the ropes which were stretched across the space where the lifeboats had been for some women to get across. Shortly after that, in fact immediately, Mme Depage and I jumped over the side into the water which at the time had risen almost to our feet. As I sank I was struck by some wreckage but came to almost immediately. As I was whirled about in the whirlpool created by the sinking ship, I escaped death by an inch at least a dozen times. There was the most astounding amount of wreckage being whirled about and I am certain all the others were struck by some of it. I like to think that this is what happened for when I go, I would ask nothing better than such a speedy and painless death.
I know that this has been a perfectly terrible blow to you and Mrs. Freeman but I am sure that it must be a continual source of comfort to you to know that Dick went like a man thinking only of others and giving his life that the women and children might be saved. If we can, when our time comes, acquit ourselves as nobly and as fearlessly as he did, we will have nothing of which to complain. I know there must be thousands of questions you want to ask me and I shall try to get to Boston in the near future. I shall let you know well in advance and shall consider a great favor to do anything in the world to alleviate your sorrow. With my Most heartfelt sympathy to both you and Mrs. Freeman, I am your most
Sincerely,
James T. Houghton
The pages of Houghton’s letter that detail Richard’s heroics are covered with water stains—Mary Freeman’s tears. His letter was accompanied by a brief note from her husband to her:
July 7, 1914 (sic)
The Lusitania was torpedoed by U-20, just 20 miles off Old Head of Kinsale in Ireland. She sank in just 18 minutes, taking with her more than 1,100 souls. The New York Times My Dearest Mary,
I enclose Dr. Houghton’s letter. I know while it recalls to our mind Dick’s end it cannot but make us proud that we have had so fine a son and that in every moment of his life he has been our joy & pride and at the last supreme moment he showed his true colors and acted the hero that he was. My heartfelt love goes out to you as you read the letter.
Our only hope is that we may be spared to give many years of love to Elizabeth and Catherine. They both need it and we must do all we can to give it to them.
Lovingly,
Richard
He was shaken as well—his note to his wife is dated 1914, not 1915.
This note confounded me when I first read it many years ago. Richard Sr. and Mary were husband and wife living under the same roof. I asked my mother, why so formal a letter? Indeed, why a letter at all? She told me her grandmother always blamed her husband for their son’s death, for reasons known only to her and to God. It was totally unfounded. Mom also told me that when a check from the Mixed Claims Commission in the amount of $10,000—the equivalent of $246,800 today—arrived at the Freeman house in Wollaston, her grandmother threw it at her grandfather and screamed, “Here—I hope you’re happy now!” Mom added that she could not recall her grandmother “ever saying a civil word” to her husband. She described her grandfather as “sweet and unassuming—a lovely guy.”
The Freeman family erected a cenotaph in Richard Jr.’s honor at the Oak Dale Cemetery in Wellfleet. His body was never found after the Lusitania’s sinking.
Many of Uncle Dick’s possessions remained intact well into the 1950s and 1960s at the Freeman summer home in Wellfleet, where my family would stay. My brothers and I always thought that had he lived, he would have been a wonderful companion, interested, as were we, in fishing, canoeing, and bird hunting (Richard Sr. kept a pair of handsome Llewellyn Setters)—a real outdoorsman. Among his possessions stored at the Wellfleet house were fly-fishing gear, a fur hat made from the pelts of muskrats that he had trapped during his stint in Michigan, wooden duck decoys, a Greener 12-gauge shotgun with Damascus barrels, his rocking chair with Harvard’s seal, and many rounds of .22 ammunition—much of it still viable, even after 50 years. We could always feel his presence in the old house.
This was the great uncle we never knew.
When interviewing my mother for his biography of her father, naval historian Brayton Harris noted the irony that one of Nimitz’s favorite weapons in the Pacific war—the submarine—had cut short his brother-in-law’s life 26 years before. A brother-in-law he barely knew and who had died so selflessly, saving the lives of others, acts of heroism that most likely cost him his own.
