British naval intelligence knew that U-20 was operating somewhere in the Western Approaches – the area of the Atlantic immediately to the west of Britain and Ireland – but the notion that it and the Lusitania might be manipulated into a collision course is absurd, for the sea is a very big place. This is the stuff of perfervid imaginings.

The savagery of the attack, moreover, had a powerful impact on American public opinion, bringing it behind Wilson when he eventually brought the US into the war, in February 1917, after Germany had begun a new campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare – which is to say warfare in which it would attack civilian shipping without warning.Ĭhurchill conspiracy Another allegation is that Winston Churchill, as first lord of the admiralty, conspired to let the ship be sunk, in order to help bring the US into the war. President Woodrow Wilson issued a strong note of protest that helped persuade the Germans to suspend the submarine campaign. So it was to be with the Lusitania, which carried 190 Americans, 123 of whom perished. This German strategy to use submarines to cut the transatlantic route bringing essential war supplies and food to Britain and France marked a sharp intensification of the conflict at sea, but it also came with the risk of alienating neutral opinion, especially that of the US should American ships or citizens suffer.

In Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania Erik Larson deftly narrates the ill-fated voyage, noting how crew and passengers largely ignored the explicit warning issued by the German embassy in Washington DC (and published in the US press) that 'vessels flying the flag of Great Britain' were 'liable to destruction' in the waters around Ireland and Britain, which the Germans had declared a war zone from February 4th, 1915. The deliberate sinking of such a famous passenger liner – the pride of the Cunard fleet – marked a new and terrible manifestation of 'total war', by which technological advances enabled death and destruction to be applied far from the traditional battlefield and which brought civilians into the front line, almost as if they were uniformed soldiers.

The loss of RMS Lusitania, torpedoed by a German U-boat 18km off the Old Head of Kinsale on the afternoon of May 7th, 1915, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, was one of the most shocking tragedies of the first World War.

Dead wake book