On May 7, 1915, the German U-boat 20 torpedoed and sank the "unarmed" passenger liner Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale on the southwest coast of Ireland, killing some twelve hundred men, women, and children, may of them Americans. The world raged at the barbarity of the Kaiser and the German people, and the act did much to participate the later entrance of the United States into World War I. But the real truth of the disaster has never been revealed.
With explosive and meticulous documentation, London Sunday Times correspondent Colin Simpson unearths the story of a monumental exercise in political cynicism, a record of arrogance. Ignorance and expectancy that indicts dozens of high government officials in both England and America.
Living many hitherto-classified documents from the British Admiralty, the U.S. Treasury, and the Cunard Company, in addition to the personal papers of the English and American trail judges, the German U=boat captain, and the chairman of Continua was unstable, improperly designed, badly staffed, and loaded with munitions rally, with high American complicity, to an extent created the situation in which the ship could be sunk.
11am: A report was commissioned by Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, to speculate about what would happen if a passenger ship were sunk by Germans with powerful neutrals aboard.
Item: The Lusitania, though nominally a passenger ship, was in actuality an armed auxiliary cruiser of the Royal Navy, carrying thousands of tons of military material as well as military personnel, a fact that England and America later vehemently denied.
Item: World War I naval warfare was conducted according to the internationally recognized Cruiser Rules, under which passengers were given time to debark before their ship was sunk, so long as that ship posed no direct threat to its attacker. Winston Churchill deliberately issued inflammatory orders to his ships, instructing them to threaten at all times, and thereby depriving them of any benefit under the Cruiser Rules.
Item: The English had broken the German U-boats operating around the British Isles.
Item: The Germans had the information that military ships would be in the Irish Sea in the first week of May. Was that information planted?
Item: The British ship assigned to signal the Lusitania to safety was suddenly and without explanation recalled.
And the Lusitania, in a matter of eighteen minutes, was sunk.
These items only scratch the surface of a story that also points up the duplicity and political, self-serving of State Department counsellor, later Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the subterfuges of Dudley Field Malone, Collector of Customs of New York: and the incompetence or irresponsibility of dozens of other officials who participated either in the disaster, its prologue, or in the massive cover-ups that followed.
As Lord Mersey, the head of the British inquiry, later remarked privately, it was "a damned dirty business."