The Lusitania

xii, 303 pp. A well-researched and insightful look at the famous Lusitania. "RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner, holder of the Blue Riband and briefly the world's biggest ship. She was launched by the Cunard Line in 1907, at a time of fierce competition for the North Atlantic trade. In 1915 she was torpdoed and sunk by a German U-boat, with heavy loss of life. As German shipping lines tended to monopolise the lucrative passage of continental emigrants, Cunard responded by trying to outdo them for speed, capacity and luxury. The Lusitania was fitted with revolutionary new turbine engines, able to maintain a speed of 25 knots. Equipped with lifts, wireless telegraph and electric light, she provided 50% more passenger space than any other ship, and the first class decks were noted for their sumptuous furnishings. On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, she was commandeered by the Admiralty as an armed merchant cruiser, but proved unsuitable in this role, and was allowed to resume passenger services on condition that she carried government cargoes. When she left New York for Liverpool on what would be her final voyage on 1 May 1915, submarine warfare was intensifying in the Atlantic. Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom to be a war-zone, and Germans in America had been specifically warned by their embassy not to sail in the Lusitania. On the afternoon of May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-Boat, 11 miles off the southern coast of Ireland and inside the declared “zone of war”. A second internal explosion caused it to sink in just 18 minutes, with a loss of 1198 lives. International law required that before opening fire on a non-military ship the U-boat was required to give the crew and passengers time to leave safely. However the U-boat did not follow this process because the Germans considered the Lusitania to be a legitimate military target, in that the ship was carrying munitions and had been ordered to break the Cruiser Rules herself. This failure caused an international uproar led by the United States, which resulted in a curtailment of German U-boat warfare for two years. Although officially denied by the British at the time, recent underwater explorations have proved the German assertion that the ship was carrying war munitions."