With 201 crossings, the British liner RMS Lusitania was preparing to once again cover the trade route between the United States and the United Kingdom at the end of April 1915, in the middle of the First World War. Even though Germany had declared a war zone in the waters around the British Isles earlier in the year, the ship set sail from New York bound for Liverpool.
It was two in the afternoon on May 7 when the captain of the German submersible U-20, Walther Schwieger, spotted the ship. “A four funnels and two masts. “She appears to be a large passenger ship,” he noted in his logbook. Ten minutes later, he ordered a torpedo fired. The Lusitania sank in just eighteen minutes and 1,198 people lost their lives. Only 761 passengers survived in the second major Atlantic naval disaster in just three years, after the sinking of the Titanic.
submarine warfare
The sinking of the RMS Lusitania was part of the submarine war that the Germans waged against the United Kingdom in the Great War. As soon as the conflict broke out, London used its sea power to establish a naval blockade of Germany, which depended on imports to feed its population and sustain the war industry. Thus, he declared a war zone throughout the North Sea in November 1914: any enemy ship could be attacked by the British navy.
Germany did the same in February 1915 around the British Isles. The objective was the same, to block transatlantic trade to drown its economy. However, as the Royal Navy was more powerful than the Imperial German Navy, it waged unrestricted submarine warfare. That is, it would not only attack English warships, but also merchant ships and even some neutral ships, despite the fact that the customary law of the sea and the London Declaration of 1909 prohibited it.
British waters became unsafe, but this did not prevent some shipping companies from maintaining their regular passenger lines. This was the case of Cunard Line Ltd. and its famous liner RMS Lusitania, the largest and most luxurious of the time until the construction of the Titanic and her brothers. She measured 240 meters, could transport 31,550 tons and sailed at fifty kilometers per hour, but her dimensions did not save her from shipwreck. When the submarine U-20 intercepted her twenty kilometers off the Irish coast, she only took eighteen minutes to sink. It was the first time that Germany had shot down a passenger ship of such volume, in an attack that shocked the world.
Lusitania: a sinking with civilians and ammunition
The magnitude of the tragedy was such that people began to talk about a war crime, since more than a thousand defenseless civilians died. However, Germany argued that the liner was actually a camouflaged warship carrying military material from the United States. Almost a century later, in 2011, an expedition led by American businessman Gregg Bennis, owner of the Lusitania, corroborated the German version: the ship’s holds were full of ammunition.
However, after the attack in 1915 it was widely believed that the Imperial German Navy had overstepped its bounds by sinking a ship full of civilians without justification. In the United States, the incident served to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to enter the Great War, since 124 Americans had died in the shipwreck.
Although Washington initially remained neutral, the sinking of the Lusitania opened the way for a possible declaration of war if Germany continued its submarine offensive. The Americans eventually entered the fray when Kaiser Wilhelm II declared total submarine warfare in early 1917 and British intelligence services deciphered the Zimmermann telegram. In the document, the German ambassador in Mexico received instructions to propose to the country an alliance against the United States.