The sinking turned American opinion against the Germans - demonstrating, for some, the incorrigible treachery of the “Pirate Huns” - and became a rallying cry when America finally entered the war in 1917.īut in the years that followed, unsettling questions clung to the Lusitania case, contributing to a persistent hunch that the ship had somehow been allowed to sail into a trap.
The world was outraged to learn that the war had taken this diabolic new turn, that an ocean liner full of innocent civilians was now considered fair game. The casualties included the millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt, the Broadway impresario Charles Frohman and the noted art collector Hugh Lane, who was thought to be carrying sealed lead tubes containing paintings by Rembrandt and Monet. Nearly 1,200 people, including 128 Americans, died with it. Less than half a minute later, a second explosion shuddered from somewhere deep within the bowels of the vessel, and she listed precariously to starboard. Following his government’s new policy of unrestricted warfare, Schwieger fired a single torpedo into her hull. The U-boat’s captain, Walther Schwieger, was pleased to discover that the passenger steamer had no naval escort. On May 7, 1915, the four-funneled, 787-foot Cunard superliner, on a run from New York to Liverpool, encountered a German submarine, the U-20, about 11 miles off the coast of Ireland. It’s the other Titanic, the story of a mighty ship sunk not by the grandeur of nature but by the grimness of man. “There’s a lot of lost souls down there.”įew tales in history are more haunting, more tangled with investigatory mazes or more fraught with toxic secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, one of the colossal tragedies of maritime history.
“It will always be a scary place, a daunting place,” he told me. Even though he had dived the great wreck dozens of times before, the expression on his face was that of a spooked man. “You could just scoop the stuff up!” But then he turned somber. “There’s thousands of cases of ammo down in that hole!” one of the Irish divers cried out. One of the divers peeled back the lid, and the corroded ammunition greeted fresh air for the first time in 93 years. 303 rounds they’d found inside the plankton-hazed ruins, rounds that had been manufactured in America and bought by the British to kill Germans during World War I.
When they came aboard, the gleeful explorers, part of a marine archaeology expedition sanctioned by the Irish government, produced a piece of history - a plastic container holding a handful of. Lusitania as sport divers returned triumphantly to the surface. One day seven years ago, while on a magazine assignment, I found myself on a boat off the coast of Ireland, bobbing in dark, heavy seas 300 feet above the slumbering wreck of the R.M.S.
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