In 1903, Germany's ships had won the coveted
Blue Riband for six years in a row. The Blue Riband was
awarded annually to the fastest trans-Atlantic crossing
by an ocean liner. The British government, embarrassed by the
situation and, similar to the current American government, willing to go
through the public money like it was toilet paper, loaned Cunard Lines 2.4
million pounds (equivalent to about 2 billion dollars today) at a low interest rate to
construct two fast ocean liners capable of reclaiming the honor. The deal further provided that the British government would also pay Cunard a grant of 75,000 pounds a year as well as awarding Cunard a mail contract for an additional 68,000 pounds annually. There were strings attached—namely, the vessels had to be
constructed to battleship standards so that they could be easily
converted to warships in the event of a conflict and turned over to
the Royal Navy. The specifications included the installation of
mounts for a dozen large guns, the ability to achieve a speed of at
least 24.5 knots, and the incorporation of longitudinal coal bunkers
which ran down each side of the interior of the ship at the
waterline. It was believed that these bunkers would provide extra
protection to the ship against enemy shells at the waterline. The
Admiralty ignored the fact that the protection would be totally
ineffective against submarines, as their torpedoes would strike below
the waterline.
When World War I broke out, one of the
ships, the RMS Mauretania, was in fact turned over to the Navy and
retrofitted as an auxiliary cruiser. The other vessel was rejected for
service in the Navy because of excessive fuel consumption. With the ability to cross the Atlantic in four days and eleven hours, it proved
to be the fastest ocean liner afloat and was nicknamed the “Greyhound
of the Seas.” It was officially called the RMS Lusitania.
As we all know, the Lusitania
was torpedoed and sunk 100 years ago today by the German sub U-20 in the
Irish Sea.
Tragically, it was the insistence of the
Royal Navy that longitudinal coal bunkers be installed which insured
that the single torpedo was adequate to bring down the ship. Because
the Lusitania was near the end of its voyage from New York and had
consumed most of the coal in the bunkers, the bunkers were for the most part
empty. The forward inertia of the boat very quickly filled the bunkers with water through the hole caused by the explosion. The weight of
the water when it filled all of the bunkers on one side toppled the
ship towards starboard, causing the open portholes on that side also to swamp the ship with water at the rate of over 260 tons a minute. Had the boat
been constructed with normal bunkers, it is quite likely that compartments of the ship where the blast from the torpedo occurred could have
been sealed off with the vessel being injured but not sunk.
The Germans had previously advised that
any ship flying British colors would be fair game in the waters
around the British Isles. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston
Churchill expressed hope that the sinking of the Lusitania
would bring America into the war as a result of the loss of the 128 Americans who were part of the total death toll of 1,198 (and, in fact, some historians claim that the British government affirmatively put the Lusitania at risk so that this would happen). Although the sinking galvanized
American resentment against Germany, the United States still resisted
entering into the conflict. After all, it was widely suspected that
the Lusitania had been carrying munitions (which was
true, by the way), the ship was flying a British flag, and it had
entered a zone where the Germans warned that it could be sunk. The Germans did not merely provide the warning through diplomatic channels; they had also run notices in fifty American newspapers, including those in New York.
Had the Americans stayed out of the
war, the British Admiralty predicted that Great Britain would have to sue
for peace by November of 1917 due to the losses of shipping
attributable to the German Navy. However, as a classic example of the
axiom “when a pig becomes a hog, it gets slaughtered,” the
Germans committed two major blunders which precipitated America's
entry into the conflict. The first was the Zimmerman telegram, where the
Germans suggested to Mexico that it might want to consider becoming an ally of Germany, invading the
USA, and reclaiming part of the territory it had lost in the prior
century. The second was a policy originated by German Admiral Henning
von Holtzendorff in early 1917 establishing that all traffic in the restricted waters around
Britain be sunk, regardless of the vessel's flag or nationality. Germany started attacking American ships, and the rest literally is history.
For further detailed information about
the Lusitania and its last voyage, I recommend reading Erik Larson's excellent book Dead Wake.
Parenthetically, the torpedoing of the
Lusitania inspired artist Fred Spear in 1915 to produce one of the simplest yet most devastatingly effective propaganda posters ever:
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