RMS Lusitania

1915

The torpedo that rewrote the Great War Location: Celtic Sea, 11 miles off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland · Coordinates: 51.25°N 8.33°W · Casualties: 1,198 · Survivors: 761 · Depth: 93 m · Cause: u-boat torpedo — Torpedoed by German submarine U-20 (Walther Schwieger, commanding) at 14:10 on 7 May 1915. A single torpedo struck the starboard bow. A massive secondary explosion followed, the cause of which remains disputed to this day. The ship sank in 18 minutes. · Fate: continental shelf · protected · Type: passenger liner · Cunard Line · Tonnage: 31,550 tons · Crew: 696 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1906 Torpedoed by U-20 off the Old Head of Kinsale. A secondary explosion sank her in 18 minutes. 128 of the dead were American civilians. The sinking hardened U.S. opinion against Germany and pushed Washington toward intervention two years later. The secondary-explosion cause remains disputed to this day. The Vessel The RMS Lusitania was a Cunard Line transatlantic liner, 239 metres long and 31,550 tons, built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank and entered into service in September 1907. She and her sister Mauretania were the response to North German Lloyd's challenge for the Atlantic speed record; both were subsidised by the British Admiralty under a 1903 agreement that allowed her requisition as an auxiliary cruiser in wartime. She was the first quadruple-screw liner of her size and the first to use Parsons direct-drive steam turbines at transatlantic scale, producing a service speed of 25 knots with reserve to 27. She took the Blue Riband on her second westbound voyage in October 1907 and held it against all challengers for five years. Her design was publicly Cunard's commercial flagship; her design drawings, held at the Admiralty, also identified her as a vessel whose hold subdivision and coaling arrangements permitted rapid conversion to a warship. By 1915 she was the only major transatlantic liner still maintaining her Liverpool-New York schedule. The Cunard board had kept her in service over the protest of her master, Captain William Turner, who had argued through 1914 that the speed advantage that had justified her subsidy no longer compensated for the U-boat risk. Her last voyage out of New York was announced for 1 May 1915 in the same newspaper page that carried the Imperial German Embassy's notice warning that any vessel flying the British flag in the declared war zone aro The Disaster U-20 under Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger had been working the western approaches for ten days and had sunk three ships already. At 14:10 on 7 May she fired a single G6 torpedo from 700 metres. It struck the Lusitania's starboard bow just abaft the bridge. A second, much larger explosion followed perhaps fifteen seconds later. The nature of the second explosion has been the central controversy of the sinking ever since. Contemporary theories have ranged from a coal-dust explosion in her partly-empty starboard bunkers (the explanation favoured by the 1993 Ballard expedition), to a boiler rupture (favoured by the original British inquiry), to a detonation of the small-arms ammunition in her forward hold (favoured by German propaganda and, in subsequent decades, by several independent researchers). The effect of the second explosion was catastrophic. The list to starboard was immediate and increased through the eighteen minutes she remained afloat. The port lifeboats could not be launched because they swung inboard against the hull; the starboard boats swung so far out that loading them from the deck was impossible for most passengers. Of 48 boats aboard, six launched successfully. She sank bow-first in 18 minutes, a list so sharp that her masts were underwater before her stern left the surface. 1,198 of the 1,959 aboard died, 128 of them Americans. Turner survived; Frohman, Vanderbilt, Hubbard, and Kessler did not.