Secret of the Lusitania

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Secret of the Lusitania: Arms find challenges Allied claims it was solely a passenger ship
By Sam Greenhill
Daily Mail 20th December 2008

Her sinking with the loss of almost 1,200 lives caused such outrage that it propelled the U.S. into the First World War.
But now divers have revealed a dark secret about the cargo carried by the Lusitania on its final journey in May 1915.
Munitions they found in the hold suggest that the Germans had been right all along in claiming the ship was carrying war materials and was a legitimate military target.


The Cunard vessel, steaming from New York to Liverpool, was sunk eight miles off the Irish coast by a U-boat.
Maintaining that the Lusitania was solely a passenger vessel, the British quickly accused the 'Pirate Hun' of
slaughtering civilians.

The disaster was used to whip up anti-German anger, especially in the U.S., where 128 of the 1,198 victims came from.

A hundred of the dead were children, many of them under two.
Robert Lansing, the U.S. secretary of state, later wrote that the sinking gave him the 'conviction we would ultimately become the ally of Britain'.
Americans were even told, falsely, that German children were given a day off school to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania.
The disaster inspired a multitude of recruitment posters demanding vengeance for the victims.

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Two years later, the Americans joined the Allies as an associated power - a decision that turned the war decisively against Germany.
The diving team estimates that around four million rounds of U.S.-manufactured Remington .303 bullets lie in the Lusitania's hold at a depth of 300ft.
The Germans had insisted the Lusitania - the fastest liner in the North Atlantic - was being used as a weapons ship to break the blockade Berlin had been trying to impose around Britain since the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914.

Winston Churchill, who was first Lord of the Admiralty and has long been suspected of knowing more about the circumstances of the attack than he let on in public, wrote in a confidential letter shortly before the sinking that some German submarine attacks were to be welcomed.
He said: 'It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the U.S. with Germany.
'For our part we want the traffic - the more the better and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.'
Hampton Sides, a writer with Men's Vogue in the U.S., witnessed the divers' discovery.
He said: 'They are bullets that were expressly manufactured to kill Germans in World War I - bullets that British officials in Whitehall, and American officials in Washington, have long denied were aboard the Lusitania.'
The discovery may help explain why the 787ft Lusitania sank within 18 minutes of a single German torpedo slamming into its hull.

Some of the 764 survivors reported a second explosion which might have been munitions going off.
Gregg Bemis, an American businessman who owns the rights to the wreck and is funding its exploration, said: 'Those four million rounds of .303s were not just some private hunter's stash.

'Now that we've found it, the British can't deny any more that there was ammunition on board. That raises the question of what else was on board.
'There were literally tons and tons of stuff stored in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters.
'I've always felt there were some significant high explosives in the holds - shells, powder, gun cotton - that were set off by the torpedo and the inflow of water. That's what sank the ship.'

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source

Under the "cruiser rules", the Germans could sink a civilian vessel only after guaranteeing the safety of all the passengers. Since Lusitania (like all British merchantmen) was under instructions from the British Admiralty to report the sighting of a German submarine, and indeed to attempt to ram the ship if it surfaced to board and inspect her, she was acting as a naval auxiliary, and was thus exempt from this requirement and a legitimate military target. By international law, the presence (or absence) of military cargo was irrelevant.

Lusitania was in fact carrying small arms ammunition, which would not have been explosive.[30] Recent expeditions to the wreck have shown her holds are intact and show no evidence of internal explosion.

In 1993, Dr Robert Ballard, the famous explorer who discovered Titanic, conducted an in-depth exploration of the wreck of Lusitania. Ballard found Light had been mistaken in his identification of a gaping hole in the ship's side. To explain the second explosion, Ballard advanced the theory of a coal-dust explosion. He believed dust in the bunkers would have been thrown into the air by the vibration from the explosion; the resulting cloud would have been ignited by a spark, causing the second explosion. In the years since he first advanced this theory, it has been argued that this is nearly impossible. Critics of the theory say coal dust would have been too damp to have been stirred into the air by the torpedo impact in explosive concentrations; additionally, the coal bunker where the torpedo struck would have been flooded almost immediately by seawater flowing through the damaged hull plates.

More recently, marine forensic investigators have become convinced an explosion in the ship's steam-generating plant is a far more plausible explanation for the second explosion. There were very few survivors from the forward two boiler rooms, but they did report the ship's boilers did not explode; they were also under extreme duress in those moments after the torpedo's impact, however. Leading Fireman Albert Martin later testified he thought the torpedo actually entered the boiler room and exploded between a group of boilers, which was a physical impossibility. It is also known the forward boiler room filled with steam, and steam pressure feeding the turbines dropped dramatically following the second explosion. These point toward a failure, of one sort or another, in the ship's steam-generating plant. It is possible the failure came, not directly from one of the boilers in boiler room no. 1, but rather in the high-pressure steam lines to the turbines. Most researchers and historians agree that a steam explosion is a far more likely cause than clandestine high explosives for the second explosion.

The original torpedo damage alone, striking the ship on the starboard coal bunker of boiler room no. 1, would probably have sunk the ship without a second explosion. This first blast was enough to cause, on its own, serious off-center flooding. The deficiencies of the ship's original watertight bulkhead design exacerbated the situation, as did the many portholes which had been left open for ventilation.

The only this I have issue with is that a 93-year old event is still seen as significant.

Codarac, haven't seen you around in a while.

It's been pretty well-known for years that the Lusitania contained some illegal arms shipments, and that the Germans sunk it after having warned America that such would happen to British ships during a time of war.

What's the point of this exactly?

All smartass technicalities and "legal status" aside...

The boat in question did in fact have a large number of civilians on board. It was also, to all outside visible inspection, an unarmed civilian ship. Not a merchantman, or obvious cargo vessel, but a liner. Paperwork be damned. The U-boat chose to fire on a liner with nothing more than an educated guess that it was in any way acting in a military capacity. Thus, it was a bastardly and evil act. Only near a hundred years have produced a smidgen of possibility that legally speaking, the U-boat commander was technically right. I'm sure that would be of great relief to the civilians who died on her. They can rest easy in their watery grave, knowing that the German fleet had every right to kill the f**k out of them.

And if she was in fact acting in a military capacity, that makes her a British Military war grave, so maybe "American businessmen" should not be owning the rights to her, or in fact being anywhere near her, eh?

This is nothing surprising really. When you have one country being railed on by another and the country under attack or blockade has allies, if those allies haven't openly declared war against the other country themselves they will be, at the least, giving support to the country who they are allied with. Declaring war is just taking it from the level of soft support to full support.

As far as the graininess of having civilians loaded on such a liner, I'd like to think that they could have done without that and still found just as much justification to jump in on the side of Britain if it were merely a naval crew rather than that plus civilians. So yeah, I think its a bit sketchy if - as your infering - that they're communication patterns made it a dead giveaway anyway on what they were doing.

It's a wreck on the bottom of the ocean, aside from collectors of water-logged junk, to whom is it of any practical use?

It was an act of mass murder.Medals were struck and awarded to the u boat crew-they depict an image of the Lusitania with the grim reaper over it,very nice.
Recently the German WW1 atrocities like the mass murder of entire villages in France have been proved to be fact.The crucifixation of a Canadian Highlander has also been proved true.In all around 7800 French civilians were murdered in non combat actions by the Germans in WW1.
So what if there were bullets aboard.Britain and the Empire won the war and would have won it without that cargo.

Apparently its current practical use it to drive even deeper the wedge between two nations who are ostensibly allied together, and supposed to be friends.

Its like being at school. Bessy mates one minute, and as soon as the proverbial back is turned, the sniping starts.