A wireless warning from the Admiralty was indeed received on the liner, but it was too terse and muted to convey the full danger. In Liverpool the alarmed Cunard chairman urged the Admiralty to divert Lusitania to safety at Cobh until the U20 boat threat had receded. U20 first sank the Liverpool schooner, the Earl of Lathom, carrying rocks from Limerick, and soon torpedoed other ships. Although the Admiralty knew that Germany’s U20 was prowling the sea route off south-west Ireland used by ships heading for Liverpool, it could issue no warnings to Cunard or the Lusitania about the peril without forfeiting the ultra-secrecy of its code-breaking abilities. The Admiralty in London had possessed a German naval codebook since 1914, and its cryptographers in Room 40 were soon breaking the further encryption of intercepted messages. The Lusitania’s captain, William Thomas Turner, who thought of his passengers as chattering monkeys, and Cunard’s bullish American managers, however, thought their ship could outrun any submarine.
On the morning of the liner’s embarkation, the German embassy in Washington had taken out advertisements in New York newspapers warning that vessels flying the British flag were liable to destruction in the naval war zone, and that their passengers were in jeopardy. The sinking of the Lusitania shocked the world, but it should not have been a surprise.
When instead they found a naval stalemate, British warships blockaded Germany and the Germans resorted to submarine warfare with their fleet of U-boats. The sinking of civilian ships without rescuing their voyagers, said Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, leaving them “to perish in open boats or drown amid the waves was in the eyes of all seafaring peoples a grisly act, which hitherto had never been practised except by pirates”.īoth the Royal Navy and the German fleet had envisaged a naval war in which their battleships met in huge showdowns such as the battle of Trafalgar. Until 1914 the established naval rules provided that warships could stop and search merchant vessels, but must safeguard their crews. This unprecedented attack on civilians caused a storm of indignation, particularly in the US, which expected its citizens to be immune from international violence. Many passengers drowned because they donned their life-jackets incorrectly and could not keep their heads bobbing above water. It sank in 18 minutes: 1,198 passengers and crew, including three German stowaways and 123 Americans, perished. O n the Cunard liner Lusitania, the fastest ship of its day, steaming from New York to Liverpool, was torpedoed by a German submarine 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland, not far from Cobh.
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