On 1 May 1915 the Cunard liner RMS Lusitania left Pier 54 in New York for Liverpool with 1,960 people aboard — 1,264 passengers, 693 crew, and three stowaways. Two days earlier, a notice from the Imperial German Embassy had appeared in around fifty American newspapers. It warned that vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or her allies were liable to destruction in the waters around the British Isles, and that travellers sailing in the war zone on such ships did so at their own risk.
The notice was not a bluff, though it was not aimed at the Lusitania in particular. It was also not enough to empty the ship. She sailed full.
The Horror
Six days later, shortly after two o’clock on 7 May, the morning fog had lifted and the Lusitania was steaming within sight of the Old Head of Kinsale. The submarine U-20, commanded by Walther Schwieger, fired a single torpedo at a range of about 700 metres. Schwieger’s log records one torpedo and no more. The many survivors who were certain they had been hit twice were describing what came next.
Within moments of the impact, a second and heavier explosion tore through the forward part of the ship. Nobody has ever established what it was. What it did is not in doubt: the Lusitania took on a list to starboard of around fifteen degrees and kept going down by the bow, still carrying way through the water.
The list is the reason so few people got off. Of forty-eight boats, six were successfully launched, all from the starboard side. The port-side boats swung inboard over the deck and could not be got away at all; the starboard boats swung out away from the hull, leaving a gap over open water that had to be crossed to board them. As boats were lowered against a moving ship, the raised heads of the hull rivets caught and tore at them. Some capsized on the way down. She sank at 14:28, eighteen minutes after the torpedo struck.
The dead are usually given as 1,198, but no single count has ever been agreed. Different authorities put the loss at between about 1,193 and 1,199, depending on whether stowaways are included, and on how the handful who died shortly after being rescued are treated. The annual commemoration service in Liverpool is held for 1,191. Among the dead were 94 of the 124 children aboard, including 31 of the 35 infants — a figure the popular retelling often inflates past a hundred children, and which needs no inflating. Between roughly 124 and 128 of the Americans aboard died, and it was that number, more than the total, that mattered in Washington.
The sea off Kinsale in May is not freezing, and the story does not need it to be. It is cold enough that exposure kills, and the ship went down close enough to land that boats out of Queenstown reached the wreckage within hours. Around 289 bodies were recovered in the end, 65 of them never identified. Some nine hundred people were never recovered at all, and are still where the ship left them.
The cargo has been argued over ever since. Germany’s justification was that the Lusitania was carrying war materials, and on that narrow point Germany was right: the manifest openly declared some 4.2 million rounds of rifle cartridges, around five thousand shrapnel shell cases, and several thousand brass percussion fuses, all of it legal to ship under United States law at the time. She was also listed on the Navy List as a merchant vessel with provision for armament, though no guns were ever fitted to her. What Germany could not show, and what conspiracy writing has been trying to show for a century, is that any of this caused the second explosion.
The wreck has been used to test that idea, and it has not survived the testing. Robert Ballard’s 1993 expedition examined the forward hull and found the cargo magazine undamaged, concluding that the torpedo struck the forward coal bunker and that the second blast was a coal-dust explosion. That explanation has its own problem: bunker coal sitting against a cold hull tends to be damp and hard to ignite. A boiler explosion is thought unlikely, since the working boiler rooms produced survivors. A ruptured steam line has been proposed and contested. In 2008 a licensed dive recovered .303 rifle rounds from the wreck, confirming an ammunition cargo that was never seriously disputed. Gregg Bemis, who owned the wreck from 1968 until his death in 2020, dived it himself and spent decades looking for the smoking gun without finding it. The ship lies on her starboard side, which is to say she lies on the torpedo wound, and until that changes the second explosion will stay unexplained rather than solved.
The blame was not left unexplained, because two proceedings were set up to place it on the captain. William Turner survived the sinking. At the Kinsale coroner’s inquest on 8 May the coroner found the deaths to be the result of an attack contrary to international law, at which point the Crown Solicitor moved to halt proceedings before Turner could be examined further. The formal British inquiry under Lord Mersey sat from 15 June 1915, and closed its doors to the public for two of its sessions — the two at which the ship’s navigation was discussed. The Admiralty’s position going in had been explicit. Churchill, as First Lord, wrote that the case against Turner should be pressed by skilful counsel; the First Sea Lord, Fisher, called him a knave and hoped to see him arrested as soon as the inquiry ended. Both men were out of office over Gallipoli before the hearings began. Mersey declined to oblige them, finding that Turner had exercised his judgment for the best and that the Admiralty’s instructions on speed, zigzagging and keeping offshore had been suggestions more than orders. He put the blame on the German government. A United States court reached the same conclusion in 1918. According to the journalist Colin Simpson, Mersey afterwards told his children: “The Lusitania case was a damned, dirty business!” That remark is secondhand and rests on Simpson’s account alone.
One thing the sinking did not do is bring America into the war, however often it is said to have done so. Two years elapsed. Wilson protested, Germany eventually curbed its submarine campaign, and the United States stayed neutral until Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare in early 1917. The declaration came on 6 April 1917, and the Zimmermann telegram did more to force it than the Lusitania ever did.
The Modern Relic
She is still there, eleven nautical miles off the Old Head of Kinsale in around ninety-three metres of water, lying over on her starboard side with her bow bent upward from the impact with the seabed. Divers report plating collapsing inward, the aft docking bridge torn away and fishing nets draped across the foredeck. The engine room is still recognisable.
Since 1995 an Underwater Heritage Order made under Irish law has protected the site, and nothing can be investigated or lifted from it without a ministerial licence. It is treated as a grave, which for nine hundred people it is.
The most visible piece of her is nowhere near Ireland. Three of her four bronze propellers were salvaged in 1982, and the most complete of them — four blades, 22.5 tons — was bought by Merseyside Maritime Museum in 1989 and has stood on the quayside in Liverpool ever since. Every year on the anniversary a commemoration service is held at it. It is a strange memorial: a piece of the machinery that was still driving her forward through the eighteen minutes, and the closest most people will get to her.
