Water began to seep through opened portholes. The baggage workers down below in the hull were all dead or soon would be. The elevators stopped, some filled with panicked passengers. The rudder no longer functioned and all the lights were out. In just ten minutes after being struck, all the systems on the Lusitania were inoperable. On May 7th, when passengers and crew could see the coastline of Ireland coming into view, the Lusitania was struck in its hull with one torpedo launched by U-20. But the British Admiralty, led by a young Winston Churchill, did not want to share the intel with the Lusitania captain because it might expose the existence of Room 40. A chill would have gone down the collective spine of all those on board the Lusitania had they known that the Germans specifically mentioned the Lusitania in a number of intercepted messages. While the German warning didn’t rattle anyone about the dangers of taking the transatlantic journey from New York Harbor to Liverpool, England, perhaps the ship’s captain and crew and the passengers would have been alarmed to find out that a top secret unit called Room 40 working under British intelligence was tracking the movements of U-boats in British waters, especially U-20 which was the most notorious and ruthless of the German subs, and that there was great concern about the possibility of submarine attacks on British ships. On the morning of May 1st, passengers boarded, luggage and cargo was loaded and the officers and crew of the Lusitania did their daily inspection of lifeboats and all systems of the gigantic ship. Besides while the Great War between Great Britain and Germany had been ongoing for years, there was a tacit agreement that neutral and commercial vessels were not fair game.ĭespite an announcement from the German embassy which ran in the New York Times on May 1, 1915, warning that commercial vessels were vulnerable to attack in waters encompassed in the war zone, no one paid much attention. It was fully capable of ramming and destroying a smaller ship. It’s size alone was daunting its image would scare off most warships that were smaller and barely faster than the swift steamship.

Just like the Titanic before it, the Lusitania was considered to be virtually unsinkable.

However being an ocean liner for passengers wasn’t to be the reason why it became an important part of world history. While some of Britain’s private steamships had been converted for the war, the Lusitania had no connection whatsoever with the war or wartime maneuvers. This splendid example of man’s advancements in shipbuilding was a commercial vessel that carried passengers and cargo. It was called the “magnificent ship” standing seven stories from dock to bridge and consuming coal at a rate of 140 tons a day while just standing still.

“Dead Wake” by Erik Larson tells the story of a fabulous steamship, the Lusitania.

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