Lusitania and the Adimirality.

[Yossarian]

I go back to the Lusitania in my mind all the time,

I am currently building a digital model of her yet after spending so many painstaking hours rendering dining saloons, cargo hatches, ventilation shafts your thoughts begin to drift to that fateful day in May 1915.

Modern explanations of her demise point more towards faulty bulkhead design and maybe even high pressure steam lines coming into contact with the sea water shortly after the deadly Explosion brought upon her by U 20's sole torpedo.

However my question is, did the British Admiralty ever have conversation surrounding what they should do if one of the still servicing as passenger ferrying vessels be attacked? Aquitania, Olympic and Marutania already serving in some form of Government service, or prepared to do as such.

Did they contemplate the possibility of American citizens being harmed or lost in such an attack? And obviously what would be the U.S. Senate's reaction to a resolution for war should such a occurrence happening?

In all, was the Lusitania just an ends to a means? The then current First Lord of the British Admiralty Winston Churchill would state in his personal memoirs in the 1930's that the Lusitania had more effect to the outcome of the Great War than all of Britain's munitions combined?

Did Britain use her as a Blockade runner holding un uniformed Canadian troops to be sent straight to the war effort? Did the Admiralty Order Captain Turner on a suicide course? Or did Turner himself fault to give the Admiralty the Propaganda message they had been foaming out the mouth for?

Any thoughts and answers or opinions welcome, I have spent almost 2 and a half years engrossed in the story of this somewhat forgotten tale of entry into armed conflict.

What do any potential members who reply think the Admiralty thought of the 1,200 souls that perished? And what do you personally think?

For the question does tear at the soul a bit at times, as for the heap of destroyed wreckage on the seabed today resonates in the sole fact it is there by no accident...

In sparse replies.

-Yo

 

[MontyB]

To be blunt I think the Lusitania was used as a pawn by the Admiralty and Churchill in particular he had an obsession with dragging the US into WW1 and WW2 and I think he was prepared to sacrifice as many as necessary to achieve that aim.

I am not convinced that the admiralty went out of its way to put the ship in danger but I suspect their reaction to it being sunk was more "Wohoo" than "Doh".

That the Lusitania was carrying a large quantity of ammunition indicates that the British were not too worried about international law or the safety of the passengers and that the Germans had sunk a legitimate military target.

 

[Yossarian]

I feel similarly on the account of Scheiwger's actions. I fully believe that if it not him, another German U Boat commander would have struck the ship sooner or later, the war was only a year and a half on at this point, and showed no progress towards peace.

I feel that a slight lax of the Admiralty's attention towards avoiding the U Boat threat was implemented from the statesman's angle leading to the tragedy.

That Statesman being Churchill. This angle would be similar in context with Churchill's reaction to Pearl Harbor and American's released course of action in 1941.

In the case of the Lusitania, I feel he may have eased or brushed off any serious attempt by senior levels of the British Admiralty in paying much attention to measures such as briefing and communicating the series of precautions to large vessel captains in avoiding submarines, and how to spot them.

Zig zaging being one such measure, the excuse of it being a new tactic can be counter argued with the RMS Olympic using the technique months before the sinking of Lusitania.

Churchill and partly even Lord Fisher, one of his closest mentors may have recognized the massive propaganda boast a high causality attack would be for sucking America and thus massive amounts of weapons munitions and fresh troops into the war on the Side of Britain .

But moreover the extent that Fisher may have played in helping Churchill create certain circumstances that increased the risk of this type of incident in happening.

On the Part of Germany's understanding of such an attack , regardless of Lusitania's known bending of agreed international laws governing merchant vessels being used to carry troops and munitions, The Kaiser's personal circle were not used to managing a government where public opinion was such a massive factor in justifying certain actions as the more open society's of Britain and America did.

Mis understanding the importance of emotional turmoil in terms of citizen's public opinion of certain matters' one of them. Hence Germany's initial reaction that essential sealed America's public then state opinion of Germany's moral appearance in the war still at the moment as "over there".