Lusitania in New York. Alexei Monreal collection.
Perhaps it is fitting that this website’s 100th post should fall on the 100th anniversary of the Lusitania‘s last voyage. One hundred years ago today, the RMS Lusitania sailed out of New York Harbor and into the history books. Seven days later, on 7 May 1915, she would be at the bottom of the Celtic Sea, and 1,198 of her 1,959 passengers and crew, including 128 Americans, would be dead, and a neutral United States would be pushed ever closer into declaring war against Germany.
This horrific attack on civilian lives in the first half of World War I bears certain comparisons with September 11th (expounded on in the afterword of Max Allan Collins’ The Lusitania Murders) in how innocent civilians were attacked in an act of war, spurring the United States on the path to war. Collins even mentions James Brooks‘ chilling choice of words in describing the sinking, comparing the death throes of the Lusitania with “the collapse of a great building on fire.”
The political fallout from this appalling tragedy that turned American public opinion against Germany has fueled suspicions of a conspiracy designed to pull the United States into the Great War. After all, how could any government allow its citizens (the majority of the passengers and crew were British) and foreign citizens (such as US nationals) to become victims of such a great crime?
Without any hard evidence having come to light to prove such a conspiracy, the other, less gripping possibility remains: Maybe someone in the Admiralty just screwed up with catastrophic consequences.
This possibility certainly sounds less riveting, but applying the law of Occam’s Razor, that the simplest explanation is usually the right one, this possibility deserves to be explored. During May of 1915, what else was going on that would have caused the Admiralty to not pay attention to the danger that innocent civilians would be exposed to?–well, there was the Gallipoli Campaign.
Gallipoli is the thin peninsula across from Çanakkale. Yellow is the Dardanelles Strait;
red is the Bosporous Strait. Thomas Steiner/Wikimedia Commons
Ottoman Turkey was fighting in World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the Allies sought to break Turkey by having the British and French pinch from the Aegean and Russians pinch from the Black Sea, with the goal of capturing the Ottoman capital of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul). The fall of Constantinople would allow free passage for Allied ships from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. While the Allies had long talked of either attacking the Ottomans or trying to get them to join the side of the Allies, the man who finally proposed the naval attack on the Ottomans was First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill–the same Churchill who would lead Britain and to Allies to victory against Nazi Germany 30 years later in World War II.
More details of the Gallipoli Campaign can be found on Wikipedia, but to make a long story short, the Allied invasion began on 25 April, one week before the Lusitania was to depart New York for the last time. The campaign was causing a great detail of stress and tension in the Admiralty, as Gallipoli was a disaster for the Allies from the start. In fact, by the time the campaign wrapped in January 1916, Gallipoli ended up being one of the greatest Ottoman victories of World War I and one of the greatest fiascos for the Allies. First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill erupted into bitter arguments over this debacle, leading to a nervous breakdown for Fisher and ending with Fisher’s resignation from the Admiralty and Churchill’s dismissal, both in May 1915, well before the campaign was anywhere close to coming to an end.
Churchill (left) and Fisher (right) in 1913.
Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons/Joseph Gilbey.
Furthermore, both Churchill and Fisher were known micromanagers who only trusted getting things done themselves, not by others. If the British were planning to have the Lusitania sunk to draw the United States during the war, Churchill would have had to approve of such a plot. Furthermore, if he did so, he would have stayed in Britain to ensure that the plot went according to plan. But the day the Lusitania sank, Churchill wasn’t even in England. He was in France, participating in a naval convention to attempt to bring Italy onto the Allied side.
The lack of correspondence between Churchill and Fisher during the Lusitania‘s last crossing has also fueled speculation of a conspiracy, but considering the strain between the two men and the fact that Churchill was in France and Fisher was having a nervous breakdown, it’s entirely possible that the lack of correspondence is because none from that time actually ever existed.
Considering the damage control the Admiralty was running at the time because of Gallipoli, and Britain’s desperation to court Italy for the Allies, it seems that the Admiralty had bigger fish to fry than looking after a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic. So, case closed, right?
Well, no–not really.
Even though ocean travel today may seem quaint, Lusitania was built with cutting-edge technology of her time. She wasn’t just a toy of the moneyed elite. The British Government so believed in the frontiers of technology that Lusitania was pushing (she was the first, large ship to run on turbine engines, ever) that they loaned Cunard money to build her. Lusitania was a symbol of national prestige built with public money. She was the Concorde, the Space Shuttle of her day. She also had naval auxiliary capabilities, with the potential to be converted into a state-of-the-art weapon if the British Government ever needed her service. Simply put, to the British, the Lusitania mattered.
Just how important Lusitania was to the British becomes apparent in light of the British Government’s actions to do everything possible to protect her when she was scheduled to arrive in Liverpool on 6 March 1915:
- Trade Division signalled Lusitania at Cunard’s request, relaying,”Owners advise keep well out. Time arrival to cross bar without waiting.”
- Admiral Henry Oliver sent two destroyers, HMS Laverock and HMS Louis to escort Lusitania
- Admiral Oliver also sent Q ship HMS Lyons to patrol Liverpool Bay, even with the shortage of available destroyers at the time.
But these precautions came to naught as Captain Dow, not wishing to disclose his location to listening Germans, steamed Lusitania into Liverpool by herself. Compare these precautions with Lusitania‘s last crossing, where the Admiralty said nothing and did nothing at all.
Room 40, the Admiralty’s intelligence arm, knew of the 23 ships torpedoed between 1 and 7 May in the area Lusitania would be steaming through, and none of this news was relayed to Lusitania, despite the fact that the survivors of these attacks specifically requested the news to reach Lusitania. Radio silence would not have been an excuse, as Admiral Oliver could have alerted Vice Admiral Coke at Queenstown of the danger if he could not reach Lusitania. Four destroyers, Lucifer, Legion, Linnet, and Laverock were idle and available–an excess of them instead of the shortage during the previous voyage–to escort Lusitania, but they were not ordered to do anything.
The real clincher: radio exchanges between Lusitania and the Admiralty from 5 to 7 May are either “lost” or remain classified to this day. As Patrick Beesly, author of Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914 – 1918 and formerly staunch critic of the conspiracy theory puts it:
The very unsatisfactory nature of the official enquiry held in June 1915 and the refusal then, and for the next sixty-six years, of the British authorities to disclose all the information in their possession, has only succeeded in fueling suspicions … German and American records are also remarkable for the absence of certain papers which once existed but which can no longer, apparently, be produced.
Image courtesy Roy Baker, Curator, Leece Museum, Isle of Man.
Beesly’s thesis, that he is “reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put the Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war,” rests mostly on the supposition that men of Churchill’s caliber are simply not capable of screwing up that badly. Room 40 had a rough idea of where the submarines were and knew for certain that the Lusitania was sailing into the danger zone; the Admiralty had 10 days to act to protect fellow British subjects and foreign civilians but did nothing. Therefore, in Beesly’s eyes, no one could be so incompetent to let such a literal disaster happen by accident that it must have happened by design.
To make a modern analogy, let’s say that the government had advance warning of a terrorist attack on a Concorde flight (since they’re retired now, we can say a passenger-carrying, state-of-the-art spacecraft if we want to be futuristic), and that the government not only had a general idea of an attack on some craft at some time, but knew the details down to the date, the flight number and specific craft, and even the part into the craft’s trip that it would likely be targeted; that government intelligence had given this and other air/spacecraft detailed commands on how to avoid terror attacks on previous occasions. This time, however, government intelligence did absolutely nothing, and the flight was attacked. Such catastrophic lack of action to protect this specific flight against a known threat would be unconscionable, if unforgivable. In light of these details, it is understandable why people see conspiracy painted all over the Lusitania disaster.
But people of Churchill’s caliber probably are capable of screwing up that badly. To bring up 9/11 again, the lapse of intelligence that allowed for such an egregious attack on American soil showed how vulnerable and fallible people who we entrust our security to actually are. We want to believe that the government is all-powerful and capable of either protecting us or sacrificing us for some Machiavellian purpose, perhaps because believing so gives us a sense of security (then again, I’m no psychology major). When we see such a cataclysmic failure of a system that we believe to be omnipotent, a system that is supposed to keep us safe, we want to make sense of the chaotic, the atrocious and the inexplicable–We want to believe in a conspiracy.
Just like the Lusitania, people see conspiracies in 9/11, but that is a whole other can of worms that I have not specialized in to make any qualified statements. But regardless of whether a conspiracy was behind any disaster, people want to see one to make the world make sense in our heads.
In this case, any missing documents in the British, American, and German files relating to Lusitania might not be about intricate plots to involve the Americans in the Great War, but rather officials covering their tracks to make sure that any ruinous mistakes were never to be traced back to them. As it was, no one in the Admiralty was ever held accountable or even reprimanded for the loss of the Lusitania. But to be fair to American intelligence, they were looking at a much nebulous time frame for when an attack on American soil would happen, especially as buildings don’t move to other places on a fixed schedule. The British were working with a time frame of 10 days with a schedule that was not only pretty much fixed but openly advertised in newspapers.
So, was the Lusitania disaster a deliberately designed conspiracy, or an intelligence failure of imagination and action of immense proportions and massive consequences? The jury is still out on this one.
Really interesting article. Seems 2201 passengers is now the accepted figure. It is also interesting that all drawings/images/paintings of the sinking ship appear to have smoke coming from the rearmost funnel. Of course for economy sake the boilers which were vented from this funnel were not in use; therefore no smoke.
There is also her questionable cargo and the bigger than a torpedo explosion that sunk her so quickly. Not only left like a sitting duck but with a belly full of explosives. Interesting comparison with 9/11 whichever side of these arguments one tends to believe.