More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
thought about how wondrously beautiful the sunlight and water were from below the surface,”
the drowning saved by sights of beauty
passenger reported seeing a woman giving birth in the water. The idea that this might have been his mother would haunt the boy for the rest of his life.
ONLY SIX OF THE LUSITANIA’S TWENTY-TWO CONVENTIONAL lifeboats got away
great swirling greenish white bubble formed where the ship went down, which was a mass of struggling humanity and wreckage!
women wore multiple layers of clothing—corsets, camisoles, petticoats, jumpers, furs—and all these quickly became sodden and heavy. Passengers without life jackets sank. The complicated clothing of children and infants bore them under as well.
heeding the hard lesson taught by the Aboukir disaster, to never go to the aid of submarine victims.
eerie echo of the Titanic disaster, initial reports also indicated that all passengers and crew had been saved.
For children—those who did not drown outright—the killer was hypothermia.
“It was a beautiful sunset,” Simpson recalled, “and all so calm
“songs were being sung, indicating not only a spirit of thankfulness but even of gaiety.”
attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses.
seagulls
the strangeness of the moment, how it juxtaposed joy and tragedy. Here she was, giddy with delight, and yet she had no idea whether her father was alive
OF THE LUSITANIA’S 1,959 PASSENGERS AND CREW, only 764 survived; the total of deaths was 1,195.
Time zones and sluggish communication made it even harder on friends and kin.
of these anonymous dead, about half were later identified using personal effects
618 souls unaccounted for.
Vanderbilt was never found,
absence of a body left them suspended somewhere between hope and grief.
When the thing really comes, God gives to each the help he needs to live or to die.” She described the quiet and the lack of panic among passengers. “They were calm, many of them quite cheerful, and everyone was trying to do the sensible thing,
Admiralty intended to forge a case against Turner. In one, Churchill himself wrote, “We sh’d pursue the Captain without check.”
churchill the bad guy
By blaming Turner, however, the Admiralty hoped to divert attention from its own failure to safeguard the Lusitania. (Questioned on the matter in the House of Commons on May 10, 1915, Churchill had replied, rather coolly, “Merchant traffic must look after itself.”) But there were other secrets to protect, not just from domestic scrutiny, but also from German watchers—namely the fact that the Admiralty, through Room 40, had known so much about U-20’s travels leading up to the attack. One way to defend those secrets was to draw attention elsewhere.
Turner of any responsibility
great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and artillery shells; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sunk three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North
...more
unanswered questions?
there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.”
wow* real reason.lusitania was bait fish!
when the torpedo exploded, the concussion shook the ship with such violence that the nearly empty coal bunkers became clouded with explosive coal dust, which then ignited.
cause of second explosion
What most likely caused the second event was the rupture of a main steam line,
IN THE END, Schwieger’s attack on the Lusitania succeeded because of a chance confluence of forces. Even the tiniest alteration in a single vector could have saved the ship.
a summary of these cuases follows:
Really the only good piece of luck that Friday was the weather.
much of America seemed to share Wilson’s reluctance. There was anger, yes, but no clear call to war,
German popular reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania was exultant.
“too proud to fight”
wilson
In his note
first Lusitania note from Wilson
Wilson’s protest—the so-called First Lusitania Note—was the initial salvo in what would become a two-year war of paper,
turning Germany’s U-boats loose, and allowing their captains to sink every vessel that entered the “war zone,” Holtzendorff proposed to end the war in six months.
“Make war together,” Zimmermann proposed. “Make peace together.” In return, Germany would take measures to help Mexico seize previously held lands—“lost territory”—in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
“The world,” he said, “must be made safe for democracy.”
wilson
Four days passed before both houses of Congress approved a resolution for war.
Just ten days later, the U.S. Navy dispatched a squadron of destroyers.
Churchill’s book, in which Churchill persisted in blaming Turner for the disaster
he was not haunted by the disaster; nor did it leave him depressed and broken,
turner
A new war came, and on September 16, 1941, a Nazi U-boat torpedoed and sank a British ship, the Jedmoor, off the Outer Hebrides, killing thirty-one of its thirty-six crew. Among the lost was a fifty-five-year-old able seaman named Percy Wilfred Turner—Captain Turner’s youngest son.
While trying to escape, Schwieger steered his boat into a British minefield. Neither he nor his crew survived,
