Carter Roy

Many passengers put on their life jackets wrong, flipped over, and were trapped upside down, drowning on the surface.

Just awful.

Rescue boats picked up as many floating survivors as they could, and then the bodies.

The fatality count was unclear at first.

The ship's records were imperfect with incorrect names.

The Lusitania carried an unusually high amount of children and babies weren't listed at all since they sailed for free.

The bodies washed up on the shore had been damaged in the explosion or decayed in the ocean.

In the end,

Out of the 1,959 people on board, 1,198 died, including 123 Americans and 27 infants.

The 764 survivors got a 25% lifetime discount on future Cunard Line cruises.

Slap in the face if you ask me.

At the end of the day, it wasn't one error that jeopardized Lusitania, but a series of small decisions that put the ship in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The slow speed, the nice weather, the change in route, the presence of one ship and one U-boat with nothing else at sea, all contributing coincidences.

And all, officially, led to the German U-boat firing two torpedoes at an innocent passenger liner, sinking it shockingly fast.

But so many things went exactly right for the Germans, people started to wonder.

Was it all coincidence?

Maybe not.

About a decade later, classified files revealed that a secret military group spied on every boat, ship, and submarine in the Celtic Sea during the war.

And they might have planned the entire incident.

When the Lusitania sank in 1915, the UK government said it was a commercial passenger ship torpedoed twice by a German U-boat.