Carter Roy

It was hard to challenge that story since the Lusitania can't be fully investigated.

Even though it sank in only about 300 feet of water, just 11 miles off the Irish coast, it landed on the side that was hit and collapsed on top of itself.

Evidence of the torpedo hits, what exactly exploded and where, is buried on the ocean floor.

Inaccessible.

But the eyewitness accounts earned international headlines.

Reading about the sinking, Americans clamored for war.

Public opinion changed instantly, and when the U.S.

finally joined the war, President Woodrow Wilson cited the Lusitania as one of the reasons.

But after World War I ended in 1918, the discovery of a secret organization cast questions on the whole story.

It started in the 1920s when American lawyer Amos Peasley accepted a seemingly impossible case.

Sue the unknown persons who bombed a New Jersey railroad during World War I.

Peasley took to the case like a dog with a bone, talking his way into a British admiral's personal office and gaining full access to his file cabinets full of war documents.

The files revealed the existence of a secret British naval operation called Room 40, which cracked Germany's secret military code and read all of their encrypted telegraph and radio communications.

Through the course of Peasley's lawsuit, the existence of Room 40 leaked to the public, and so did their classified operations, like tracking German U-boats in 1915.

According to investigative journalist Colin Simpson, Room 40 kept a giant map of European waterways on a wall,

Every day, they moved around pins to update the locations of all known ships and U-boats.

Now, they couldn't pinpoint a ship's exact location at any given time, but they had a general idea of where each submarine was patrolling and could plan accordingly to avoid or attack them.

if all messages were decoded correctly and all went to plan, no British ship would be caught by surprise.

Now you might be thinking, well, wait a minute, Carter, why didn't they just tell the Lusitania that U-boat 20 was near the south coast of Ireland?

That's the conspiracy theory that they chose not to.