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Chapter 1: What was the significance of the Lusitania in World War I?
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Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026. Crazed with the Belgian blood so lately shed, the bestial Prussian seeks the ocean's bed. In Neptune's realm the wretched coward lurks, and on the world his wonted evil works. Like slinking cur, he bites where none oppose. Victorious over babes, his valour grows.
One fateful day, may such be nevermore, a stately vessel left Columbia's shore. Upon the wave in fearless grandeur rode, nor feared to bear its blameless, helpless load. No human risk, the watchful captain ran, protected by the common laws of man, the laws of man. What laws can curb or sway the Prussian wolf with manhood cast away?
His idle threat too hideous for belief with its foul truth plunged nations into grief. So that immortal work of poetry was The Crime of Crimes, Lusitania, 1915. And it was first published by a young journalist called H.P. Lovecraft. And that is a name that will be familiar to any fans of horror stories today. He's the great pioneer of that genre.
And he's celebrated as the inventor of Cthulhu, a terrifying and monstrous entity that lurks in hidden depths, and to quote Lovecraft, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. And that poem that I have just read... also describes a source of awful dread that lurks in hidden depths. But it belongs to a very different kind of horror story.
And that horror story is the theme of today's episode, the third in our epic series on the nightmare that was the world in 1915. And it is the story of how the liner RMS Lusitania came to be sunk by a German U-boat, or Dominic, as Lovecraft would put it, a Prussian wolf.
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Chapter 2: How did the German U-boat campaign impact maritime warfare?
So in the 1910s, the understanding is that basically if you see a merchant ship and you're a U-boat, you surface, you come to the surface and you stop the ship and And you demand to search it for contraband. You know, are you carrying war supplies and whatnot? But this is quite fiddly, I guess. It's very fiddly.
And you put the crew and any passengers, you make them get into, you either capture them, which obviously you can't do on a U-boat because you can't put more people on your U-boat. You make them get in the lifeboats and then you blow up their ship. Of which there are now enough, but thanks to the Titanic disaster. Exactly. There should be enough.
You make them get in the lifeboats, then you sink their ship or you capture it in some way. You don't just sink their ship without warning. The issue is, A, as you said, it's very fiddly and very difficult. And B, the British start disguising their warships as merchant ships to lure the Germans in.
So it's a little bit like the bit with the Acheron in Master and Commander, the film, if people have seen that, where Captain Jack Albury disguises his ship as a crippled whaler to lure the French in.
You see, if that was German policy, that would be cheating. But because it's us, it's cunning and clever.
The other thing, of course, as you already mentioned, by the end of 1914, the British have set up a naval blockade of Germany, basically closing the North Sea, because they're hoping to starve the Germans into submission. And faced with this, Grand Admiral Tirpitz and the Chief of Staff, Hugo von Pohl, say to the Kaiser and his Chancellor, Bertrand Holweg,
could we please ditch these antiquated cruiser rules, as they're called, and can we embrace what's called unrestricted submarine warfare? In other words, the gloves are off, we're just going to attack your merchant ships if we see them and sink them, and we're going to drive you off the seas of the world. And the Kaiser and his Chancellor, Bethlehem Holweg, said,
No, we don't want to do this because this will massively antagonize the United States, which obviously controls a lot of the merchant ships that are going hither and thither to Britain. And it might even bring the United States into the war. So there's a lot of dithering, but then at the beginning of February 1915, Paul persuades the Chancellor, Theobald Bettenhoveg, to give it a go.
And he says, do you know what? I'm confident that we can destroy British merchant shipping with just 20 U-boats. That's all it will take. And the chancellor says, well, what about the Americans? Are you not worried about the Americans? No, we're not worried about the Americans. Because we'll advertise this. We'll tell everybody we're doing it. And we will strike really hard at the beginning.
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Chapter 3: What were the circumstances leading to the sinking of the Lusitania?
Might they have been slightly more careful if it had been Teddy Roosevelt, say, or someone of that ilk in the White House?
Teddy Roosevelt is gutted that the Americans aren't fighting in the First World War. He loves a war, doesn't he? He loves a war. He loves two things, Teddy Roosevelt. He loves a war, and he loves Oliver Cromwell. Well, it makes sense. Doesn't he like hunting as well? Bears. Well, he's the father of the teddy bear, isn't he? This is a side issue.
But I think it's important because that presents Wilson as the slightly ineffectual man of peace that he will prove himself to be in due course.
A man of war and of useless treaty making. The 17th of April, the Lusitania leaves Liverpool and it crosses the Atlantic east to west without incident. And a week later in New York, so the 24th, it arrives in New York harbour. And it's due to return on the 1st of May.
Now, meanwhile, the German ambassador in Washington, who's a man called Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, he is very worried that the Americans are underestimating the dangers of all this. And he decides he's going to put an official warning in the American press, so in American newspapers. The official warning, this advert, runs in the American press.
And it says, if you get on an Atlantic ship, be warned, you are travelling into a war zone and that British ships are legitimate targets. Travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
Well, I've got two questions. One is, are there American liners? And if there are, why aren't people just going on the American liners? And the second question is, is the Lusitania, because it's the most famous British liner, a prize in and of itself? And so therefore, do the U-boats know it's coming and are they looking out for it?
Okay, two interesting questions. So first of all, interestingly, and for reasons that I don't know the answer to, American ships don't seem to have been big rivals for the ocean liner business. So at this point, it's all the Germans, some Dutch ships, but also, but obviously British ships. But you don't really hear much mention of American ocean liners.
So I guess there must be smaller American boats, but not big, luxurious ocean liners of this kind. So that's the first answer. And the second answer, I forgot what the question was.
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Chapter 4: How did the sinking of the Lusitania affect American public opinion?
For various humdrum technical reasons, the advert is delayed. So the advert doesn't actually appear in American newspapers. It doesn't first appear until Friday the 30th of April, which is the day before the Lusitania is due to leave New York. And indeed, some papers are actually printing it the next day, the Saturday, the day the passengers are boarding. You wouldn't want to see that, would you?
No, like what's in the paper today? Oh, an advert telling me that if I get on this ship, I'll probably die. So we come to the day of the Lusitania's departure. That's Saturday the 1st of May.
Chapter 5: What were the immediate consequences of the Lusitania's sinking?
And it's due to leave at 10 o'clock in the morning from Manhattan's Pier 54. The Lusitania is still only eight years old. So it's one of the world's great ocean liners. And as you would expect, it's a tremendous spectacle. She's been painted gray, the funnels, but still a spectacular sight. Nine decks, 31,000 tons, 800 feet long, almost. There's a huge hustle and bustle as everybody's boarding.
That said, because of the war and the inevitable fears, so as you said, you know, who would be crossing the Atlantic? The answer is a lot fewer people than normal. There are 1,264 passengers on the Lusitania and 702 crew. So a total of 1,966, let's say just under 2,000. But that is less than half the Lusitania's total capacity.
And of those people who are on the ship, the vast majority are British, there are lots of Canadians, and there are 159 citizens of the United States of America. So that's the passengers, but more controversial is the cargo. It was very common on transatlantic voyages for ships to carry cargo that could be put to military use.
The Lusitania is carrying copper wire, machine parts, these kinds of things in the hold, huge quantities of sort of wire and stuff that clearly could be used by arms manufacturers.
And are they carrying any weapons or ammunition?
The short answer is yes, they are. They're carrying 4 million rounds of Remington .303 rifle ammunition. They're carrying 1,000 cases of shrapnel-filled artillery shells. They're carrying 16 cases of percussion fuses. They're carrying tons and tons, 46 tons, in fact, of aluminium powder, which is used for making explosives. And who sent this? American manufacturers. It's been bought.
To the British Army? To British... Armaments manufacturers. Yeah, armaments manufacturers. Exactly, British factories.
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Chapter 6: How did the British government respond to the Lusitania disaster?
Now, this is incredibly controversial. So later on, after the Lusitania sank, the Germans said, look at this. I mean, you're carrying war contraband. This is obviously war stuff. But the American government's position was, you know, this is not an arms trade between two nations. This is completely standard on transatlantic shipping. This is, and I quote, a private legal shipment of small arms.
The rifle ammunition is the kind that would have gone back and forth. between Britain and America during peacetime, and it can be used by private citizens, and it's continued in wartime as well. And in no way does this violate United States neutrality. And I think a fair-minded observer... would surely say the Americans are stretching a point here.
And the Germans, obviously, are not being unreasonable in saying you are shipping military material. The one thing I would say, though, is that this is in no way a secret. Everybody knows that Cunard are doing this. It has been well known for months that ocean liners carry cargo like this.
And the British and American position is, well, it doesn't really matter because the big issue is the safety of the passengers. And you, the Germans, as supposedly decent civilized people, you should put the safety of the passengers first. And basically, you should do everything in your power to save their lives. And the fact that the ship is also carrying munitions is neither here nor there.
I mean, it's kind of basically using civilians as human shields to kind of protect military targets. I think that's a pretty fair assessment. I mean, I don't want to sound unpatriotic.
Yeah, if you had made that assessment in an article in the Morning Post in 1915, there would have been a mob outside your house.
Yeah, white feathers all around.
Yeah, white feathers, exactly. But I think it's completely reasonable. I think if there are German listeners to this podcast... They would definitely be raising an eyebrow at this and saying, come on. I mean, I don't think it's reasonable that you're transporting all this stuff and pretending it's just a civilian ship. Anyway, the passengers, a lot of them are very anxious.
The German warning has now appeared in 50 American newspapers. Some of them ran it on the Friday, some on the Saturday morning. And one paper, very famously, you can see Clippings Online, actually runs it next to a Cunard advert for the Lusitania. So next to each other, it's like, sale the Lusitania. And next to it is a thing saying, if you sell the Lusitania, we will give you up, basically.
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