Voices of the Lusitania

By Diana Preston

On 7 May 1915, without warning and against international law, the German submarine U-20 torpedoed the British Cunard liner RMS Lusitania off the southern Irish coast. She sank in just eighteen minutes with the loss of 1,198 of the 1,959 passengers aboard, including 128 citizens of the then neutral United States. What happened off the Irish coast that warm spring day of 1915 was a personal tragedy that ranks with the Titanic, lost three years earlier. The political fall-out was momentous, triggering a sequence of events that two years later would bring the United States into the First World War. It would be said that although the ship had failed to deliver her 200 American passengers safely to Liverpool in 1915, in 1917 and 1918 her ghost carried 2 million US troops to the Western Front. Through the voices of victims and perpetrators, politicians and diplomats, the public and the press, this is the story of how one ship altered the course of history.