lusitania definition us history

lusitania definition us history

The Lusitania Incident: A Turning Point in US History

1. Introduction to the Lusitania

On May 7th of that year, shortly after 2 p.m. off the coast of Kinsale, Ireland, the Lusitania was hit and sunk by a single torpedo fired by the German U-boat U-20. The ship’s design, location, and steering were no match for the fast and unexpected attack, supported by the nature and quantity of her cargo and other contributing reasons. In the ensuing panic, more passengers were drowned than were saved, causing the death of 1,198 civilians, including 128 US citizens. Classified as a civilian passenger liner, in addition to nobility, men, women, and children, the Lusitania was also packed with a vast quantity of various types of ordinance, military clothing, and armored vehicles. Shot on its helm by the Royal Navy via the Admiralty and her owner, the Cunard Line, in charge of Captain William Turner, the Lusitania sank in 18 minutes, and the judicial inquiry into the loss of the ship exonerated both of them from all blame. However, with the opportunity to move the public over to their side and away from Germany, both the British and the US authorities were quick and successful in turning the tables to their advantage. Indeed, the rapid loss and the sinking of the Lusitania served as some of the most powerful propaganda tools of the war.

More than thirty years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was another single event that triggered America’s formal entry into the First World War. If the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary caused the First World War, the sinking of the rapid passenger liner Lusitania is seen as the catalyst that pulled America out of its supposed isolationist stance to become a full participant in a global military conflict fronted predominantly by the European powers. Commissioned in 1906, the Lusitania was the largest, fastest, and most luxurious ocean liner of her day. However, by 1915, the date of her final voyage, she was already dwarfed by the German U-boats lying in wait off the coasts of Great Britain, France, and Ireland.

2. The Impact of the Sinking on US Involvement in WWI

The ship’s sinking did nothing to unite the conflict’s American opponents. Since the war was “between capital and labor, having no underlying causes beyond the desire of aristocrats to take from the poor,” critics of US neutrality would argue to make such a point the global conflict was a rich person’s war and a poor person’s fight. Popular critics of bonded opulence shared such a view. Despite its losing effort in the Senate, New Jersey’s Borah answered the “Americanist” business-class view that, in order not to “plunge into war,” “we have done everything which a self-respecting nation situated as we are could do.” The definition of “nation” that Borah and Congress’s other opposing spokesmen would use was a working person’s.

One modern scholar calls the Lusitania incident “a major turning point in the war,” since it made any notion that the United States should join the wartime alliance against the German High Command a question that could no longer be debated in polite society, and Congress was the lobbying forum of politeness. In fact, Congressman Driscoll and others began their lobbying for a declaration of war with an allusion to incivility. Prefacing his view of the issue as an “Irish-American,” who therefore had a sensitivity to England’s mistreatment of the rest of the “Empire,” Driscoll would make clear that “non-intervention” was no longer a serious option. His argument was that The Lusitania “gifted to the American people a question which compelled an answer and a decision. Americans could no longer continue to speculate, to debate abstractly, to uphold theories in the face of practical situations.”

3. Media Coverage and Public Opinion

In the Dutch language, there is a rather good translation for ‘turning point’ that may symbolize the backward character of an about-face movement. The expression is “keerpunt” which in English can be translated into turning or return point. The Lusitania incident forms often discussed history keerpunt in public US horror slang. Because, a century later, the motives, forces, and decisions moved American society into a not very distant area of understanding and acting. Yet, the Lusitania glossed over tension areas that never appeared before. It had to reach from high to low society ranks and to many history angles to make history keerpunt self-committable. The inkling, albeit personally unknownable, that not immediately trusted and familiar individuals have meddled defined the suddenly realized sense of danger. The ensuing unwillingness and doubt-endowing silence may thereafter always linger about dubious history situations.

The controversial sinking of the Lusitania filled entire editions of newspapers and all available news bulletins for weeks. Stories about casualties and survivors kept the interest high. Daily news about the first-hand experiences of important people on both sides of the Atlantic released an unparalleled cooperation in international news distribution. The Lusitania disaster brought the American public the first raw taste of World War I and an in-depth knowledge about mass warfare. Stories about the sinking thus created the obedient, war-movement promoting, and volunteer army-building population, ready to enter American military history.

4. Conspiracy Theories and Controversies

The question of why the ship did not take evasive action to avoid the German U-boat presence is addressed by Spencer Dunmore in his book “The Lusitania” (1972; reprinted in 1982). First, the U-20 had quite a head start on the Lusitania who left New York at 12:65 hours April 1 and the U-20 is known to have been in the area 80 kilometres off the Irish coast by 14:43 hours on May 5. Second, the passengers and the Captain were assured that the British Admiralty knew how to route the ship clear of danger and the U-Boat threat was in fact accepted as minuscule in 1915. Also, the thinking was that the Lusitania was more likely to strike a floating mine, which was not uncommon, as the Germans had in fact declared the sea around Britain to be a war zone in response to the British blockade of German ports. Finally, escapist literature and thinking (such as endless steamer trunks) had convinced the ship’s passenger list that war was not to change the comfort of one’s journey.

Long before Oliver Stone’s “JFK”, the sinking of the Lusitania has been surrounded by conspiracy theories. On the Allied side, the German government’s failure to release all of its documentation, lest it reveal details of the Ultra top secret coding program that decrypted German messages beforehand, is often used to implicate them in a devious plan to involve the USA in the war. On the US side, an investigation found that Ly-3, Mark 3 high explosive shells were partly to blame for the velocity of the explosion and the resulting loss of the ship. As these exploded before the ship’s cargo areas were breached, culpability is also assigned to the ship’s owners for carrying high explosives on a passenger ship.

5. Legacy and Historical Significance

In an ironic twist of fate, the existence and luxurious enticements of these temporarily unconverted state-of-the-art general passenger ocean liners attracted peculiar attention from German naval planners and firebrand propagandists like Josef Goebbels. The German High Command decided strategically that after the United States declared war upon the Third Reich, German submarine assaults would target United States passenger liners with convoys of frontline soldiers, not munitions. These tactics were designed after the German Naval High Command recognized that unrestricted attacks on noncombatant vessels minimized or actually postponed US combat activity until Germany had decided the war conclusively with the Soviets and Great Britain. In April 1942, plans for Operation Paukenschlag, translated into English as Operation Drumbeat, were put into action when US cargoes and passenger liners started being targeted by the anti-British German war effort. The United States was deliberately placed under the threat of mass civilian troop ship and shipping convoy destruction through the unprovoked targeting of her large coastal express ocean liners, ships capable of reaching either coast in approximately seven days.

In the aftermath of the Lusitania tragedy, trans-Atlantic shipping companies voluntarily reduced the speed of their ships to conserve fuel, enabling American and Allied trans-Atlantic shipping interests to argue that a greater risk of submarine warfare on the high seas existed. By the late 1930s, complying with these desires, the great United States passenger liners, such as the SS United States and SS America of the United States Lines and the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth of the Cunard White Star Line, became capable of much faster ocean-crossing speeds. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the refurbished trans-Atlantic passenger liners, tied to US national interest, helped initially transport European immigrants and tourists out of war-embattled Europe and then carry US soldiers, marines, and airmen in support of the Europe First resolve against German Nazi aggression.