Owning a fragment of history — a Gettysburg bullet, a Coolidge campaign button — is fun, so in 1968, Gregg Bemis became an owner of the Lusitania. This 787-foot-long passenger liner has been beneath 300 feet of water off Ireland’s south coast since a single German torpedo sank it 100 years ago Thursday. It contains the 4 million U.S.-made rifle bullets and other munitions that the ship had been carrying from neutral America to wartime Britain.
It is commonly but wrongly said that the sinking altered history’s trajectory. Yet some people, including Britain’s first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, hoped an attack on a ship would pull America into the war. They may have facilitated Lusitania’s calamity by not taking available measures to prevent it. Of the 1,198 who perished, 128 were Americans.
In “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania,” Erik Larson notes that early in 1915, warfare was evolving. On January 19, two zeppelins conducted Germany’s first air raid on Britain. On April 22, near Ypres, Belgium, Germans sent a cloud of chlorine gas drifting toward French and Canadian lines.
Larson’s story concerns a technology central to Germany’s strategy: Submarines supposedly would interdict supplies heading to Britain, which imported two-thirds of its food. The morning the Lusitania left New York, Germany’s U.S. embassy placed on the shipping pages of the city’s newspapers its usual notice that vessels flying the British flag “are liable to destruction” in the war zone, including waters around the United Kingdom. Capt. William Turner soothed anxious passengers by noting that his ship could outrun a submarine. This was reassuring only assuming he would know where the submarines would be. Turner also said that upon entering the war zone, the ship would be enveloped by the British Navy’s protection. He was wrong.