Sinking of the Lusitania
A German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania off Ireland in 1915, killing 1,197 civilians and hardening American opinion against Germany.
It took eighteen minutes. At 2:10 in the afternoon on May 7, 1915, a single torpedo from the German submarine U-20 struck the Cunard liner Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale, on the southern coast of Ireland. A second, larger explosion followed from somewhere inside the hull. The ship listed so violently that most of her lifeboats were useless, and she went down bow first before rescue could reach her. Of the 1,960 people aboard, 1,197 died, among them 128 Americans and 94 children. The Titanic had taken over two and a half hours to founder; the Lusitania was gone in eighteen minutes, and the shock reached far beyond the water.
The controversy
Germany did not deny the sinking; it defended it. Berlin had declared the waters around Britain a war zone, and the German embassy had even placed a warning in American newspapers, printed beside Cunard's own advertisements, telling passengers they sailed at their own risk. The Lusitania, Germany argued, was a legitimate target because she carried war material for Britain. This was partly true. In her hold were roughly 4.2 million rounds of rifle ammunition, some 5,000 shrapnel shell casings, and thousands of brass fuses. Whether that cargo caused the fatal second explosion is still argued a century later. But the claim that a liner full of civilians was fair game did Germany no good in the court of opinion. What the world saw was not a munitions ship. It was drowned women and children.
The turn in American opinion
The sinking did not bring the United States into the war, and that is the point most often missed. President Woodrow Wilson, who had won office as the man who kept the country out of Europe's quarrel, refused to be stampeded. 'There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,' he said days later, a line his critics never let him forget. Instead he sent a series of stiff notes demanding that Germany stop attacking passenger ships. For a time it worked: rather than risk dragging America in, Germany pulled back, and by 1916 had largely suspended unrestricted submarine warfare.
But the Lusitania had done something quieter and more lasting. It hardened a neutral country's sense of who the aggressor was. Theodore Roosevelt called it piracy and murder. Recruiting posters turned the ship's name into a rallying cry. The image of a passenger liner sunk without warning lodged itself in the American imagination and waited there.
When Germany gambled in early 1917 on sinking every ship near Britain, and when the Zimmermann Telegram exposed a plot to set Mexico against the United States, that stored memory came due. Wilson asked Congress for war in April 1917. The Lusitania had not lit the fuse. It had laid the powder, and for two years Americans remembered the eighteen minutes it took a liner to disappear.