RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner launched by the Cunard Line in 1906 as a Royal Mail Ship. She was the world's largest passenger ship until the completion of her sister three months later. In 1907, she gained the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing, which had been held by German ships for a decade.
Though reserved for conversion as an armed merchant cruiser, Lusitania was not commissioned as such during World War I, but continued a transatlantic passenger service, sometimes carrying war materials in her cargo. The German submarine hit her with a torpedo on 7 May 1915 at 14:10, off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, leading to her sinking about 18 minutes later. Only six of several dozen lifeboats and rafts were successfully lowered; there were 763 survivors out of the 1,960 people on board, while 1,197 perished.The official figures give 1,195 lost out of 1,960, excluding three stowaways who also were lost. The figures here eliminate some repetitions from the list and people subsequently known not to be on board.
The sinking killed 128 US citizens and significantly increased American public support for entering the war, which occurred in 1917 with the United States declaration of war on Germany, after three other US merchant ships had been torpedoed.
Overview German shipping lines were Cunard's main competitors for the custom of transatlantic passengers in the early 20th century, and Cunard responded by building two new 'ocean greyhounds': Lusitania and . Cunard used assistance from the British Admiralty to build both new ships, on the understanding that the ship would be available for military duty in times of war. During construction gun mounts for deck cannons were installed but no guns were ever fitted. Both Lusitania and Mauretania were powered by steam turbines which enabled them to maintain a service speed of . They were equipped with lifts, wireless telegraphy, and electric lights, and provided 50 percent more passenger space than any other ship; the first-class decks were known for their sumptuous furnishings.
A series of tit-for-tat moves intensified the naval portion of World War I. The Royal Navy had blockaded the German Empire at the start of the war; as a reprisal to German naval mining efforts, the United Kingdom then declared the North Sea a military area in the autumn of 1914 and mined the approaches. As their own reprisal, Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom a war zone, wherein all Allied ships would be liable to be sunk without warning. Britain then declared all food imports for Germany were contraband. When submarines failed to sink many ships, the German authorities loosened U-boat rules of engagement. The German embassy in the United States also placed fifty newspaper advertisements warning people of the dangers of sailing on a British ship in the area, which happened to appear just as RMS Lusitania left New York for Britain on 1 May 1915. Objections were made by the British and Americans that threatening to torpedo all ships indiscriminately was wrong, whether it was announced in advance or not.
On the afternoon of 7 May, a German U-boat torpedoed Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland inside the declared war zone. A second internal explosion occurred. The damage caused her to sink in 18 minutes, killing 1,197 passengers and crew. Hundreds of bodies washed ashore, but most were never found.
The German government attempted to find justifications for sinking Lusitania. Special justifications focused on the small declared cargo of 173 tons of war materials on board the 44,000-ton displacement ship, and false claims that she was an armed warship and carried Canadian troops. In defence of indiscriminately sinking ships without warning, they asserted that cruiser rules were obsolete, as British merchant ships could be armed and had been instructed to evade or ram U-boats if the opportunity arose, and that the general warning given to all ships in the war zone was sufficient.
After the First World War, successive British governments maintained that there were no "munitions", apart from small arms ammunition on board Lusitania, and the Germans were not justified in treating the ship as a naval vessel. But the most important protests at the time came from the US. Under neutrality inspections, the US was aware the ship was not armed, was acting in accordance with American law, and was chiefly a passenger vessel carrying almost two thousand civilian passengers and crew, including over a hundred American citizens among the dead. The US government argued that whatever the circumstances, nothing could justify the killing of large numbers of un-resisting civilians, and that the United States had a responsibility to protect the lives of law-abiding Americans. The Americans had already warned the Germans repeatedly about their actions, and the Germans had also demonstrated that submarines were able to sink merchant ships under cruiser rules.
The sinking shifted public and leadership opinion in the United States against Germany. US and internal German pressure led to a suspension of German Admiralty policy of deliberately targeting passenger ships, as well as later stronger restrictions. War was eventually declared in 1917 after the German government chose to violate these restrictions, deliberately attacking American shipping and preparing the way for conflict with the Zimmermann Telegram.
Development and construction
Lusitania and Mauretania were commissioned by Cunard, responding to increasing competition from rival transatlantic passenger companies, particularly the German Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) and Hamburg America Line (HAPAG). They had larger, faster, more modern, and more luxurious ships than Cunard, and they were better placed to capture the lucrative trade in emigrants leaving Europe for North America. The NDL liner captured the Blue Riband from Cunard's in 1897, before the prize was taken in 1900 by the HAPAG ship . NDL regained the prize in 1903 with the and , and Cunard saw its passenger numbers affected as a result of the "s".
American businessman J. P. Morgan had decided to invest in transatlantic shipping by creating International Mercantile Marine (IMM). He purchased the British freight shipper Frederick Leyland & Co. in 1901, as well as a controlling interest in the British passenger White Star Line, and folded them into IMM. In 1902, IMM, NDL, and HAPAG entered into a "Community of Interest" to fix prices and divide the transatlantic trade. The partners also acquired a 51-percent stake in the Dutch Holland America Line. IMM made offers to purchase Cunard which was now its principal rival, along with the French Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (CGT).
Cunard chairman Lord Inverclyde approached the British government for assistance. The government was faced with the impending collapse of the British liner fleet and the consequent loss of national prestige, as well as the reserve of shipping for war purposes which it represented, and they agreed to help. Under the terms of an agreement signed in June 1903, Cunard was given a loan of £2.6 million to finance two ships, repayable over 20 years at a favourable interest rate of 2.75-percent. The ships would receive an annual operating subsidy of £75,000 each plus a mail contract worth £68,000. In return, the ships would be built to Admiralty specifications so that they could be used as auxiliary cruisers in wartime. Lusitania and her sister ship received special permission to fly the Blue Ensign, as a Royal Naval Reserve Merchant Vessel.
Design
Cunard established a committee to decide upon the design for the new ships, of which James Bain, Cunard's Marine Superintendent was the chairman. Other members included Rear Admiral H. J. Oram, who had been involved in designs for steam turbine-powered ships for the Royal Navy, and Charles Parsons, whose company Parsons Marine was now producing turbine engines.
Parsons maintained that he could design engines capable of maintaining a speed of , which would require . The largest turbine sets built so far had been of for the battleship , and for s, which meant the engines would be of a new, untested design. Turbines offered the advantages of generating less vibration than the reciprocating engines and greater reliability in operation at high speeds, combined with lower fuel consumption. Having initially turned down the use of this relatively untried type of engine, Cunard was persuaded by the Admiralty to set up a committee of marine professionals to look at its possible use on the new liners. The relative merits of turbines and reciprocating engines were investigated in a series of trials between Newhaven and Dieppe using the turbine-driven cross-Channel ferry Brighton and the similarly-designed Arundel, which had reciprocating engines. The Turbine Committee was convinced by these and other tests that turbines were the way forward and recommended on 24 March 1904 that they should be used on the new express liners. In order to gain some experience of these new engines, Cunard asked John Brown to fit turbines on , the second of a pair of 19,500 GRT intermediate liners under construction at the yard. Carmania was completed in 1905 and this gave Cunard almost two years of experience before the introduction of their new super liners in 1907.
The ship was designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland. The ship's name was taken from Lusitania, an ancient Roman province on the west of the Iberian Peninsula—the region that is now southern Portugal and Extremadura (Spain). Her sister ship, Mauretania, was named for the ancient land on the nearby northwest African coast. The name Lusitania had also been used by a previous ship built in 1871 and wrecked in 1901, making the name available from Lloyd's for Cunard's giant.
Peskett had built a large model of the proposed ship in 1902 showing a three-funnel design. A fourth funnel was implemented into the design in 1904 as it was necessary to vent the exhaust from additional boilers fitted after steam turbines had been settled on as the power plant. The original plan called for three propellers, but this was altered to four because it was felt the necessary power could not be transmitted through just three. Four turbines would drive four separate propellers, with additional reversing turbines to drive the two inboard shafts only. To improve efficiency, the two inboard propellers rotated inward, while those outboard rotated outward. The outboard turbines operated at high pressure; the exhaust steam then passing to those inboard at relatively low pressure.
The propellers were driven directly by the turbines, for sufficiently robust gearboxes had not yet been developed, and only became available in 1916. Instead, the turbines had to be designed to run at a much lower speed than those normally accepted as being optimum. Thus, the efficiency of the turbines installed was less at low speeds than a conventional reciprocating steam engine, but considerably superior when the engines were run at high speed, as was usually the case for an express liner. The ship was fitted with 23 double-ended and two single-ended boilers (which fitted the forward space where the ship narrowed), operating at a maximum and containing 192 individual furnaces.