A century ago, crossing the Atlantic was no picnic. If it wasn’t the icebergs, it was the damn torpedoes.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: May 7, 1915--
Well, if you were rich it was pretty nice, as the Lusitania was a helluva ship with all sorts of fancy shit for those who weren’t down in steerage with Leonardo DiCa—oh, shit. Wrong boat. Anyway, for a time it was the world’s largest passenger ship and held the record for fastest commercial Atlantic crossing.
On May 7, 1915, the ship was nearing the end of its New York – Liverpool crossing when a German U-Boat attacked. Because World War I. Except they called it The Great War back then; they didn’t know some German corporal was gonna go full fucking murder-psycho and try to rule the world two decades later.
The ship had 1,266 passengers and 696 crew aboard. It also had a shit-ton of munitions for the Allied war effort, so the Germans figured fair game and launched a torpedo, which struck her starboard bow while the ship was 11 miles from the coast of Ireland. A second internal explosion sank her in just 18 minutes, and 1,198 passengers and crew died.
As they are often wont to do, Americans, who had 128 citizens die in the sinking, were ever so pissed. Prior to the sinking, there had been plenty of pro-German voices in the U.S., but the torpedoing mostly shut them right the fuck up. President Badass Wilson (sarcasm) sent some stern letters to Germany, which were mostly ignored.
Don’t ignore the green button:
But the sinking did start a trend, turning American public opinion against the Germans. It took a couple more years, but then this thing called “The Zimmermann Telegram” was intercepted by British Intelligence in January 1917. It was a secret message from Germany to Mexico, proposing an alliance against the U.S., and promising Mexico they’d get Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico out of the deal.
That did not go over well in the U.S., and they entered the war on the side of the Allies on April 6 of that year.
Get the book On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.
Heaven forbid we wait until it hurts the US!
I had previously understood that the sinking was what brought America into the war. I read that British intelligence knew the ship would be bombed and ignored the Intel so that the sinking would lure the Americans and convince Wilson to join the allies. Now I'm confused.