Sinking Of The Lusitania Quotes

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it. On January 30, 1945, four torpedoes waited in the belly of Soviet submarine S-13.

You don’t pay much attention to the construction of ships?” “No, as long as they float; if they sink, I get out.

The company had a remarkable safety record: not a single passenger death from sinking, collision, ice, weather, fire, or any other circumstance where blame could be laid upon captain or company,

One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes.

Look into the sinking of the Lusitania also,” Cassie added. “The Germans sinking that ship filled with American passengers was the reason the US got involved in World War I. The Germans posted warnings in American newspapers not to sail in the area because it was a war zone, yet the Lusitania sailed right into a place known to be filled with German subs. If the government was looking for public support to get into the war, that event gave them what they wanted.

The first submarine ever credited with sinking an enemy ship was the Confederate navy’s H. L. Hunley, which, during the American Civil War, sank the Union navy’s frigate, the Housatonic. The Hunley, propelled by a crew of eight using hand cranks to turn its propeller, approached the Housatonic after dark, carrying a large cache of explosives at the end of a thirty-foot spar jutting from its bow. The explosion destroyed the frigate; it also sank the Hunley, which disappeared with all hands.

German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship leaving Britain had a one-in-four chance of being sunk. In

The expulsion of Spain from Cuba (a worthwhile venture) so that the U.S. could take control of Cuba (an unworthy venture) was preceded by a dubious story, never proven, that the Spaniards had exploded the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor. Our seizure of the Philippines (from the Filipinos) was preceded by a manufactured “incident” between Filipino and U.S. troops. The German sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania in World War I was one of the instances of “ruthless” submarine warfare given as a reason to enter that war; years afterward, it was disclosed that the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but a munitions ship whose papers had been doctored.

the Lusitania was deliberately sent to her doom. Prior to the incident, Winston Churchill, then head of the British Admiralty, had ordered a study done to determine the political impact if the Germans sank a British passenger ship with Americans on board. And just before the sinking, Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, asked Edward Mandell House, top advisor to President Woodrow Wilson: “What will America do if the Germans sink an ocean liner with American passengers on board?

Both camps maneuvered to win the endorsement of Kaiser Wilhelm, who, as the nation’s supreme military leader, had the final say. He authorized U-boat commanders to sink any ship, regardless of flag or markings, if they had reason to believe it was British or French. More importantly, he gave the captains permission to do so while submerged, without warning. The most important effect of all this was to leave the determination as to which ships were to be spared, which to be sunk, to the discretion of individual U-boat commanders. Thus a lone submarine captain, typically a young man in his twenties or thirties, ambitious, driven to accumulate as much sunk tonnage as possible, far from his base and unable to make wireless contact with superiors, his vision limited to the small and distant view afforded by a periscope, now held the power to make a mistake that could change the outcome of the entire war. As Chancellor Bethmann would later put it, “Unhappily, it depends upon the attitude of a single submarine commander whether America will or will not declare war.

A German admiral, Henning von Holtzendorff, came up with a plan so irresistible it succeeded in bringing agreement between supporters and opponents of unrestricted warfare. By turning Germany’s U-boats loose, and allowing their captains to sink every vessel that entered the “war zone,” Holtzendorff proposed to end the war in six months. Not five, not seven, but six. He calculated that for the plan to succeed, it had to begin on February 1, 1917, not a day later. Whether or not the campaign drew America into the war didn’t matter, he argued, for the war would be over before American forces could be mobilized. The plan, like its territorial equivalent, the Schlieffen plan, was a model of methodical German thinking, though no one seemed to recognize that it too embodied a large measure of self-delusion. Holtzendorff bragged, “I guarantee upon my word as a naval officer that no American will set foot on the Continent!” Germany’s top civilian and military leaders converged on Kaiser Wilhelm’s castle at Pless on January 8, 1917, to consider the plan, and the next evening Wilhelm, in his role as supreme military commander, signed an order to put it into action, a decision that would prove one of the most fateful of the war.

Hall loved the surprise of intelligence work and loved knowing the real stories behind events reported in the news, which often were censored. For example, Room 40 learned the real fate of a German submarine, U-28, that attacked a ship carrying trucks on its main deck. One shell fired by the U-boat's gun crew blew up a load of high explosives stored in the ship, and suddenly "the air was full of motor-lorries describing unusual parabolas," Hall wrote. Officially, the U-boat was lost because of explosion. But Hall and Room 40 knew the truth: one of the flying trucks had landed on the submarine's foredeck, penetrating its hull and sinking it instantly. "In point of actual fact," wrote Hall, "U-28 was sunk by a motor-lorry!

Along with enraged responses to Zeppelin air raids, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the use of poison gas in the trenches, these demonisations prompted outrage in the United States and other neutral states at the moral vileness of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany. Bad things were undoubtedly done, but the propaganda technique of encouraging pro-war sentiment in one’s own country by claiming that the enemy commits atrocities is both too tempting to resist and too commonplace to ignore. Its effect is to make going to war against a supposed such enemy more acceptable, providing a moral justification and the requisite preparedness to make and accept sacrifices.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it.

Plainly the Kaiser knew his men ... so he sent them forth to bayonet babes, violate old women, murder old men, crucify officers, violate nuns, sink Lusitanias, and turn solemn treaties into scraps of paper.

It was left to Senator Isidor Rayner to conclude the hearings by saying: “As the ship was sinking, the strains of music were wafting over the deck. … It was a rallying cry for the living and the dying - to rally them not for life, but to rally them for their awaiting death. Almost face to face with their Creator, amid the chaos of this supreme and solemn moment, in inspiring notes the unison resounded through the ship. It told the victims of the wreck that there was another world beyond the seas, free from the agony of pain, and, though with somber tones, it cheered them on to their untimely fate. As the sea closed upon the heroic dead, let us feel that the heavens opened to the lives that were prepared to enter. “…If the melody that was rehearsed could only reverberate through this land ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ and its echoes could be heard in these halls of legislation, and at every place where our rulers and representatives pass judgment and enact and administer laws, and at every home and fireside…and if we could be made to feel that there is a divine law of obedience and of adjustment…far above the laws that we formulate in this presence, then, from the gloom of these fearful hours we shall pass into the dawn of a higher service and of a better day, and then…the lives that went down upon this fated night did not go down in vain.

While strides had definitely been made since the sinking of the Titanic, which took 3 hours to sink after striking an iceberg, the additional lifeboat drills would prove to be insufficient preparation for a torpedoed ship that sank in less than 20 minutes.

Ironically, the fact that the watertight compartments were closed ahead of time meant some crewmen would be trapped in them when the ship was torpedoed and thus had no chance to escape the sinking ship.

To a world that had barely recovered from the shocking loss of the Titanic a few years earlier, the loss of the Lusitania came as a terrible blow.  While the death tolls in each disaster were nearly equal, there were aspects of the Lusitania’s sinking that made it so much more offensive to the human psyche.

Indeed, the British government began warning divers who went to explore the wreck that there were dangerous contents down there: “Successive British governments have always maintained that there was no munitions on board the Lusitania (and that the Germans were therefore in the wrong to claim to the contrary as an excuse for sinking the ship) ... The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous. The Treasury have decided that they must inform the salvage company of this fact in the interests of the safety of all concerned.

With the possible exception of a few soldiers on leave, the ship’s passengers were all civilians, so it may be better to ask whether the Germans were justified in sinking a ship full of civilians simply to keep weapons from falling into their enemies’ hands.

Schwieger was then given command of a larger boat, U-88. The following year, he received the ironically named Pour le Mérite in recognition of his gallantry and service in sinking nearly 200,000 tons of Allied shipping.(83) That fall, he took U-88 on a mission into the North Sea and, on September 5, 1917, Schwieger’s luck ran out when he struck a mine. There were no survivors: Schwieger was just thirty-two.(

Yet however legitimate Schwieger’s actions, it is undeniable that in torpedoing Lusitania he made a grave mistake, if not from a legal perspective than certainly from humanitarian, political, and diplomatic ones. The attendant outcry over Lusitania’s sinking offered the world a vivid exhibition of the very worst excesses of German warfare, painting the dreaded “Huns” as barbaric murderers of innocent women and children. In this sense, as historians Bailey and Ryan wrote, Germany gained a temporary victory that was “worse than a defeat.”(

Once safely whisked away to a friend’s country house, Lauriat sat down and began to write a detailed account of his experiences, published later that year as The Lusitania’s Last Voyage. Lauriat cast a critical eye over everyone involved with the disaster. “I did not think any human being with a drop of red blood in his veins, called a man, could issue an order to sink a passenger steamer without at least giving the women and children a chance to get away,” he wrote.(3) Yet he also heaped scorn on Lusitania’s captain and crew, and on the efforts by the British government to absolve Turner and his men, as well as Cunard and the Admiralty, of any responsibility in the tragedy. Lauriat eventually returned to his family’s book business in Boston, and died in 1937.

The sinking of Lusitania underlined the brutality of war in a previously unthinkable way. For the first time in the conflict, a large number of civilians were sacrificed as if they were nameless soldiers: brutally and without consideration, underscoring the terrible tragedy of the war itself. And the sinking played out in an unexpected way. Life aboard Lusitania was still largely stratified by social class and financial worth, yet what happened in those pivotal eighteen minutes destroyed any illusions about privilege. A few passengers, like Alfred Vanderbilt, rigidly clung to traditional notions of a gentlemen’s code; in doing so, he perished, just as the brightest generation of British and European young men, standing by similar conceptions of tradition, did in trenches across the continent. Death and survival were random: passengers assuming their lives would continue on as normal saw their world turned upside down. Those fortunate enough to get into lifeboats were hurled into the sea and killed; people who remained on deck survived. Lady Allan’s two daughters perished; her two maids survived. The utter randomness of the disaster mocked expectation.

The Edwardian Era’s mythology painted Edward Smith and his crew aboard Titanic as heroic figures. The captain went down with his ship, his death atoning for whatever navigational mistakes contributed to the disaster. And Smith’s crew had lingered below in the sinking ship, stoking furnaces to keep the lights burning, aware that they would likely not escape. The contrast between the behavior of the crews of Titanic and Lusitania is stunning. Perhaps the war heightened sensitivities to looming death; then, too, Lusitania’s crew were largely a poorly trained, haphazardly drawn bunch with no loyalty to Cunard, the ship, or her captain. Refusing to give away their lifebelts to help passengers and, in at least one instance, actually turning an ax on a terrified passenger, these seamen revealed that their foremost thought was their own preservation.

The effect was lethal and catastrophic, resulting in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people; even Schwieger later professed shock at the destruction he had caused. The man who, recalled one of his friends, described the sinking of Lusitania as “the most terrible sight” he had ever witnessed, a scene “too horrible” for him to watch, only learned just how many had died when he arrived back in Germany. A friend said he was “appalled to discover the anger of outraged humanity that his act had aroused, and horrified at the thought that he was held up all over the world as an object of odium and loathing.”(

With the world in an uproar, Schwieger found himself summoned to Berlin. Despite public pronouncements that the sinking had been justified, authorities in Berlin were now on the defensive; there were rumors that Kaiser Wilhelm II personally berated him, while Admiral Tirpitz recalled that he was treated “very ungraciously” by military officials.(79) After the sinking, Schwieger seemed “so haggard and so silent and so different,” said his fiancée.(80) Yet soon he was back at sea aboard U-20, sinking more ships. In September, he torpedoed the Allan Line’s Hesperian off the Irish coast, again without warning. Thirty-two of the 1,100 aboard died when one of the lifeboats overturned during evacuation. Also aboard was a coffin holding the remains of Lusitania passenger Frances Stephens, who now fell victim to Schwieger a second time when the vessel sank the following day.(81) This time, Schwieger was ordered to apologize for having violated German assurances that no further passenger liners would be attacked without warning.

At first, the war at sea followed a gentlemanly set of informal regulations known as the Cruiser Rules, codified by The Hague Conventions in 1899 and 1907. An armed ship or U-boat encountering an enemy merchant vessel was expected to give warning either by a shot across the bow or by semaphore flags. The challenged ship was to stop and allow a search of its cargo; if no contraband was discovered, she could proceed. If she was found to be carrying munitions or war matériel, her crew and any passengers were to be allowed sufficient time to abandon ship before she was sunk. Merchant vessels were also obliged to follow certain rules: they were not to display false or neutral flags; they were not allowed to actively resist search or sinking; they were not allowed to flee from a challenge; and they were not allowed a military or an armed escort. Any of these actions meant that the challenged vessel lost its immunity and was not subject to warning before destruction.(

After more than an hour of gripping lines at the side of the boat, Holbourn was exhausted, and asked if the officer in charge would hold on to his hand so that he would not sink. The officer refused, saying that holding another man’s hand would make him “uncomfortable.”(