Propaganda War and Lasting Legacy

This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over two hundred and fifty years. Now, when you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, uh the rise of the House of Wessex, the family of Alfred the Great and his heirs, who between them established the United Kingdom of England. Yeah, it's a great story, isn't it? But great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. So Alfred and his heirs, they marry ide alism and pragmatism. Uh they're brilliant at alliances, they're brilliant at managing power, they're brilliant of course at managing their money, which is a key part of political leadership. And of course, we are all reaping the rewards of their wisdom and for esight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyd to be ready when you are. Because from new businesses to new homes and new life chapters, backed by generations of hope and ambition, you can see, Tom, why 14 million people trust Lloyd's to help make their dreams a reality. Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 2026 . Attention all passengers. The Uber ride for Mark and Jamal's romantic weekend will depart in four minutes from platform six. Your ride comes with a rolling countryside sunset view and a table seat ideal for playing footsie bene ath. Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber . Trains on über ze with the Belgian blood so lately shed, the bestial Prussian seeks the ocean's bed. In Neptune's realm the wretched coward lurks, and on the world his wonted evil works, like slinking cur , he bites where none oppose, victorious over babes his valour grows . One fateful day may such be nevermore, A stately vessel left Columbia's shore, Upon the wave in fearless grandeur rode, Nor fear'd to bear its blameless, helpless load. No human risk, the watchful captain ran, protected by the common laws of man The laws of man What laws can curb or sway the Prussian wolf with manhood cast away, his idle threat too hideous for belief, with its foul truth plunged nations into grief. So that immortal work of poetry was The Crime of Crimes, Lusitania 1915, and it was first published by a young journalist called H. P. Lovecraft. And that is a name that will be familiar to any fans of horror stories today. He's the great pioneer of that genre. And he's um celebrated as the inventor of Cthulhu , a terrifying and monstrous entity that lurks in hidden depths, and to quote Lovecraft, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. And that poem that I have just read also describes a source of awful dread that lurks in hidden depths, but it belongs to a very different kind of horror story. And that horror story is the theme of today's episode , the third in our epic series on the nightmare that was the world in nineteen fifteen, and it is the story of how the liner RMS Lusit ania came to be sunk by a German U-boat, or Dominic, as Lovecraft would put it, a Prussian wolf. Yes. So the Luce Tania, everybody, was sailing from New York to Liverpool, and it was torpedo off'd the coast of Ireland by a U -boat on the seventh of May nineteen fifteen with the loss of more than a thousand lives. And as you know, Tom, it this became one of the first World War's most emotive stories, but also one of its most controversial. So it became the subject of all kind of legends and conspiracy theories. And actually rather like the Cthulhu mythos, this became the subject of a mythos itself. Did it? A mythos. A mythos. Exactly. But like the story of the Titanic, this is a tremendous human drama. So it's a great story about individuals and what happens to individuals in conditions of extreme stress, but also it's a fantastic window into the story of Germany's U-boat campaign and the strategic dilemmas that are facing Friend of the Show Kaiser Wilhelm II and his commanders. One other aspect of this story, though, this is a crucial moment in the story of how the United States ends up being drawn into the First World War. So just to remind people, we are not yet 12 months into the Great War. And at this point, there is no suggestion that the United States will ever take part. So there are a small number of I suppose you'd call them now Atlanticists, kind of pro British Americans, but against them there are millions of Americans of German descent, or Scandinavian, or indeed Irish descent, who are dead against intervening. And the US President at this point is a Democrat. He is Woodrow Wilson. And Woodrow Wilson has explicitly ruled out intervening in this European war, not least because Irish Americans are a massive part of the democratic governing coalition. And Wilson at this point, so we're talking about nineteen fi fteen, is already thinking that in the long run, maybe he can step in to sort of orchestrate a compromise piece. He's already beginning to fancy himself as a great sort of world statesman and as the man who is going to put the world to rights and this will be tremendous for him at home of course and all of this kind of thing and of course we we all know how that plays out in the long run. Yeah because he he he loves birth of a nation, the film that is Ku Klux Klan, but he does also love posing as the champion of world peace. So a man of contradictions, one might say. Yes, exactly. So now the sink of the Lusitania does not bring the United States immediately into the war. It takes another couple of years for that to happen, but it's an absolutely crucial step along that road. So let's get into the actual story and let's start, rather like when we did our series about Titanic, we started with the ship. Let us start with the ship herself, the Lusitania . So the Lusitania, we are very much team White Star, aren't we, at the rest of history? Oh definitely. Yeah. But the Lusitania belongs to their rivals, Cunard. And it's a Cunard liner launched in nineteen oh six as part of the competition for the Atlantic passenger trade that produced the Titanic. So for a brief period, the Lusitania was the world's biggest ocean liner. It had capacity for 2,200 passengers, it had six passenger decks, it was extremely luxurious. So it's a little bit like the Titanic, but just not as good, frankly. The Titanic goes above and beyond. I mean the Titanic is more luxurious, isn't it? Because that's what White Star makes great play with. But to be fair , the Lusitania is faster because that's the great selling point of um of Cunard. Yeah, that's right. So the Lusitania actually won the blue ribbon for the fastest Atlantic crossing, and up for previous 10 years or so, German ships had been the masters of the seas, but the Lusitania beats them. It's faster. Do you think that's part of the motivation? Revenge. Revenge. Winning back the blue ribbon. I don't think so. I don't think so. Now, as with a lot of other liners, the construction of the Lusitania, and this will become important later on when it's sunk, the construction had been subsidised by the British government on condition that in the event of a war the Lusitania could be converted into an armed merchant cruiser. So there 's actually space built in on the deck for naval guns, even though they're not actually uh installed . And when war breaks out in August nineteen fourteen, the Lusitania is very briefly requisitioned by the Admiralty. But the issue with these massive Cunard liners is that they are so expensive to run. They're basically too big. And the cost of the coal alone is prohibitive. It's so high up. How on earth would you fire guns from it? Yes, suppose you could aim down? I don't know. I'm not really an expert on naval armaments. Anyway, Q Nod get the ship back. The demand for ocean crossings obviously falls in the first month of the war. But you know, people are still crossing the Atlantic. And in the winter of 1914-15, Lusitania is still the fastest first-class liner that is, you know, going back and forth across the Atlantic waves. So the Lucitania is going back and forth, but the world's attention is focused on a very different kind of boat. And this is one of the first World War's great military innovations, and this is, of course, the U-boat. So I was astonished to discover, as not a great and I you know, I've never really taken any interest in submarines until I was preparing this episode, that the first military submarine was developed in 1775 as part of the tax revolt in North America, which many of our American listeners will be celebrating this year. Alexander the Great is meant to have built a submarine and gone down into the sea. Yeah, that's right. Wasn't there a submarine a a Confederate submarine that shot a sunk a ship in the American Civil War? The first submarine to go into action, I think, was a Confederate ship, but was it then destroyed by its own it destroyed itself? Yes, I think it kind of blew up a ship and then blew up itself. So obviously you win some, you lose some. The Americans are very much pioneers of this kind of thing. But basically throughout the nineteenth century, you know, it's a it's seen as a bit of a white elephant, the submarine. But then in the nineteen hundreds, the major naval powers had started building these fleets of submarines that could fire torpedoes and lay mines. And they thought of them really as coastal defense things, that they would kind of lurk around your coast, somebody sends a fleet and your submarine will will shoot it down or whatever. Because the uh Jules Verne, he has the Nautilus. The Nautilus which must make it kind of seem very fashionable. Cutting head. Cool. Yes, exactly. And the biggest submarine force in nineteen fourteen, when war broke out, I'm happy to say belonged to the Royal Navy . So we had 75 boats, the French had about 50, and the Germans, who you you always think of, oh the Germans love a submarine with a yes, yes, a seawolf, they had near 28 submarines, and most of those, well at least a lot of those, were not even seaworthy. So they're very much lagging behind. And the reason is that their um naval chief, Grand Admiral Alfred von Turpitz, so he's the sort of dreadnought baron , I suppose. Yes. He has a and he has a tremendous forked beard, very impressive beard. Very offset by his kind of resplendent baldness, isn't it? Yeah, he's an odd looking bloke, frankly. So Turpitz, he's much more interested in his dreadnou ghts than submarines. But just before the war, he'd said, okay, well, we'll get have some submarines, and he'd started ordering these new diesel submarines. And apparently, diesel submarines are safer and harder to detect, but for reasons that I don't fully understand. The things you learn while preparing a podcast. Exactly. These submarines, they can go they can go at a speed of about 16 knots, which for those of you who don't speak knot, that's about twenty miles an hour. And they can go a heck of a long way. They can go seven thousand miles. So, you know, they can range around the seas of the world. And what's it actually like to be on a submarine? Well, if you're a German submariner, you get you're better treated than almost any other member of the German armed forces. You get better rations than anyone. But the reason for that is that it's absolutely awful being on a submarine. So to give people a sense, if you're on a U-boat, a U-boat is about seventy meters long and seven meters wide . So it's really cramped. And inside this sort of narrow metal cylinder, there are about 40 men and all their food and supplies for an entire month. And also at Christmas, a Christmas tree. Yeah, they have a Christmas tree and tons of sausages, I think. I mean genuinely lots of sausages. So the crew are very often you're very often seasick. Um you're only allowed to wash once a week to say because they need to save water. And to quote Alexander Watson in his brilliant book Ring of Steel about the Germans and the Central Powers at War, it's really hot. It's very thick and foul, a choking atmosphere of machine oil, cooking and sweat. That would make you feel sea sick, wouldn't it? Yeah, it's basically like a someone has someone has sort of shrunk a kitchen, a sort of industrial kitchen, and you're in it and but you've also under the sea. I think it's just terrible. And of course it's terrifying. It's I mean every everyone thinks that uh U-boats strike terror into other people, but to be on a U-boat is really frightening. Yeah. You might get attacked by a giant squid or something. At any moment, you might hit a mine, you might get tangled up in a net , you might uh you know, there might be a shell or something, you might bump into a ship, and it and this one uh ship U-boat commander said at any minute we could be thrown a hundred metres up in the air or a hundred metres under the water. So basically you're in terror of your life the whole time. And you're you're away for months at a time. Yes, exactly. You're away for a long time. You have months and months of waiting to run into a Kraken or hit a mine or something. Yeah, it's terrifying. Horrible. And the first U-boats were sent out just two days into the war from Heligoland into the North Sea. And their target wasn't really the Royal Navy, so much as Britain's merchant shipping. So basically, what the Germans thought was, as we've said so many times in this series, they're conscious of themselves as underdogs, and the way that they think they can bring Britain to its knees is to target its trade with the outside world. So Britain in 1914 imported almost two thirds of all its food, including all of its sugar, obviously Britain doesn't produce its own sugar. It imported half of its meat and almost half of its wheat. A lot from Denmark, I think. Meat from Denmark, surely. A lot of bacon, bacon and ham from Denmark. Well the Danes they have great bacon, don't they? Yeah, I mean they have tremendous bacon. And wheat from Canada, I suppose, from the prairies and stuff. Beef from Argentina, all these kinds of things. So the the j German strategy is essentially to starve Britain into submission, rather as Britain had that was the strategy that Britain had applied in the Napoleonic Wars against France, and I is applying against Germany now. It's the default British strategy. And the Germans are trying to pay them back in their own coin. Exactly. And actually, just before the war, Arthur Conan Doyle had written a short story with the tremendous title Danger. That is a great title. And uh basically this short story predicted that with a very small force of U boats, Germany or some adversary could destroy Britain's merchant shipping and cause mass hunger and bring Britain cap in hand to the negotiating table. Oh, like in nineteen seventy seventy six INF. Exactly. You know, this was well known in Germany. The German sort of high command and the German public absolutely believe that this is the way to beat Britain. And so in the last months of 1914, Grand Admiral Turpitz and the chief of the J of the German Admiralty staff, who is a guy called Hugo von Paul, they are arguing with other commanders and they are saying, right, the way to win this war, is this aggressive kind of gloves-off campaign against British merchant shipping? And does that include liners? Well, this is the complexity. Because of course, liners are transporting a lot of cargo, so they are absolutely part of that. But at this point, the U-boats, like other ships, are still obeying what are called at the time prize rules or cruiser rules. This is the sort of established convention of how you fight a war at sea. People remember from our Nelson series that there are always these sort of um almost unwritten codes that govern naval warfare. And this is as true in 1914 and 1915 as it was in the 1790s. So in the nineteen tens, the understanding is that basically if you see a merchant ship and you're a U-boat, you surface, you come to the surface, and you stop the ship, and you demand to search it for contraband. You know, are you carrying it war supplies and whatnot? But this is quite fiddly, I guess. It's very fiddly. And you put the crew and any passengers, you make them get into life you either capture them, which obviously you can't do on a U-boat because you can't put more people on your U-boats, you make them get in the lifeboats, and then you blow up their ship. Exactly. There should be enough. You make them get in the lifeboats, then you sink their ship, or you capture it in some way. You don't just sink their ship without warning. The issue is it's A, as you said, it's very fiddly and very difficult. And B, the British start disguising their warships as merchant ships to cut the Germans in. So it's a little bit like the bit with the Acher on in um Master and Command of the film, if people have seen that, where Captain Jack Aubrey disguises his uh ship as a crippled whaler to lure the French in. You see, if that it was the German policy, that would be cheating. But because it's us. It's cunning. Cunning and clever. The other thing, of course, as you ready mentioned, by the end of nineteen fourteen, the British have set up a naval blockade of Germany, basically closing the North Sea, because they're hoping to star ve the Germans into submission. And faced with this, uh, Grand Admiral Turpitz and the Chief of Staff Hugo von Paul say to the Kaiser and his Chancellor Bethmann Holveg. Could we please ditch these antiquated cruiser rules as they're called? And can we embrace what's called unrestricted submarine warfare? In other words, the gloves are off, we're just going to attack your merchant ships if we see them and sink them, and we're going to drive you off the uh seas of the world. And the Kaiser and his Chancellor Bethmann Holveg said, No, we don't want to do this, because this will massively antagonize the United States, which obviously controls a lot of the merchant ships that are going hither and thither to Britain, and it might even bring the United States into the war . So there's a lot of dithering, but then at the beginning of February nineteen fifteen, Paul persuades the Chancellor, Tebal Betvan Holveg, to give it a go. And he says, Do you know what? I'm confident that we can destroy British merchant shipping with just 20 U-boats. That's all it will take. And the Chancellor says, Well, what about the Americans? Are you not worried about the Americans? No, we're not worried about the Americans. Because we'll advertise this, we'll tell everybody we're doing it, and we will strike really hard at the beginning. And that will have a deterrent effect. Basically, neutral shipping will stay away anyway. They'll be so frightened that we will sink them. And actually, this is and now this is very controversial. What the Germans say is: actually, if we did hit a passenger ship, so much the better. It'll be a massive story, and it will be the perfect deterrent. Because sure a lot of lives will be lost, but that will drive all neutral shipping off the seas and The Kaiser, great friend of the rest of history, of course, but some poor behaviour in his uh in his past, I think we we can all agree on that, so not perfect. But a man who always basically his bark is a lot worse than his bite, isn't it the case? So he's against this. He's against this. He says I don't like the sound of this at all. Because he's a he's a man of humanity and peace. He's a great humanitarian. Typical of the Kaiser. He's against it, but he doesn't get his way. You know, he's he's by this point already in the war, he's becoming a bit of a figurehead, frankly. So Paul gets his way, and on the fourth of february nineteen fifteen, the imperial German Gazette publishes this ominous announcement. The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, I don't know why he's doing a French accent, but anyway, are hereby declared to be a war zone from Fromebru fary eighteenth onwards every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, and it will not always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. Neutral vessels will also run a risk in the war zone, and it may not always be possible to prevent attacks on enemy ships from harming neutral ships. So in other words, the warning is pretty explicit. Don't go into the war zone, which is the the waters around Britain and Ireland. And so now the U boat campaign is on in earnest. So often, ever since their defeat and the Battle of the Marne, the Germans are so conscious of the urgency of this, that it pushes them into more extreme measures. So this is basically the nautical equivalent of uh using gas. Yeah, exactly. Or shooting Belgians. That's exactly what it is. You know we,'re in a terrible hurry. Uh, time is against us. We need to crack on, be ruthless. Can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Exactly. Their overall submarine Supremo, who's a guy called Herman Bauer, he says to his U-boat commanders. Com one, be really ruthless. Strike without warning. Terror is great. Drive merchant shipping off the seas. This is what we're gonna do. Like a lot of the sort of Germans' wheezys, this is flawed from the beginning because they've been massively over optimistic. They have only 29 U-boats, many of which are barely operational. And they do sink quite a few ships. So they sink on average about two ships a day. But this is just a tiny, tiny fraction of the total of British merchant shipping. Because thousands and thousands are coming in all the time. Yeah, not remotely enough to affect Britain's economic strength. And the reputational cost is very high. So the first few months of 1915, they sink a tanker, they sink some Swedish ships, some Dutch ships, then two Greek ships in April. Very bad for Germany's reputation with neutral countries. And then there's a very uh controversial incident on the twenty eighth of March when they chased down a British cargo liner called the Faliba. This is U twenty eight. And U twenty eight actually gives the crew and passengers of the Faliba ten minutes to get off. It says you've got ten minutes to get off and then we'll sink you. The evacuation is a bit of a shambles and takes longer than ten minutes. The U boat commander for various reasons loses patience and sh and fires a single torpedo. This s sinks thehip and capsizes some of the lifeboats that have already got into the water, and a hundred and eleven people drowned or died of hypothermia . And disastrously for the Germans, one of them was an American , a man with the name Leon C. Thrasher. That's unreal. And schoolteacher. Surely, surely, at a boarding school, at a boys' boarding school that educated people who went on to run the State Department in Connecticut or something. Or called Kermit or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Woodrow Wilson was Woodrow Wilson was outraged at the loss of Leon C. Thrasher. And he sent a note of complaint to the Germans. But a note of complaint was all he sent. He didn't make a huge hullabaloo in a great protest about it. And that's because his Secretary of State, who's William Jennings Bryan, a kind of prairie populist and relative isolationist. They don't want to provoke the Germans and get into a sort of big international incident with them. And they say, well, maybe this was an accident, you know, maybe that the Germans surely wouldn't do this again. So that's happened. That was on the 28th of March. All this time, the Lusitania has been sailing back and forth between Liverpool and New York. And Cunard know that you know the rules of the game have changed since the Germans issued that warning. And just to be clear for people, because perhaps we haven't made it this is a British company. It's a British ship. Very proud. Yeah. Yeah. Because the the race to control the sort of Atlantic passenger trade had been a big story in the 1900s, as with Titanic. Cunard's directors told the ship, don't fly flags in the war zone. They have these sort of very distinctive red funnels, the Cunard ships, the Cunard liners, and they say, Please paint your red funnels grey so it'll be harder for enemy ships to spot you as you're crossing. I mean I I I have to be honest, that would not reassure me if I was planning to take a ship across the Atlantic. But that's the thing is if you wanted to cross the Atlantic, this is the only way you can go. I just stay. Well, if you were invited to do some corporate speaking event with your uh gramophone based podcast in New York in nineteen fifty. Just send telegrams. You do it remotely. Yeah, I would. Superb. That's what the Lusitania is doing. Now, meanwhile in Germany , the head of the admiralty staff says to the Kaiser, the campaign is going much too slowly. Like we've obviously, you know, we've started too slowly this U-boat campaign. We should act much more ruthlessly. We should stop giving passenger ships, we're still giving passenger ships warning. We should strike from the deep silently and lethally. The Germans are very conscious that if this happens again, there will be a diplomatic incident with the Americans. But it's important, I think, to bear in mind, everybody at this point thinks the Americans are absolutely useless and flimsy and weak. So yeah, the Americans have no history of getting involved in European conflicts in this way. And people look at Woodrow Wilson and they say, you know, he's kind of reedy, an academic. Yeah, he's got steel glasses. There's a Jimmy Carter side to him, I think, that people say and and the Germans actually say it. They say in writing, all the Americans want they will do anything to stay out of this war. They simply do not have the guts to fight. Might they have been slightly more careful if it had been Teddy Roosevelt, say, or someone of that ilk as i in the White House. Teddy Roosevelt is gutted that the Americans aren't in the first world. He loves the war, doesn't he? He loves the war. He loves two things, Teddy Roosevelt. He loves the war and he loves Oliver Cromwell. Well it makes sense. Doesn't he like hunting as well? Bears . Well, he's the father of the teddy bear, isn't it? But but I think it's important because that presents Will Wilson as the slightly ineffectual man of peace that he will prove himself to be in due course. A man of war and of useless treaty making. The 17th of April, the Lusitania leaves Liverpool and it crosses the Atlantic east to west without incident, and a week later in New York, so the twenty fourt,h it arrives in New York Harbour, and it's due to return on the first of May. Now, meanwhile, the German ambassador in Washington, who's a man called Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, he is very worried that the Americ ans are underestimating the dangers of all this. And he decides he's going to put an official warning in the American press. So in American newspapers. The official warning, this advert runs in the American pr ess and it says: if you get on an Atlantic ship, be warned you are travelling into a war zone and that British ships are legitimate targets. Travelers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk? Well I've got two questions. One is are there American liners? And if there are, why aren't people just going on the American liners? And the second question is, is the Lusitania, because it's the most famous British liner, a prize in and of itself? And so therefore do the U boats know it's coming and are they looking out for it? Okay, two interesting questions. So first of all, interestingly, and for reasons that I don't f know the answer to, American ships don't seem to have been big rivals for the ocean liner business. So at this point, it's all the Germans, some Dutch ships, uh but also but obviously British ships. But you don't really hear much mention of American ocean liners, so I guess there must be smaller American boats, but not big, luxurious ocean liners of this kind. So that's the first answer. Right. And the second answer, I've forgotten what the question was. What was the question? Um would the would the Germans consciously be looking out for the Lusitania because it would constitute a massive prize? Uh no, I don't think so. I think well there are tons of conspiracy theories about whether the Lusitania was deliberately targeted or whether in fact the British were actually secretly controlling the whole thing. Most of those conspiracy theories I think are rubbish. I think the Germans are aware that the Lusitania exists. It's it's sailing at this time. It's a big ship and it's the faster ship. But I don't think they set out deliberately to target this particular ship. Although later on it was sort of claimed that they did, but I don't think that's the case at all. There's no evidence for it. As we will see, they end up coming across it by chance rather than by design. Though this is controversial if you go onto the internet, I mean Tom, you could spend um I know you've got better you've I think you've actually got better internet discipline than I have, but you could easily lose days of your life falling down lusitaneous rabbit holes. I imagine we're going to be coming to the conspiracy theories, so I might wait till then. This ambassador is prepared this advert. But just one small thing. For various humdrum technical reasons, the advert is delayed. So the advert doesn't actually appear in American newspapers. It doesn't first appear until Friday the thirtieth of April, which is the day before the Lusitania is due to leave New York, and indeed some papers are actually printing it the next day, the Saturday, the day the passengers are boarding. I mean you wouldn't want to see that, would you? No. Like what's in the paper today? Oh, an advert telling me that if I get on this ship I'll probably die. So we come to the day of the Lusitania's departure, that's Saturday, the first of May. And it's due to leave at 10 o'clock in the morning from Manhattan's Pier 54. The Lusitania is still only eight years old, so it's one of the world's great ocean liners, and as you would expect, it's a trem endous spectacle. She's been painted grey with the funnels, but still a spectacular sight. Nine decks, thirty-one thousand tons, eight hundred feet long, almost. There's a huge hustle and bustle as everybody is boarding. That said, because of the war and the inevitable fears, so as you said, you know, who would be crossing the Atlantic, the answer is a lot fewer people than normal. There are one thousand two hundred and sixty four passengers on the Lusitania and seven hundred and two crew, so a total of one thousand nine hundred and sixty six, that'd say just under two thousand, but that is less than half the Lusitania's total capacity. And of those people who are on the ship, the vast majority are British, there are lots of Canadians , and there are 159 citizens of the United States of America. So that's the passengers, but more controversial is the cargo. It was very common on transatlantic voyages , for ships to carry cargo that could be put to military use. The Lusitania is carrying copper wire, machine parts, these kinds of things in the hold, huge quantities of sort of wire and stuff that clearly could be used by arms manufacturers. And are they carrying any weapons or ammunition? The short answer is yes, they are. They're carrying four million rounds of Remington point three oh three rifle ammunition. They are carrying um a thousand cases of shrapnel filled artillery shells. They're carrying sixteen cases of percussion fuses. They're carrying tons and tons, forty-six tons, in fact, of aluminium powder, which is used for making explosives. And who sent this? Uh American manufacturers. It's been bought to the British Army? To British Armaments manufacturers. Yeah, armaments manufacturers, exactly British factories. Now, this is incredibly controversial. So later on after the Lusitania sank, the Ger mans said, Look at this. I mean, you're carrying war contraband. This is this is obviously war stuff. But the American government's position was, you know, this is not an arms trade between two nations. This is completely standard on transatlantic shipping. This is an I quote a private legal shipment of small arms. The uh rifle ammunition is the kind that would go have gone back and forth between Britain and America during peacetime and it can be used by private citizens and uh it's continued in wartime as well and in no way does this violate United States neutrality. And I think a fair-minded observer would surely say the Americans are stretching a point here. And the Germans obviously are not being unreasonable in saying you are shipping military material. The one thing I would say though is that this is no way a secret. Everybody knows that QNARD are doing this. It has been well known for months that ocean liners carry cargo like this. And the British and American position is, well, it doesn't really matter, because the big issue is the safety of the passengers, and you, the Germans, as you know, supposedly decent civilized people, you should put the safety of the passengers first. And basically, you know, you should do everything in your power to save their lives. And the fact that the ship is also carrying munitions is neither here nor there. I mean it's kind of basically using civilians as human shields to kind of protect uh military targets. I think that's a pretty fair assessment. I mean, I don't want unpatriotic. Yeah, you would have if you had made that assessment in an article in the morning Post in nineteen fifteen, there would have been a mob outside your house. Yeah. White feathers all round. Yeah, white feathers, exactly. But I think it's completely reasonable. I think if you're if there are German listens to this podcast, they would definitely be raising an eyebrow at this and saying, Come on. I mean, I don't think it's reasonable that you're transporting all this stuff and pretending it's just a civilian ship. Anyway, the passengers are a lot of them are very anxious. The German warning has now appeared in fi fty American newspapers. Some of them run it on the Friday, some on the Saturday morning, and one paper very famously you can see uh clippings online actually runs it next to a QNARD advert for the Lusitania. So next to each other is like sail the Lusitania. And next to it is a thing saying, if you sail on the Lusitania, we will give it up. Basically. There's a nice book on the sort of very colourful book on the Lusitania by Greg King and Penny Wilson, which came out about 10 years ago. And this has loads of nice stories about passengers discussing the warning as they're boarding the ship. So there's a group that we'll come back to. There's a family called the Pearls, and they have a nanny called Alice Lines. We'll come back to them in the second half. And Alice Lines is British, she's very young, she brings it up with the Pearl, she's very anxious about it. And Mrs. Pearl says to her, Take no notice, dear, it is just propaganda. There's a suffragette called Margaret Mackworth, and she's boarding the ship with her uh father, Viscount Ronda. And she remembers later, she's a survivor, she remembered later that the passengers were discussing the warnings, and a lot of them are very angry. Feeling ran strong and that we should be driven off our own boat by German threats after we'd already booked our passage. There it is. Was unthinkable. The authentic voice of the British consum er. Yeah. We've paid good money for these tickets. So to send us the warning now is disgraceful. Because presumably there wouldn't be travel insurance. I mean, you couldn't cancel the ticket because of that. I mean, well, maybe there is, I don't know, but it'd be very f I mean imagine trying to claim make a claim into travel insurance in nineteen fifteen. I mean it's difficult enough now. Doing it then would be a nightmare. And one of the passengers, interestingly, has had a very specific warning. And this is we love a millionaire, a doomed millionaire traveling on a boat. We so do . And uh I'd say it's our signature. Yeah. This is a 37-year-old millionaire called Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. And he is of the Vanderbilt shipping and railroad dynasty. Vanderbilt is an extremely rich man and he was generally described as a sportsman for his um love of elite sport like you Tom. Yeah. But his choice of sports were probably a little different from yours because his sports were fox hunting and carriage racing. Kind of Oh, like Prince Philip. Prince Philip, exactly. Now before he gets on the boat that morning, he gets a telegram that says to him, do not get on the Lusitania. The Lusitania is going to be torpedo ed. And it's signed with the single word morte . Death. I mean, this is very very reminiscent, Dominic, of what you might call the Titanic mythos. I would call it Titanic Mythos. Yeah, I would. I absolutely would. Um, the trouble with this story is I've looked into it and I can't find where it comes from. And I'm curious about how anyone would know. Because Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, we described him as a doomed millionaire . So spoiler alert, he's not telling his story in the nineteen thirties. Maybe he told his valet and the valet survived. I don't know. Maybe. Hey look, Dominic, it's it's it's a mythos. You don't don't get don't dig down too hard. No one knew that Lusitania was going to be torpedoed. So I think this was either a j a jape from one of his post friends or somebody made this story up and now it's just told and retold in histories ever since. On the key side is the QNR general agent in New York, who's a man called Charles Sumner. And he gives a press conference. He says to the press, there is no risk whatsoever to when you hear that getting on a ship. Right. Don't don't get on that ship. Lusitania, he says, it's too fast for any submarine. No German vessel of war can get near her. And the same message comes from the ship's captain. So we love a sea dog on the show. Uh, but this captain, the captain of the Lusitanian, is not a great charmer, William Turner. He's seen as very gruff. He's not like Captain Smith and the Titanic, one of his just greatest mariners. The only really interesting thing about him, his nickname is Bowler Bill , because every time he gets a new ship, he buys a new bowler hat, which he wears. Do you know? I I've been hard on Captain Smith, as you'll know. Yeah. But I I don't think that you should wear a bowler hat if you're captaining an ocean going liner. I think you should wear your nautical hat like Captain Smith did. If I was getting on a ship and I saw three things. One an advert telling me that if I get on ship I will probably be sunk. If I saw that, if I heard a man from the company running the uh ships saying this ship is unsinkable, I probably wouldn't get on. And then if I saw the captain wearing an inappropriate hat, that would massively put that's a massive red flag, no? It really is, isn't it? Yeah. Captain, whatever his name is, Bowler Bill, Captain Turner. He tells the press as well. We should be going faster than any submarine can travel. They're not likely to sneak up on us. The Titanic is unsink able. Right. So anyway, the voyage, departure is delayed. They have to wait because there's people coming from another boat, and at midday they finally get underway. There are people waving handkerchiefs, cameras, all the all the usual stuff. Now meanwhile , the day before, a submarine called U twenty, commanded by Capitaine Leutnant Walter Schwieger , has set off from North Germany and it's gone across the North Sea, around the top of Scotland, then down the west coast of Ireland, and then U twenty is going to come back into the Irish Sea from the south. And the Admiralty in Britain, have been tracking her using intercepted German messages. They're decoding German messages. But this is so secret that they've decoded, they have this room 40, it's called in the Admiralty, the decoding room. And it's so sec ret that the warnings are not being widely distributed. So it's like um Bletchley Park in the Second World War. Like Enigma in the Second World War, exactly. Uh on the fifth of May, so this is after the Lusitania has set off. U twenty intercepts a merchant ship called the Earl of Latham off the coast of County Cork , and that evening the Royal Navy send a warning to all ships, submarines active off the south of coast Ireland. On the sixth of May, U twenty intercepts a British steamer called the SS Candidate off the coast of County Wexford, and then another ship, the SS Centuri on, and in each case the crew of those ships is able to escape before the U boat sinks them. If the U boats are operating off the south coast of Ireland, there's no thought of going kind of round the north and to Liverpool that way. You could do that, but there's no reason to believe that there aren't submarine So all this time the Lusitania has been steaming east. And that morning, the sixth, she is about eight hundred and sixty miles west and she is well clear of the war zone. But by the the evening of sixth she is less than four hundred miles from the war zone. And about eight o'clock that night, Captain Turner gets two messages. Submarines are still active off the south coast of Ireland and quote, avoid headlands, pass harbours at full speed, steer mid channel course. And so we come to dawn on the fatal morning, the seventh of may nineteen fifteen. It is very foggy. Captain Turner posts extra lookout s and he slows his speed to just fifteen knots and he sounds the foghorn. Now some passengers don't like this. They say why would you sound the foghorn? You know, you're drawing attention to our presence as we're approaching the war zone. But he's says, Well it foggy, this is what you do. Because he's conscious that he's entering the war zone, he orders the twenty-two lifeboats swung out ready just in case. So you know he's thinking ahead. Yeah, it wouldn't be reassuring, would it? Not terribly. At ten o'clock, the fog begins to lift, and as midday approaches, they've increased speed to 18 knots. It's a lovely sunny, clear day. At eleven fifty-two, so just before midday, they get another warning from the Admiralty by telegraph. U-boats active in southern part of Irish Channel. And then at one o'clock, another message. Submarine, five miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at ten AM . Now this is a false alarm. This is a false report, but it gives Turner the impression, because they are clear of that by this point , that they are past the danger. In fact, they're not past the danger, the U boat is ahead of them. At this point, it's one o'clock in the afternoon on the seventh of May, the passengers can see the coast of Ireland in the distance . And some of them have actually gathered on the port side of the ship, that's the left, to look out and to spot the coast of Ireland. So they're very close now. The voyage is almost over. Meanwhile, on U twenty , Capitaine Leutnant Schwieger is running low on fuel and he's got only three torpedoes left. He is at the end of his own voyage. And partly because of the fog, he has decided , let's call it a day and let us go back to base in Germany. And then at twenty minutes past one, his call to the Conning Tower as it's called of the U-boat. The lookout says I've spotted something on the horizon , it looks like an enormous ocean liner. And Schwieger immediately orders the U boat to dive. They dive to a depth of six fathoms, which is about thirty six feet, and to head for the target . And so they head for the target, they go closer and closer and closer. It is now one forty, and the Lusitania is approaching the old head of Kinsale , which is about thirteen miles away, and Schw isieger very close to his target now. And then to his horror, the Lusitania turns and turns away. He's gutted, he's lost the chance for this fantastic prize. And then to his disbelief, the Lusitania turns very slightly again, back in range, back into his sights, and he breathes a massive sigh of relief. It is now ten minutes past two The Lusitania is finally in range and on U twenty Volter Schwieger gives the order to fire. My goodness. Will it hit? Will the Lusitania sink? Only one way to find out. Join us after the break . This episode is brought to you by the Times and by the Sunday Times. Now, if there is one thing that history, and indeed Bob Dylan, teaches us, it is that the times they are always a changing. And Dominic, I guess we're living in changing times now, what with America attacking Iran and oil crises. So do you think that the lessons of that for Keir Starmer are Rosie So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was prime minister in the previous oil crisis. It didn't , to be honest. And actually he and Keirstarmer, I think, are quite similar. They're from relatively humble backgrounds and there's a slight sense of foundering which they have in common. But their bigger point is you never really know what's round the corner, do you? Because when you look at history, the future is always pretty uncertain. But you know the fac ts they shouldn't be uncertain. And uh that of course is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in. Yeah, and I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to The Times and the Sunday Times, visit the Times .com . Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest of history where it is ten minutes past two on Friday, the 7th of May, 1915, and the German U-boat captain has just given order to fire on the ocean liner Lusitania. And almost instantly on board the Lusitania, the 18-year-old lookout, who's a guy called Leslie Morton, spots a thin streak of foam speeding towards the ship, and that's nothing that you want to see when you're a lookout in a time of war, is it? Not at all. So Morton shouts, Torpedoes coming on the starboard side. Now, actually, he's wrong. There's just one torp edo, although this has given rise to um yet more conspiracy theories. Morton said later I saw the torpedo coming, a white streak about two feet below the surface. It struck just below the bridge. There was a muffled explosion , and a cloud of coal dust and steam shot up. Then almost instantly there came a second explosion, far greater, more shattering. The ship trembled like a living thing. Now Schwieger, the guy who gave the order to fire, is watching from the periscope of U twenty, and he records a very similar description in his ship's log. The torpedo hitting right behind the bridge was where he thought it hit, although he was wrong, an explosion, and then a second explos ion. The ship stops immediately, he writes, and heals over to starboard very quickly, immersing simultaneously at the bow. And it's at this point, he said, the name Lusitania becomes visible in golden letters. And it is famous enough that this is really a big deal. He'll think, yeah, this is a great kill. But I think up to this point he didn't Lusitania. He just thought it's a bloody big ship. Um anyway, this talk of a second explosion, very controversial for this reason. We mentioned the um all the ammunition and stuff that's being carried, but it that was non-explos ive. In other words, to pass the US sort of uh you know port authority regulations , you couldn't carry explosives on a ship that might blow up. So it can't have been all this. So there's a conspiracy theory ever since that the Lusitania must have been carrying secret explosives not recorded in the kind of ship's manifest or whatever. But I think this is bonkers. Most historians think this is bonkers and this what was actually happening was something to do with the boilers. It's always something to do with the boilers, isn't it? Same with the Titanic. So this huge geyser of kind of water and shrapnel and smoke and debris erupts above the deck of the Lusitania. As one passenger said, it sounded like a million ton hammer hitting a steam boiler a hundred feet high. And immediately, Captain Turner, Bowler Bill, shouts to the quartermast, he says, Turn towards the Irish co ast, but the ship has already lost control and the ship is not responding to the ship's wheel. Turner says, put the engines into reverse. We need to stop the ship, but the ship is basically not responding to anything now. Meanwhile, the wireless operator has already sent out an SOS. This is within moments of the ship being hit by the torpedo, and he's transmitting the ship's position south of Kinsail on the coast of County Cork. Remember the torpedo hit at ten past two. So at two fourteen, the power fails, and the whole of the ship is plunged into darkness. So the electricity has failed, the electric lifts uh shut down, and there are actually crew members who are heading up to the deck to launch the lifeboats who are trapped in the lifts. God, oh how awful. Already the starboard uh compartments of the ship are flooding badly. The ship is beginning to list to sort of tip towards starboard. The forecastle at the front of the ship is close to going under, so it's going down very, very quickly. And a minute later at 2:15, so this is five minutes after the torpedo hit, Captain Turner gives the order to abandon ship and to start launching the lifeboats. So some of this may sound reminiscent of the series we did about Titanic or the shows we did about Titanic um in Ireland. The difference though is people who remember the Titanic series, the Titanic drama, what makes it so riveting is that it uh unfolds of f in some ways in slow motion. It's a slow puncture, isn't it Ye?ah. It's it takes two hours for Titanic to sink. But this is less than twenty minutes of just abject, kind of desperate, urgent panic. There's no kind of women and children first stuff this time? I think it's much too chaotic. Everyone just was kind of plowing off to get into life boats. Well, we'll come to the women and children first issue because there's some very, very gallant behaviour. Let me there's no doubt about that. But there isn't the sort of ordered dance that you get on the Titanic, you know, the sort of um the elaborate procedures because there's no band playing on the deck or no, no band playing on the deck. Now the other big difference, I guess, between Lusitania and Titanic, which is which affects your women and children first issue, is the Lusitania does have enough lifeboats. So the Lusitania has forty eight lifeboats and that is enough for all the one thousand nine hundred and sixty people on the ship. The problem is that the ship is is now tilting so much, it's listing to starboard so badly that you basically can't use the boats on that side. Well, because they're starting to sink into the water. Well they've swung out. wildly They're on ropes, so they've swung out from the ship. And the other thing is because you're tilted, the life bets on the other side to get them clear of the ship is going to be really, really difficult. Because if you drop them they they'll kind of bump into the bump into the yeah, it's side of the ship. So it's a very, very chaotic scene and a scene of of of of sort of desperate um panic. They are lowering lifeboats, um, but they're overturning while they're being lowered. There are stories of lifeboats overturning and tipping the people into the sea, or lifeboats being launched and then tipping over straight away, and passengers jumping into the lifeboats from above and all of this kind of thing. So actually, of those forty-eight lifeboats, only six of them were lowered successfully. And many of them at that point were massively overcrowded with people. And one of them actually overturned as soon as it And everybody fell out. The lifeboat then was turned over again by a wave and everybody started clambering back onto it again. This only lasts for a few minutes all this kind of stuff because just eighteen minutes after it was hit by the torpedo, the Lusitania begins to plunge down towards the seabed. And it is the most terrifying spectacle, as with the Titanic. So as it sinks, the funnels, the grey painted funnels, they create whirlpools as they go down, and these whirlpools suck in some of the people who are swimming for their lives. Captain Turner, Bowler Bill, is on the deck, he's near the bridge, and he's holding the ship's's logbook. He behaving as a captain should, frankly. But he is swept off the deck by a wave and he's swept into the sea. He manages to swim towards a chair that's floating in the water, and he clings onto this chair, basically clings onto it for three hours. Does he keep the logbook? I think he loses the logbook. I don't know actually. Surely it would be sodden. Captain Smith would have kept it. He would, absolutely absolutely. Well, surely Captain Smith would uh isn't that the case that Captain Sm ith was seen some years later after the Titanic in a New York bar in a New York playing the piano, no? Yes , he's piano? I think he was singing. Sea shanties. Of course he was, like that bloke in COVID, who gave up his job as a postman. A thick jersey. Now, as with the Titanic, there are some terrible stories about the people in the lifeboats. And here is just one of them, because we can't go through all of them as we did with Titanic. We've only got one episode. So there was a young Canadian woman called Charlotte Pye, and she was travelling with her eighteen month old daughter Marjorie. They were helped into a lifeboat by a man who gave them uh his life belt. As the Lusitania sank, it toppled almost on top of their lifeboat. And meanwhile, loads of more people were jumping into their lifeboat, and in the chaos, their lifeboat tipped over. And both Charlotte and her eighteen month-old daughter Marjorie were thrown into the water. And Marjorie, who's screaming for her mother, is basically ripped away by a wave. Charlotte loses touch . That's it. She she's she dies. And and Charlotte is then dragged under by the tide. I shall never forget the agony of it, she said later. While I was under the water I felt my end had come. And she passes out, and she comes to moments later floating amid the wreckage of the ship, surrounded by bodies, and she said of those that were living were screaming and shouting wanting to be saved. She clings onto some wreckage, somehow manages to stay afloat, and she's eventually rescued by three men who have got onto an upturned boat and they sort of drag her up onto this boat . And then they were all eventually rescued by people who came out from the coast of Ireland on little boats to look for survivors. And is the body of her baby found? Never found. Never found. So that's the end of Marjorie. Very sad. Now as with um Titanic, there aren't exact figures for the casualties. There's lots of sort of debate about how many people died. Probably let's go with the most common seven hundred and sixty seven passengers and crew were rescued and 1, 1 94 people were killed. So actually, you were better off on the Lusitania than you were on the Titanic. So a four out of ten survival rate, so a little bit better than Titanic, although better to be a woman on Titanic, I suppose, than just uh uh to take your chances either of either gender on the Lusitania. But you mentioned about women and children first, the Titanic, by and large, children survive. In this case, ninety four of the dead were children, and even more scandalously one hundred and twenty eight of the dead were American, and most of the bodies were never recovered. And among the dead there are you you go through the list. I mean there are people who were prominent at the time and are now forgotten, so sort of novelists and art collectors and engineers and whatnot. And and what about the um the American millionaire? What's his name? Vin Vanderbilt? Vanderbilt. Well he is by far the most famous casualty. We love a millionaire behaving well, a doomed millionaire behaving gallantly, and he absolutely did behave gallantly. Yeah, because we we'd just recently been doing a series of shows in Ireland, haven't we, about Titanic? And we pondered whether Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk um would behave as well as American Plutar Yeah. I'd be interested to know what the listeners think. So Vanderbilt behaved splendidly. He was very impressive. Uh lots of passengers said they saw him talking to a young mother carrying a baby and he's saying to her, I will find you an extra life jacket. And he couldn't find her an extra life jacket, so he took his own life jacket off and he gave it to this woman. And this woman actually may have been the woman we've just described, Charlotte Pye. There are different descriptions, so it's not entirely clear, but it may well have been her. And the ship's barber who escaped said later that he saw Vanderbilt and I quote trying to put life jackets on women and children plural. The ship was going down fast. I never saw Vanderbilt after that. All I saw in the water was children everywhere. Good on him. Yeah, good on him. And then the other s story that reallyticks in my mind: the the longest-lived person to survive the Lusitania was an American girl called Audrey Pearl. I already mentioned the Pearl family very briefly in the first half. Oh, with the nanny, the nervous nanny. So Audrey , they were an American family, and Audrey was three months old when she got on the Lusitania. She was traveling with her parents and her older siblings. And she was with her brother Stuart, who was five, and they were in their cabin and they were being um fed by this English nanny, Alice Lines. And Alice Lyons was 17. Right. And she came from Suffolk. And she was feeding Audrey. She'd taken them basically downstairs when the torpedo struck. And Alice they they don't know where the rest of the family are, but Alice, this nanny, with showing tremendous courage, she manages to get the children upstairs and into a lifebo at. And there, unbelievably, or perhaps very believably, a Frenchman used the opportunity of being in a lifeboat to try to crack onto her. So this Frenchman said to her, that's very French behaviour. He whispers in her ear. He says, You have perhaps lost your husband. Do not worry, I am wealthy, I will look after you. I don't think she took him up on that uh that offer. Anyway, Alice and the two children, Stuart and Audrey, survived. And they were eventually, I'm happy to say, reunited with Mr. and Mrs. Pearl, who had also survived, and been picked up uh by steamers from the shore. And Alice Lines , the nanny, died aged 100 in 1997. Oh my God. And if you think that's mind-blowing, Audrey, the baby, lived to the age of 95 and died in 2011. God, that's incredible. I mean, that really blows your kind, that kind of messes with your sense of kind of historical materi alization. Yeah. The somebody who basically was on the Lusitania lived to see the David Cameron Cameron premiere show. Well, how lucky for her. Yeah. She wouldn't have wanted to miss that. She'd have been able to read which of your books was most recently published then? I think Millennium. Millennium. She'd have been able to read Mill ennium and that killed her. Well, maybe it was whatever, seasons in the sun. State of emergency. The Heath years. I mean, she was so depressed by that that she just thought I can't live on. I'm finished. Yeah. I need give me more Tony Ben. Give me more. Right. Uh now we should just mention some of the conspiracy theories about I've been waiting for this. So the conspiracy theory is that it's actually loaded with explosives. Well, there's multiple conspiracy theories, Tom. And we actually don't have time for all of them. So number one is yes , there were it was carrying like secret explosives. It was hit by the German torpedo. What destroyed the ship was the second explosion, which was the secret explosives. And so it's not really the Germans' fault at all, it's the British fault. But people don't rate that. Historians don't rate that. And and generally what the the theme that runs through a lot of these conspiracy theories is that it's obscurely Britain's fault. So they're very popular among sort of American isolationists who would now probably be of quite a MAGA tendency? I mean, in a way, it reflects well on the reputation of the British spy agencies for for kind of cunning. Yes. That's how I see it. Conspiracy theory. Um, and this is by far the most the one that has the most traction in that particular community. This is that basically the British wanted the Lusitania to be uh sunk. And that actually it's really the fault of the uh first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. What is it about American isolationists and Churchill? They just think he's a bad person. He's the real villain in the war, right? He is the real villain in every war. And they think that Churchill is the real villain of this story. I mean there is a letter or something that Churchill writes at the beginning of nineteen fifteen. Well listen, he loves the sunk ship, doesn't he? Yeah. Because he was all over the sinking of the Titanic and said how proud it makes him He wrote a letter at some point to somebody and I cannot remember the exact details, which probably shows that I'm part of the conspiracy. Um he wrote a letter to somebody in the British government and he said it would be absolutely wonderful if the Germans sank a passenger liner because that would look great. And you know, it I I think this would be brilliant. It would bring the Americans into the war. I mean, it's mad that both the Germans and the British are saying it would be great if it got sunk. So the claim is that basically Churchill deliberately put the Lusitania in harm's way, that he could have diverted it, he could have provided an escort for it, because he wanted a sinking to get the Americans into the war. And this is um actually c this is clearly complete rubbish. So basically it would have been mad to give the Lusitania an escort because the Lusitania was so fast. I mean if you got if you've won the blue ribboned. Yeah. there Th'eres' nos no way that anyone can keep up with you. No. And also the thing about the warnings, as I've already described, they were getting loads of warnings the whole time. I mean, Captain Turner, Bowler Bill, he basically said, I got so many warnings. You know, I was just over whelmed with warnings. Yeah. I mean what do you expect me to do? I was just sailing the right way, they've got tons of warnings, and unfortunately it was sunk by a U-boat. End of story. So I don't really believe in the conspiracy theories, to cut a long story short. I mean Ockham's razor, the simplest explanation is likely always the likeliest. But actually the sinking of the ship is only the beginning of the story. Our producers will be delighted to hear that when they look at the clock. Um another three three pages worth of surely the story to go. The real story is the publicity war, the propaganda war that follows the sinking. Because obviously this is a big deal, a thousand people have been killed. And in terms of sort of naval disasters, it's really comparable only to the Titanic. I mean, up to the point that James Cameron did his film, yeah, James Cameron film obviously made the Titanic a colossal, colossal pop cultural phenomenon. But up to that point, the Lusitanium, the Titanic, where I would say probably ne ck and neck in terms of publicity. Yeah, Lusitanium is massive. Lusitanium is massive. If you read, for example, Agatha Christie's uh thrillers, so there's one called it's a Tommy and Tuppence thriller. I think it's the Seeker Adversary. The Lusitania it runs right through this book. But Titanic has the kind of metaphorical heft that I think the Lusitania does. And also Lusitania really matters in terms of the war. So in Germany, what's the response? Because I mean uh I imagine among the iceberg community there was no great rejoicing at the sinking of Titanic. But what about Germans? What about the Germans? Are they coca hoop? The Germans are cocahoop actually. The Germans it may surprise some listeners that the Ger mans don't feel bad about this at all. They think we've done a we've done our job and we've done it brilliantly. So the official line in Berlin is look, the Lusitania, you know, the app the British government put money into building it because they wanted to use it as an auxiliary ship. It could have been fitted with guns. It's carrying war material in the cargo. Most German newspapers say well done for sinking it. So the Frankfurter Zeitung calls it an extraordinary success. A Catholic centre party newspaper says, you know, the British are behaving very badly at sea. This is our reprisal, our repression. Yeah. With joyful pride, we contemplate this latest deed of our navy. The English w ished to abandon the German people's death by starvation, but we are more humane. We simply sank an English ship with passengers who entered the war zone at their own risk. I mean that's not not untrue, actually. Yeah, but it it''s nots not wise in the context of winning global opinion for your policies is it it's not wise well what's definitely not wise is that they produce they produce propaganda postcards showing the sinking. They produce medals, unofficial medals, making fun of Cunard. Um, and some of these medals show this Lusitania sinking, and they show the Lusitania bristling with guns because they want people to perceive the Lusitania as a military target. I mean, one of these medals has a skeleton selling cunard tickets. And the motto is business above all. In other words, cunard, sacrifice the lives of their own passengers just so they could make money, that's the claim. Now in Britain, of course, the reaction's very different. The vast majority of the victims are British or Canadian. People see it as an unspeakable war crime. Even more, I think, than the atrocities in Belgium. This is the moment that establishes the idea in the British public mind of German barbarism, of the crimes of the Han. I assume that there's no awareness of the possibility that well not possibility, the fact that the Lusitania is carrying ammunition. ship in force and so there was no mention in the newspapers that actually the ship is carrying all of this ammunition. And so to the British it just seems that the Germans have sunk a liner for the halibert. Yeah. Just for cruel people. And all of these urban myths spread in Britain. So for example, it was widely believed, I think almost unquestioned in Britain in the 1910s, that German school children had been given the day off school to celebrate the sinking of the Lusitania. This was just not true, but it became absolutely embedded. Or people get those medals that I was talking about, and they say, they get hold of copies of them, and they say, um, well, these were actually struck by the German government. This is an official thing. This was given out to children. And this is not true. These were unofficial, privately produced kind of war merch. But naval intelligence in Britain got got, they set up a Lusitania souvenir medal committee, which basically produced copies of this medal, and then they sold a quarter of a million of them to raise money for the Red Cross in Britain, to I mean, that's a kind of mad thing, but you know, it's hugely effective in spreading the idea of German barbarism. And there were loads of posters and postcards showing kind of the most famous one, it's a maiden, she's holding up a sword, and in the background the Lusitania is sinking, and there are people drowning, and the caption says, take up the sword of justice. In other words, avenge all the women and children who were killed on the Lusitania. But I suppose in Britain this is going with the grain of what public opinion already thinks. Yes. But what about America? Because that's the the the crucial kind of market to for the Germans and the British to compete over. So as I said, about 128 Americans died on the Lusitania. And it is a colossal story. So we already mentioned Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt, the former president, says, come on, let's get stuck into this war now. We should get involved. The Germans are pirates, all of this kind of thing. The contraband issue does get reported there, the arms issue, but the United States authorities say it's completely reasonable. We've always been sending small arms cartridges on ships. This is not an excuse for the Germans. Um, you know, it's not really war material, it's for private citizens, blah blah blah blah blah. Is that true? Um I think it's massively stretching a point . I think if you were German you would you would say come on. Couldn't say it's for shooting grouse or something. Yeah, exactly. It's for shooting squirrels. What what about the percussion fuses? Are you gonna be blowing up squirrels and grouse? Sure. What about President Wilson though? President Wilson goes out of his way at first. He does a bit of a Jimmy Carter. So three days after the sinking, he gives a speech in Philadelphia and he's talking to people who've just become American citizens . And he says, We're special. You know, America must be a special example, the example of peace, because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. And then this line, there is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. I mean that's such an American thing to say. Not at the moment. No, no, no. It's hard to imagine Wilson's present day successor saying that, isn't it? No. Um, but he is massively mocked for this, Wilson. I mean, people say, what an absolute wimp, what a weed. So one British newspaper produced a cartoon entitled Fail Columbia, and it shows the Kaiser literally kind of thumbing his nose at a sort of haughty but ultimately wimpish Woodrow Wilson. And the caption, too proud to fight, too right to right a wrong, too wise to walk with wisdom, too mighty to be strong. Stinging. So there's then a huge argument within the US administration, and it basically ends with the Secretary of State, William Jennings Bry an, already mentioned this kind of radical prairie populist. He ends up actually resigning. There's a big argument, are we going to complain to the Germans? Wilson agrees that he will find he finally is persuaded that he will complain. He sends the Germans a series of notes. And so Brian resigns because he thinks this is too provocative. He thinks it's too provocative. He thinks no don't even I I mean I think this is pretty bonkers from Brian. Put the ammunition issue on one side. If 128 of your citizens are sunk by an by a U-boat and you don't complain, when would you complain? But he's an isolationist, isn't he? So he would never complain. Yeah. Um Wilson does complain. He uh sends the Germans not quite an ultimatum, but he basically says, you know, the sinking was totally unjustified. It was totally your fault. Don't do this again. If you keep sinking our ships, that will be tantamount to war. But what Wilson doesn't do is get involved in the war at this point. And actually, the Germans make this easy for him because all through this episode, remember, they have been arguing themselves about whether they're doing the right thing. And after the sinking of the Lusitania, the Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Holveg and the Army Chief Eric von Falkenhayn, and indeed the Kaiser, say to the R the Navy, do not do this again. We do not, we we cannot run the risk. Not worth it. Not worth it at all. The campaign continues for a few more weeks. They do actually sink one more liner., the Arabic You see, that's never talked about, is it? No. Forty-four people died on that sinking. That was heading from Liverpool to New York. Again, it was off the coast of Ireland. So why is that not a big deal? Well, not that many people. So it's completely eclipsed by the Lusitania . the actual sinking was a little bit murky. It's not entirely clear whether the Germans did it deliberately or not, where they didn't realise it was a liner. So I think in this case they're rel them they're a little bit less um culpable. But anyway, to cut a long story short, the Kaiser then said, enough of the unrestricted submarine warfare. And on the 18th of September 1915, all U-boats were recalled from the Atlantic and from the English Channel. And although the campaign continued in the North Sea, the Germans then said, well, we'll follow the old cruiser rules, we'll stop sinking ships without warning. By the end of nineteen fifteen, this was the position . The British has still got their naval blockade of Germany. And actually, in the long run, although it's not really talked about, it's not people don't often think about the first world War at sea. This is one of the big reasons that Germany lost the First World War. The squeeze on Germany. And on supplies and everything. Exactly. I mean the fact they're drinking, you know, coffee made of I don't know. Rat poison. Yeah, exact ly. By the end of and eating nothing but turnips or whatever. I mean, they're having a terrible time, the Germans. The German submarine campaign has failed. They've not come remotely close to cutting uh Britain's trade links. But the Americans at this point are still not involved. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson is still determined to stay out, and in nineteen sixteen he runs for re-election on the slogan He kept us out of war . But something definitely changed after the sinking of the Lusitania. It made a massive impression on American public opinion, including among people close to Woodrow Wilson. So William Jennings Bryan's replacement as Secretary of State is a guy called Robert Lansing. And Lansing wrote in his memoirs afterwards that the sinking of the Lusitania left me with a conviction that we would ultimately become the ally of Britain. So there's a sense that it's only a matter of time . And when in absolute desperation in nineteen seventeen Germany restarts the submarine campaign, that drags the Americans into the war. And then a central element of its recruitment, of the American recruitment campaign, playing a part in all the posters and all the recruitment postcards and all of this is the Lusitania. But I guess that's to get ahead of ourselves, Tom, because we're still in nineteen fifteen. And next time we'll be talking about another story that became a key weapon in the propaganda war, a story that in its time was just as notorious as the sinking of the Lusitania. And this is the story of the British nurse, Edith Cavill, who was accused by the Germans of being part of an underground spy network in occupied Belgium. So the question, was she an innocent martyr or a British secret agent? Or possibly both. Um and if you want to find out the answer to those questions, club members can hear the episode and the following two episodes, which are about Gallipoli right away. And to join them and to get the sensational full array of benefits, uh you have to go to therest is history.com and sign up there. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thank you, everyone, for listening and goodbye. Bye bye This episode is brought to you by the Times and by the Sunday Times. Now if there is one thing that history, and indeed Bob Dylan, teaches us, it is that the Times they are always a changing. And Dominic, I guess we're living in changing times now, what with America attacking Iran and oil crises. So do you think that the lessons of that for Keir Starmer of Rosie . So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was prime minister in the previous oil crisis. He and Kirstarmer I think are quite similar. There's a slight sense of foundering which they have in common. But their bigger point is you never really know what's round the corner because when you look at history You know the facts they shouldn't be uncertain. And that is where the Times and the Sunday Times come in. And I would say that understanding the news is absolutely vital when you're navigating an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to The Times and the Sunday Times, visit the Times.com. Hi everybody, we are back with another absolutely colossal update about the rest is history festival. Well it's massive. So on the 4th and 5th of July we will be at Hampton Court Palace. So we have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic royal palaces collections. And yes, Dominic, most excitingly of all, this is the thing I have been pushing for, and I'm so looking forward to it. We have Medieval Combat. A terrifying, brutal, yet completely thrilling sport . It is going to be an unforgettable two days. It is indeed. And um at the core of the festival of these talks, we've got some more talks to add to the lineup. So I will be talking to the brilliant Tudor historian Tracy Borman about the secrets of the six wives of Henry VIII. I'll be talking to friend of the show and Irish national treasure, Paul Rouse, about whether there is an alternative universe in which Ireland We'll be talking to Katja Hoyer about Weimar, Germany and in particular the town of Weimar through history, and Professor Adam Smith will be telling the story of America through three presidents. And on top of all that, I'll be doing a special event with Ian Hislop about the history of satire. And I will be on stage with