RMS Lusitania

 
En plein conflit mondial, les Britanniques ont sacrifié leur navire et 1 200 passagers pour accélérer l’entrée en guerre des Etats-Unis.(https://fr.news.yahoo.com/7-mai-1915-naufrage-lusitania-1200-morts-torpillage-043742164.html)

 Few tales in history are more haunting, more tangled with investigatory mazes or more fraught with toxic secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, one of the colossal tragedies of maritime history. It’s the other Titanic, the story of a mighty ship sunk not by the grandeur of nature but by the grimness of man. On May 7, 1915, the four-funneled, 787-foot Cunard superliner, on a run from New York to Liverpool, encountered a German submarine, the U-20, about 11 miles off the coast of Ireland. The U-boat’s captain, Walther Schwieger, was pleased to discover that the passenger steamer had no naval escort. Following his government’s new policy of unrestricted warfare, Schwieger fired a single torpedo into her hull. Less than half a minute later, a second explosion shuddered from somewhere deep within the bowels of the vessel, and she listed precariously to starboard.
 The Lusitania sank in just 18 minutes.

The world was outraged to learn that the war had taken this diabolic new turn, that an ocean liner full of innocent civilians was now considered fair game. The sinking turned American opinion against the Germans — demonstrating, for some, the incorrigible treachery of the “Pirate Huns” — and became a rallying cry when America finally entered the war in 1917.

But in the years that followed, unsettling questions clung to the Lusitania case, contributing to a persistent hunch that the ship had somehow been allowed to sail into a trap. (Or, at least, that important aspects of the story had been assiduously covered up.) Why had the British Admiralty failed to provide a military escort? What was the cause of that catastrophic second explosion? Why was a British cruiser sent to rescue the Lusitania’s dying victims suddenly called back to port? And what about Winston Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty, who conveniently left Britain for France just days before the sinking? What did Churchill know, and when did he know it?

Shortly before the disaster, Churchill had written in a confidential letter that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.” Afterward, he all but celebrated the sinking as a great Allied victory, saying, “The poor babies who perished in the ocean struck a blow at German power more deadly than could have been achieved by the sacrifice of a hundred thousand fighting men.”

The Germans, for their part, argued, and with good reason, that the British had long been using passenger liners like the Lusitania to ferry troops, weapons and ordnance from supposedly neutral America to war-weakened Britain. The Lusitania, in fact, was known to be carrying many tons of war matériel that fateful day (including four million rounds of ammunition, samples of which the Irish divers discovered seven years ago). The U-boat captain, Schwieger, was surprised that a single torpedo had sunk such a massive ship — and so quickly. Yet from his periscope, he noted a second explosion, apparently the same one that so many aboard the ship also felt and heard. Over the years, many people have contended that this second explosion was very likely caused by secret stores of volatile munitions — like aluminum powder or guncotton — that detonated within the ship’s holds.

This nagging question of the second explosion is one of many Lusitania riddles that persist to this day. And with the hundredth anniversary of the ship’s demise almost upon us, the subject would seem to be ripe for a new and fresh interpretation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/books/review/erik-larsons-dead-wake-about-the-lusitania.html?_r=2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania