The Rest Is History - 673. The First World War: The Submarine Strikes (Part 3)

Episode Date: May 24, 2026

Was the Lusitania merely an ocean liner like Titanic, or a formidable battle ship? How and why did a German U-boat fleet manage to bring down this titan of the sea? And, how did the tragedy ignite the United States’ decision to finally join the War in 1917? Join Dominic and Tom as they launch into one of the most cataclysmic events of the First World War, and a major turning point for America’s intervention…. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ Lloyds. 250 years on and still backing the nation's aspirations. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[e-mail]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude  Senior Producer: Callum Hill  Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 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, 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, Tom? A great lesson in leadership, I think, for anybody. So Alfred and his heirs, they marry idealism and pragmatism.

They're brilliant at alliances. They're brilliant at managing power. They're brilliance, 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 foresight. When it's time to make your next move, you can bank on Lloyd's 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 Lloyds to help make their dreams a reality. Based on Lloyd's internal customer data from March 26. crazed 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 valor grows One fateful day May such be never more A stately vessel left Columbia's shore Upon the wave in fearless grandeur road

Nor feared 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 to hideous for belief

with its foul truth plunged nations into grief. So that immortal work of poetry was the Crime of Crimes, Lucetania in 15 and it was first published by a young journalist called HP Lovecraft. And that is a name that will be familiar to any fans of horror stories today. the great pioneer of that genre. And he's 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 heart. 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 1915. And it is the story of how the liner RMS Lusitania came to be sunk by a German U-boat, or Dominic, as Lovecraft will put it, a Prussian wolf. Yes. So the Lusitania, everybody, was sailing from New York to Liverpool, and it was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a U-boat on the 7th of May, 1915, with the loss of more than a thousand lives.

And as you know, Tom, 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 kinds of legends and conspiracy theories. And actually, rather like the Cthulu 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 aspects 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 Atlantisists, 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 1915, 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 there's the man who's 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 all know how that plays out in the long run. Yeah, because he loves birth of a nation, the film that he's part of the 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 Lucitania 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 its history. Oh, definitely, yeah. But the Lusitania belongs to their rivals, Cunard.

And it's a Cunard liner launched in 1906 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 Cunard. Yeah, that's right. So the Lusitania actually won the blue ribbon for the fastest Atlantic crossing. And up for the 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. Because I wanted revenge on this fast ship. 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 subsidized 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 installed. And when war breaks out in August 1914, 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? I suppose you could aim down?

I don't know. I'm not really an expert on naval armaments. Anyway, can not get the ship back. The demand for ocean crossings obviously falls in the first months 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 Lusitania 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, 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 revolts 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 Confederate submarine that shot her 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 you win some, you lose some. The Americans are very much pioneers of this kind of thing.

But basically, throughout the 19th century, you know, it's seen as a bit of a white elephant, the submarine. But then in the 1900s, 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 defence things, that they would kind of lurk around your coast. Somebody sends a fleet and your submarine will shoot it down or whatever. Because Jules Verne, he has the Nautilus, which must make it kind of seem very fashionable. Cutting edge. Yes, exactly. And the biggest submarine force in 1914, 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 always think of, oh, the Germans love a submarine with a year. Yes, a sea wolf. They had 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 naval chief, Grand Admiral Alfred von Turpitz. So he's the sort of dreadnought baron, I suppose. Yes. 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 dreadnoughts than submarines. But just before the war, he'd said, well, we'll have some submarines. And he 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 at speed of about six. knots, which for those of you who don't speak not, that's about 20 miles an hour. And they can go a heck of a long way. They can go 7,000 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'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 70 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. You're only allowed to wash once a week 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 seasick, wouldn't it? Yeah, it's basically like someone has sort of shrunk a kitchen, a sort of industrial kitchen, and you're in it, but you've also under the sea. I think it's just terrible. And of

course, it's terrifying. I mean, everyone thinks that U-boat 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 be a shell or something, you might bump into a ship. And as one ship, U-boat commander, said at any minute, we could be thrown 100 meters up in the air or 100 meters under the water. So basically, you're in terror of your life the whole time.

And 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 craken 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, amazing.

I think 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 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 basically this short story predicted that with a very small force of U-boats, Germany or some adversary could destroy Britain's main. merchant shipping and cause mass hunger and bring Britain cap in hand to the negotiating table. Oh, like in 1976. Like in 1970s. 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, Grad Ambril Terpitz and the chief 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 almost unwritten codes

that govern naval warfare. And this is as true in 1914 and 1950 as it was in the 1790s. So in the 1910s, 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 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, you either capture them, which obviously you can't do on a U-boat because you can't put more people on your U-boat, you make them get in the lifeboats, and then you blow up their ship.

Of which there are now enough, thanks to the Titanic disaster. Exactly. There should be enough. You make it again 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, as you said, it's very fiddly and very difficult, and B, the British start disguising their warships as merchant ships to lure the Germans in. So it's a little bit like the bit with the Acheron in Master and Command of the film, if people have seen that, where Captain Jack Aubrey disguises his ship as a crippled whaler to lure the French in. You see, if that was the German policy, that would be cheating because it's us. It's cunning. It's cunning and clever. The other thing, of course, as you really mentioned, by the end of 1914,

the British have set up a naval blockade of Germany, basically closing the North Sea, because they're hoping to starve the Germans into submission. And faced with this, Grand Admiral Turpitz and the chief of staff, Hugo von Paul, say to the Kaiser and his Chancellor, Betman 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 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 in the beginning of February 1915, Paul persuades the Chancellor, Tehrbalt, Bettenholyovig, 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? And you're not worried about the Americans? No, we're not worried about the Americans. Because we'll advertise this. We'll tell everybody we'll 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 basically Britain will be isolated and will be able to starve them out. The Kaiser, great friend of the rest of history, of course, some poor behaviour in his past. I think 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? 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 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 by this point already in the war he's becoming a bit of a figurehead, frankly. So Paul gets his way

and on the 4th of February 1915, 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 February the 18th 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 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 Marn, 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 using gas. Yeah, exactly. Or shooting Belgians. That's exactly what it is.

You know, we're in a terrible hurry. Time is against us. We need to crack on. Be ruthless. Can't make an omelet without breaking smegs. Exactly. Their overall submarine supremo is a guy called Herman Bauer. He says to his U-boat commanders, come on, be really ruthless, strike without warning.

Terror is great. Drive merchant shipping off the seas. This is what we're going to do. Like a lot of the sort of Germans wheezes, this is flawed from the beginning because they've been massively over-optimistic. There 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 controversial incident on the 28th of March,

when they chase down a British cargo liner called the Falaba. This is U28. And U28 actually gives the crew and passengers of the falaba 10 minutes to get off. It says you've got 10 minutes to get off and then we'll sink you. The evacuation is a bit of a shambles and takes longer than 10 minutes. The U-boat commander, for various reasons, loses patience, and fires a single torpedo. This sinks the ship and capsizes some of the lifeboats

that have already got into the water and 111 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. She's a school teacher. 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. All called Kermit or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Woodrow Wilson was outraged at the loss of Leon C thrasher. And he sent a note of complaint to the Germans. But a noted complaint was all he sent.

He didn't make a huge hullabaloo and 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. was an accident, you know, maybe 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. It's a not merely a British ship. It's a ship of which the British are very proud. Very proud. Yeah, because 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 gray. So it'll be harder for enemy ships to spot you as you're crossing. I mean, I have to be honest, that would not reassure me if I was planning to take a ship across the Atlantic. But this thing is, if you wanted to cross the Atlantic, this is the only way you can go. I'd just stay. Well, if you were invited to do some

corporate speaking event with your gramophone-based podcast in New York in 1950s, I do it by telegram. Oh, you do it by telegram? Very good. 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 passengers ships. We're still giving passengerships 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, think, 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 and academic. Yeah, he's got steel glasses. There's a Jimmy Carter side to him, I think, that people say, and the Germans actually say, they say in writing, all the Americans want, they will do anything to stay out to 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 in the White House? Teddy Roosevelt has gutted that the Americans aren't fighting in the First World War. He loves a war, doesn't he? He loves a war. He loves two things, Teddy Roosevelt. He loves a 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 he? This is a side issue. But I think it's important because that presents 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 24th, it arrives in New York Harbor. And it's due to return on the 1st of May. Now, meanwhile, the German ambassador in Washington, who's a man called Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, he is very worried that the Americans 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 press, 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 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, 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 your first answer. And the second answer, I forgot what the question was.

What was the question? Would the Germans consciously be looking out for the Lusitania because it would constitute a massive prize? 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 salient at this time. It's a big ship and it's the fastest ship. But I don't think they set out deliberately to target this particular ship. Although later on it was sort of claim 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,

I know you've got better, I think you've actually got better internet discipline than I have, but you could easily lose days of your life falling down lucetania rabbit holes. I imagine we're going to be coming to the conspiracy theory, so I might wait till then. This ambassador has 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 30th 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. 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 1st 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 tremendous spectacle. She's been painted gray at the funnels, but still a spectacular site. Nine decks, 31,000 tons, 800 feet long, almost. There's a huge hustle and bustle as everybody's 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 1,264 passengers on the Lusitania and 702 crew, so a total of 1,966,

let's say just under 2,000. 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 Lucitania 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.303 rifle ammunition. They're carrying a thousand cases of shrapnel-filled artillery shells. They're carrying 16 cases of percussion fuses. They're carrying tons and tons, 46 tons, in fact, of aluminium powder,

which is used for making explosives. And who sent this? American manufacturers. It's being 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 Germans said, look at this. I mean, you're carrying war contraband. 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, and I quote, a private legal shipment of small arms. The rifle ammunition is the kind that would have gone back and forth between Britain and America during peacetime, and it can be used by private citizens, and 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 Kuhna 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 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 or there. I mean, it's kind of basically using civilians as human shields to kind of protect military, targets. I think that's a pretty fair assessment. I mean, I don't want to sound unpatriotic. Yeah, you would have, if you had made that assessment in an article in the morning post in 1915, 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, this 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 50 American newspapers. Some of them ran it on the Friday, some on the Saturday morning. And one paper very famously, you can see Clippings Online, actually runs it next to a Cunard advert for the Lusitania. So next to each of this like, sail the Lusitania. And next to it is that thing saying, if you sail on the Lusitania, we were getting it. Basically. There's a nice book on the sort of very colorful 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 McWorth. And she's boarding the ship with her 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 is. The authentic voice of the British consumer. Yeah. I'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 catch a ticket because of that.

I mean, well, maybe there is, I don't know, but imagine trying to make a claim into travel insurance in 1915. 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. I'll 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 love of elite sport like you Tom but his choice of sports were probably a little different from yours because his sports were fox hunting and carriage racing kind of like Prince Philip.

Like 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 torpedoed. 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. 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 1930s. Maybe he told his valet and the Valley survived? I don't know. Maybe. Hey, look, Dominic, it's a mythos. You don't get, don't dig down too hard. Then one knew the Lusitania was going to be torpedoed. So I think this was either a jape from one of his posh 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. So when you hear that getting on a tip.

They couldn't have an elephant at this dist. Right. Don't get on that ship. Lucitania, 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.

But this captain, the captain of the Lucitania, is not a great charmer, William Turner. He's seen his very gruff. He's not like Captain Smith and the Titanic, one of his 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've been hard on Captain Smith, as you'll know. Yeah, yeah. But 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 a ship,

I will probably be sunk. If I saw that, if I heard a man from the company running the 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 unsinkable. 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 usual stuff. Now, meanwhile, the day before, a submarine called U20, commanded by Captain Leitnant Walthershviger, 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 U20 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 secret that the warnings are not being widely distributed. So it's like Bletchley Park in the Second World War. Like Enigma in the Second World War, exactly. On the 5th of May, so this is after the Lusitania has set off, U-20 intercepts a merchant ship called the Earl of Latham off the coast of County Cork. And that evening, the Royal Navy sends a warning to all ships, submarines active off the south coast of Ireland. On the 6th of May, U-20 intercepts a British steamer called the SS candidate

off the coast of County Wexford, and then another ship, the SS Centurium. 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 around the north and to Liverpool that way? You could do that, but there's no reason to believe that there aren't submarines there. I mean, the submarines are all around the British and Irish waters.

So all this time, the Lusitania has been steaming east. And that morning, the 6th, she is about 860 miles west, and she is well clear of the war zone. But by the evening of the 6th, she is less than 400 miles from the war zone. And about 8 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 7th of May, 1915. It is very foggy.

Captain Turner posts extra lookouts and he slows his speed to just 15 knots and he sounds the foghorn. Now some passengers don't like this. They say, why would you sound the foghorn? You're drawing attention to our presence as we were approaching the war. zone. But he says, well, it's foggy. This is what you do. This is just how ship's sail. Because he's conscious that he's entering the war zone, he orders the 22 lifeboat swung out ready just in case. So, you know, he's thinking ahead. You wouldn't be reassuring, would it? Not terribly. At 10 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 1152, 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 1 o'clock, another message. Submarine, five miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10 a.m. 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 1 o'clock. in the afternoon on 7th 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-20, Captain Leitnant Schfiger 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 20 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 Schfiger immediately orders the U-boat to dive. They dive to a depth of six fathoms, which is about 36 feet, and to head for the target. And so they head for the target. they go closer and closer and closer. It is now 140, and the Lusitania is approaching the old head of Kinsale, which is about 13 miles away, and Sviga is 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 sight, and he breathes a massive sigh of relief. It is now 10 minutes past two. The Lusitania is finally in range, and on U-20, Volta Schviger 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 are 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 Kirstama are Rosie? So looking at the career of Edward Heath, for instance, who was prime minister in the previous oil crisis? It didn't work out brilliantly for Ted Heath, to be honest. Actually, he and is Darma, I think, are quite similar. They're from relatively humble backgrounds and there's a slight sense of floundering, which they have in common. But their bigger point is you never really

know what's around the corner, do you? Because when you look at history, the future is always pretty uncertain. But, you know, the facts, they shouldn't be uncertain. And 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 an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world. So to subscribe to The Times and the Sunday Times, visit thetimes.com. The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31 for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health.

Riders of all abilities are welcome, and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family or corporate team, and make an impact. Register today at fight for brainhealth.ca. Hello everyone and welcome back to the rest of history, where it is 10 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 torpedo, although this has given rise to 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, Schfiger, the guy who gave the order to fire, is watching from the periscope of U-20, 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 explosion. 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 know it was the Lusitania. He just thought it's a bloody big ship. Anyway, this talk of a second explosion, very controversial for this reason. We mentioned all the ammunition and stuff that's being carried. But that was non-explosive. In other words, to pass the US sort of, 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 ships manifest or whatever. But I think this is bonkers. Most historians think this is bonkers. And 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 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 100 feet high. And immediately, Captain Turner, Bowler Bill, shouts to the quartermaster, he says, turn towards the Irish coast. 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 it 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 Kinsale on the coast of County Cork. Remember, the torpedo hit at 10 past 2. So at 214, the power fails and the whole of the ship is plunged into darkness. So the has failed. The electric lifts are shut down, and they're 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 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 in Ireland. The difference, though, is people who remember the Titanic series, the Titanic drama, what makes it so riveting is that it unfolds in some ways in slow motion. It's a slow puncture, isn't it?

Yeah. It takes two hours for Titanic to sink. but this is less than 20 minutes of just abjects 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 kind of plowing off to get into life base. Well, we'll come to the women and children first issue because there's some very, very gallant behaviour. I mean, 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 the elaborate procedures. Because there's no band playing on the deck. No, no ban playing on the deck. Now, the other big difference, I guess, between Lusitania and Titanic, which affects your women and children first issue, is the Lusitania does have enough lifeboats. So the Lusitania has 48 lifeboats, and that is enough for all the 1,960 people on the ship. The problem is that the ship is now tilting so much, it's listing to Stalbards so badly

that you basically can't use the boats on that side. Because they're starting to sink into the water. Well, they've swung out wildly. They're on ropes. They've swung out from the ship. And the other thing is, because you're tilted, 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'll kind of bump into the... Benponts of the, yeah, inside of the ship.

So it's a very, very chaotic scene and a scene of sort of desperate panic. They are lowering lifeboats, 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 48 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 landed in the water. And everybody fell out. The lifebed 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 18 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 the... their lives. Captain Turner, Bowler Bill, is on the deck. He's near the bridge and he's holding the ship's logbook. He's behaving as a captain should, frankly. But he has 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. Well, surely Captain Smith would Isn't it the case that Captain Smith was seen some years later after the Titanic in a New York bar? Yes. Playing the piano, no? Yes.

Does he not playing the piano? I think he was singing. See shanties. It's like that bloke in COVID who gave up his job as a postman. The 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. It's very got one episode. So there was a young Canadian woman called Charlotte Pie and she was traveling with her 18. month-month-old daughter Marjorie. They were helped into a lifeboat by a man who gave them 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 18-month-old daughter, Marjorie, were thrown into the water.

A Marjorie, who's screaming for her mother, is basically ripped away by a wave. Charlotte loses. touch with her. She dies. 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, 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 gone 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 Titanic, there aren't exact figures for the casualties. There's lots of debate about how many people died. Probably, let's go with the most common, 767 passengers and crew were rescued

and 1,194 people were killed. So actually, you were better off on the Lusitania than you were on the Titanic. So a four out of 10 survival rate, so a little bit better than Titanic, although better to be a woman on Titanic, I suppose, than just to take your chances of either gender on the Lusitania.

But you mentioned that women and children first. The Titanic, by and large, children survive. in this case 94 of the dead were children and even more scandalously 128 of the dead were American and most of the bodies were never recovered and among the dead there are 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 what about the the American millionaire what's in Vanderbilt van derbilt where 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 had just recently been doing a series of shows in Ireland, haven't we, about Titanic. And we pondered whether Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk would behave as well as American plutocrats did back in the 1910s. An open question, I think. Yeah, I'm interested to know what the listeners think. So Vanderbilt behaved splendidly. He was very impressive. 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 just described. Charlotte Pie. 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 story that really sticks in my mind,

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, and this nanny. So Audrey, they were an American family, and Audrey was three months old, when she got on the Lusitania. She was travelling 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 fed by this English nanny, Alice Lines. And Alice Lines was 17. Right.

She came from Suffolk. And she was feeding Audrey. She'd taken them basically downstairs when the torpedo struck. And Alice, they don't know where the rest of the family are, but Alice, this nanny, showing,

tremendous courage, she manages to get the children upstairs and into a lifeboat. And there, unbelievably, or perhaps very believably, a Frenchman used the opportunity of being a lifeboat to try to crack onto her. So this Frenchman said to her, that's very French behavior. He whispers in her ear. He says, you have perhaps lost your husbands. Do not worry, I am wealthy. I will look after you. I don't think she took him up on 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 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 periodization. Yeah. Yeah. There's somebody who basically was on the Lusitania lived to see the David Cameron Cameron Premier Show. Well, how lucky for her. 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 Millennium 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 and finish it. I need, give me more, Tony Ben. Give me more. Right. Now, we should just mention some of the conspiracy theories about the, 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, 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 German's fault at all. It's the British fault.

But people don't rate that. Historians don't rate that. And generally, 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 mager tendency. I mean, in a way, it reflects well on the reputation of the British spy agencies for kind of cunning.

Yes. That's how I see it. Now, then we come to the second conspiracy theory. and this is by far the one that has the most traction in that particular community. This is that basically the British wanted the Lusitania to be sunk. And then actually it's really the fault

of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. What is it about American isolationists and Churchill? They just think he's a bad person. I mean, we know what it is. He's the real villain in the war, right? He is the real villain in every war. And they think Churchill is the real villain of this story. I mean, there is a letter or something that Churchill writes at the beginning of 1915.

Well, listen, he loves a sunk ship, doesn't he? Yeah. Because he was all over the sinking of the Titanic and said how proud it makes him feel to be British. 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. He wrote a letter to somebody in the British government, and he said it would be absolutely wonderful if the German sank a passenger liner because that would look great. And, you know, I think this would be brilliant.

It would bring the Americans into the war. 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 actually, this is clearly complete rubbish. So basically, it would have been mad to give the Lusitania an escort because the Lusitania was so fast.

It would be so fast, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, it would be better for the Lusitania to just rush across. I mean, if you've won the Lusitania, blue ribbon. There's 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 overwhelmed 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 you by end of story. So I don't really believe in the conspiracy theorist to cut a long story short. I mean, Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is slightly, always the likeliest. But actually the single, but actually the Sinking the ship is only the beginning of the story. Our producers will be delighted to hear that when they look at the clock. Another three pages worth of 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, you know, James Cameron film obviously made the Titanic. colossal, colossal, pop cultural phenomenon. But up to that point, the Lusitania and the Titanic, where I would say probably neck and neck in terms of publicity. Yeah, Lusitania was massive.

Lusitia is massive. If you read, for example, Agatha Christie's thrillers, so there's one called, it's a Tommy and Tupin's Thrill. I think it's the secret adversary. The Lusitania runs right through this book. But Titanic has the kind of metaphorical heft that I think the Lusitania doesn't. I think Lusitania is massive. And also Lusitania really matters in terms of the war.

So in Germany, what's the response? Because I mean, I imagine among the iceberg community, there was no great rejoicing at the sinking of Titanic. No, but what about the Germans? Are they cocker hoop? The Germans, it may surprise some listeners, the Germans don't feel bad about this at all. They think we've done our job and we've done it brilliantly. So the official line in Berlin is, look, the Lusitania, you know, 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 Frankfurters Zaitung calls it an extraordinary success.

A Catholic Centre Party newspaper says, you know, the British are behaving very badly at sea. This is our reprisals, our refrains. Because they're blockading us. Yeah. With joyful pride, we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy. The English wished 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, it's not untrue, actually.

Yeah, but it's not wise in the context of winning global opinion for your policies. It's not wise. Well, what's definitely not wise is that they produce propaganda postcards showing the sinking. They produce medals, unofficial medals, making fun of Kuhnard. And some of these medals show there's lucidaneous 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 sacrificed the lives of their own passengers just so they could make money. That's the claim. Now, in Britain, of course, the reaction is 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. No, because under the defence of the Realm Act, there is effectively censorship in force, and so there was no mention in the newspapers that actually the ship is

carrying all of this ammunition. So to the British, it just seems that the Germans have sunk a liner for the hell of it. Yeah. Because they're cruel people. And all of these urban myths bred in Britain. So, for example, it was widely believed, I think almost unquestioned in Britain in the 1910s, that German school children have 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, of copies of them. And they say, 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, they set up a lucetania 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. 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 crucial kind of market 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.

You know, it's not really war material. It's for private citizens, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is that true? I think it's massively stretching a point. I think if you were German, you would say, come on. Couldn't say it's for shooting grouse or something. Yeah, exactly. It's for shooting squirrels.

What about the percussion fuses? Are you going to 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, it's hard to imagine Wilson's present-day successor saying that, isn't it? 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 as 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 Brian, 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, don't even, 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 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. Wilson does complain. He 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, Tehbal-Betman-Holweg, and the army chief, Eric von Falkenheim, and indeed the Kaiser, say to the Navy, do not do this again. We do not. 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. 44 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. Yeah, okay. 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 realize it was a liner. So I think in this case, they're a little bit less culpable. But anyway, to cut a long story short,

the Kaiser then said, enough of the unrestricted suburb. marine 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, will stop sinking ships without warning. By the end of 1915, 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, exactly. 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 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 1916, he runs for re-election on the slogan, he kept us out of war. But something definitely changed after the Sinky of the Lusitania. It made a massive impression on American public opinion,

including among people close to Woodrow Wilson. So William Jennings is Brian's replacement as Secretary of State, as 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 1917,

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 1915. 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. 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, you have to go to The Rest Is History.com and sign there. But for now, thank you, Dominic. Thank you everyone for listening and goodbye. Bye-bye. 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. We have a weekend of brilliant talks, live music, exclusive access to historic Royal Palace's collections. And yes, Dominic, most exciting 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 at the core of the festival of these talks, and 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 a friend of the show and Irish National Treasure, Paul Rouse, about whether there is an alternative universe in which islands could have remained part of the United Kingdom. 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 Hizlop about the history of satire. And I will be on stage with Mary Beard and we will be talking about just how strange, just how alien, just how different to us Rome was or maybe it wasn't. I will be talking to Helen Castor about Elizabeth I'll be discussing whether she truly was England's greatest ruler or maybe whether that title should still be claimed by Athelstan. I will be talking to Ali Ansari about all things Persian with Dan Jackson about the pit of death. And I will be talking to a friend of the show, Willie Dalrymple, about the links between ancient India and Greece and Rome. Absolutely incredible scenes. And of course, on both days, Tom and I will be on stage doing a show together as well. So on the first day, we'll be answering all our club members' questions. And then to close the festival, we will do a definitive ranking of the all-time top friends of the show.

So lots to look forward to. And beyond that, there is so much. else that will be happening across the weekend. So think of it as the ultimate summer history hangout. And your tickets will give you full access to explore the great Tudor Palace of Hampton Court and indeed the Royal Tennis Court. So that would be very exciting. There will be food and drink fit for a king, which sounds very enticing.

I picture the very glamorous people that are our club members and their summer garb. They're on the lawn at Hampton Court Palace. They're chatting about history and delightful surroundings, sipping on a refreshing gin and tonic. And it's probably the most civilised festival there's ever been. I mean, that's what I imagine anyway. Just a reminder, the tickets are exclusive to club members. And if you are not a member, now is the perfect time to join. So head over to The Restishistory.com to sign up and grab your tickets.

And of course, have access to a whole range of supplementary benefits. benefits. Once you have signed up to the restishistory.com, all you do then is log into the members area and you select festival and it's all very obvious. But you know what? There is a twist. If you do this, you will be entered into a genuinely unbelievable prize draw. And that prize draw, if you win, you and three other people, it's like the golden ticket in Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, because you will be given the chance to be upgraded to the premium experience and the premium experience will give you, among other things, unlimited food and drink for free all day.

Do not miss it. Can't wait to see either.