Lusitania (Steamship)

RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner and briefly the world's largest passenger ship. The ship was sunk on 7 May 1915 by a German U-boat 11 mi (18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland. The sinking presaged the United States declaration of war on Germany (1917); Lusitania was a holder of the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing, and was briefly the world's largest passenger ship until the completion of her sister ship Mauretania, three months later. The Cunard Line launched Lusitania in 1906, at a time of fierce competition for the North Atlantic trade. She sank on her 202nd trans-Atlantic crossing; When RMS Lusitania left New York for Britain on 1 May 1915, German submarine warfare was intensifying in the Atlantic. Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom a war zone, and the German embassy in the United States had placed newspaper advertisements warning people of the dangers of sailing on Lusitania; On the afternoon of 7 May, a German U-boat torpedoed Lusitania 11 mi (18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland and inside the declared war zone. A second, unexplained, internal explosion, probably that of munitions she was carrying, sent her to the seabed in 18 minutes, with the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew; However the ship was technically unarmed and was carrying thousands of civilian passengers, and so the British government accused the Germans of breaching the Cruiser Rules. The sinking caused a storm of protest in the United States because 128 American citizens were among the dead. The sinking helped shift public opinion in the United States against Germany and was one of the factors in the United States' declaration of war nearly two years later. After the First World War, successive British governments maintained that there were no munitions on board Lusitania, and the Germans were not justified in treating the ship as a naval vessel. In 1982, the head of the British Foreign Office's North America department finally admitted that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous and poses a safety risk to salvage teams