The Lusitania's 100-Year Secret Our World

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It was a tragedy that should never have happened.

It was the first time that war had left land and had affected

the ordinary common man and woman.

There has always been a question of what caused the second explosion.

It must have been very frightening, really.

A century on, it's still felt as a kind of horrific, horrific act.

There was great anti-German feeling.

Many felt, now, this was an enemy that has got to be stopped.

# All aboard!

# All aboard!

# Last call now for those going abroad!

# They people were ordinary people like ourselves.

Some were on board because they thought it was their duty to

come back and fight in the war.

They all have a different story.

If they were going to travel on any ship across the Atlantic,

the Lusitania was particularly a safe bet.

# Last call now for those going abroad!

Fast, luxurious, and consumed by a century of mystery.

The Lusitania was the super liner of her day.

But why was she targeted, and why did she sink so quickly?

There was no alternative for getting from America over to Britain.

That was the only option.

It was 1915, the Lusitania was about to leave New York for Liverpool,

the passenger ship supposedly safe from German U-boats.

Up until the sinking of the Lusitania, there had not been any

passenger liners that had been sunk.

There was a threat made, but many people thought it was an idle

threat, because the Germans had not carried out on any of these threats.

But German U-boat tactics were about to change.

We know that the Germans put advertisements in New York

newspapers before the ship left, warning people not to get on the

Lusitania, that it was carrying arms which were against the laws of the

sea at the time, and therefore the ship was subject

to attack. They got on board and they must have been worried,

some of them, but they sailed.

It was May 1st.

For those who boarded, the final journey was about to begin.

# They called it the Greyhound of the Sea.

# The biggest, fastest ship of her day.

# For her speed, size and power, 25 knots an hour.

# She was known as the Greyhound of the Sea.

With 2,000 passengers and crew on board,

most of the journey was uneventful.

But as she neared Ireland, the British Admiralty began issuing

U-boat warnings.

Passengers were told not to light their cigarettes on deck for fear

of being seen by the U-boats.

They heard the rumours that they were going to be torpedoed, but the

crew were not afraid, because they did not believe it, they thought

the ship was too fast and too modern and nothing could catch it.

The following morning, the Admiralty sent this.

But it seems what the Lusitania's Captain William Turner did not

know was that the Admiralty would not or could not be more specific.

It did not want to reveal it had broken German naval codes.

Turner doubled the lookout.

There had been thick fog, but by lunchtime, it had cleared,

it was a lovely spring morning.

Another message arrived shortly after.

The south-east coast of Ireland was sighted.

Turner thought the fog had saved them.

The ship came closer inland and changed direction.

Unbeknownst to them, they were being watched by U-boat U-20.

This is U-20, a German attack submarine.

It was captained by Walther Schwieger, an ambitious 30-year-old

veteran of submarine warfare.

At 2:09pm, he gave the order to fire one torpedo.

There is no footage of the actual attack.

What followed was later recreated in this extraordinary 1918 animated

film.

The torpedo made a huge explosion.

Clear bow shot at 700 metres.

The German U-boat commander was watching,

he made a note in his logbook.

Shot struck starboard side close behind the bridge.

An extraordinarily heavy detonation followed,

with a very large cloud of smoke.

Billy Burrows was 15, he was the ship's bellboy.

He was three floors down in the washroom, I believe.

He heard this explosion, and all the lights went out.

Robert Leith was the Lusitania's wireless operator.

When the torpedo hit, my grandfather was in the dining room.

I think it was the second-class dining room.

He immediately went to the wireless-operator room

and started sending SOS messages.

The ship was going too fast for the crew to launch some lifeboats.

Then, there was a second explosion.

One that has never been fully explained.

Fred Russell was a waiter in first class.

He later wrote about the chaos.

I helped to lower one boat on the port side, you could do

nothing on the starboard, she had such a list, and not

fancying staying too long, I went down to the lower deck, thinking to

chance my luck and jump for it.

Able seaman Joseph Parry was among the crew members who scrambled

to rescue passengers.

The lifeboat snagged and did not end up in the water.

The next thing, he was thrown into the water with the ship tilting.

I am told by my mother that one of the people he pulled out

of the water was a lady who he pulled out by her hair.

The radio operator, Robert Leith, kept sending SOS messages

as water rose above his feet.

The power failed and there was some sort of emergency

back-up that he was able to use.

And I gather, really, he stayed until the very last minute.

The 15-year-old bellboy, Billy Burrows, waded into a life raft.

He pulled quite a few people into the boat, even

though the boat was full already.

They got to about 50 yards out, and they heard this whoosh

and the ship upended and sank.

It took just 18 minutes for the Lusitania to go down here, some 11

miles of the Old Head of Kinsale.

Those who managed to get their life jackets on lasted two or

three hours in the water.

But those that didn't, or couldn't, only survived a few minutes

in the freezing Atlantic.

IRISH FIDDLE MUSIC.

More than half the 2000 people on board the Lusitania were killed.

There was a rescue operation.

The lifeboat crew from Courtmacsherry rowed

from 11 miles away.

It took three hours, because it was six o'clock, you can see.

Brian O'Donovan's great granduncle, Timothy Keohane,

was skipper of the lifeboat.

His logbook recalls every detail.

But they simply couldn't get there in time.

If they'd had a bit of wind on the night they probably would

have felt they could have got there sooner, and might have been able to

save some souls.

But I suppose it is a big thing, too, to even be able to recover

bodies, for the families' sake.

Survivors who reached shore wandered around Cobh and other towns,

dazed by what had happened.

But as Ireland reeled from the tragedy, information filtered

back to Britain much more slowly.

With no television or radio it took hours for news of the

disaster to reach the Lusitania's home port here in Liverpool.

But when the details of the tragedy did emerge, it was met by a

combination of anger and revulsion.

I've come here today to see the exhibition.

Liverpool's Maritime Museum has captured the city's stunned reaction

in the family accounts from people like David Knowles.

His grandfather, Joseph Parry, was an able seaman on board.

He helped save many lives.

He saved a lady and her baby, and in the lifeboat, at one stage, she

was so grateful that she gave my grandfather one of the shoes of the

baby, which he obviously treasured, because it came ashore, it was

passed down through the family once he was on land again.

And he inscribed it, underneath, with "Lusitania 1915."

And I think the words "Lest we forget."

So he obviously treasured that, and since then,

we have treasured it as a family.

Fred Russell, the first-class waiter, also survived.

And in letters now in the museum, he spoke of his relief at escaping

and making it back to Liverpool,

to the relief of his family.

Uncle Fred came home, but there were a lot of families who probably

suffered greatly because they had lost their income, you know?

They have lost their family member, and they probably suffered greatly

after that.

But hundreds of other families didn't get good news.

Norman Ross' grandfather had been a barkeeper on the ship,

but Henry Ross was never found, despite the yearnings of his wife.

He was such an excellent swimmer, according to my grandmother,

that she really didn't think - she thought if anyone was going to

be a survivor, he would.

And she was always of the opinion that he may have lost his memory,

a knock on the head, and could perhaps be somewhere in Ireland.

And so people went out to look for him.

And what happened?

Well, he was never found.

There was no body found.

Communities on both sides of the Irish Sea went into mourning,

grief that is to this day re-enacted by groups like these in Ireland,

where they were convulsed by the news.

Most simply couldn't believe that a civilian ship had been targeted

with such callousness.

We moved into an area of almost kind of total war, where civilians were

seen as potentially legitimate.

It was still kind of a learning process, a journey into the unknown

for the crews and passengers during the First World War.

The small Irish town of Cobh struggled to deal with so many dead.

The world had never seen civilians attacked like this in war before.

100 years on, those graves are still tended to, victims

of a tragedy that didn't distinguish between age, class or nationality.

More than 120 children died.

Just over 120 Americans lost their lives, and nearly 200

first-class passengers were killed.

In all, just under 1200 civilians perished

on the Lusitania in an act of war.

The shock of the Lusitania was felt across Britain and America,

which hadn't yet entered the war.

It was overwhelmingly an attack on a civilian ship.

I think those kind of men, women and children who were caught

up in that attack, you know, the horror of that is still felt.

It was new at the time, but it still has that impact

and resonance, a century on.

It is still felt as a kind of horrific, horrific act.

But within months, Britain was using the sinking

in its propaganda war with Germany.

The author of War Horse, Michael Morpurgo, touches on this in

his new book about the Lusitania.

His wife Claire's family were among thousands who bought specially

made medals issued soon after the disaster.

And there's the medal,

where she found it, aged seven.

The medals were exact copies of ones released in Germany,

gloating about the tragedy.

The British cleverly turned this triumphalist sentiment on its head,

and issued 300,000 of their own, to show the public how barbaric

Germany was.

The effect, I think, clearly worked.

For months afterwards there was great anti-German feeling.

Up until that time this notion that somehow everyone was very happy to

go off and join this war, there were plenty

of people who were, but there were also plenty of people who were not.

Many of those now felt, "This is an enemy that has got to be stopped."

100 years on, the Lusitania now lies in 90 metres of water,

a mass of encrusted wreckage.

But what has never been fully answered is whether she was

a legitimate target, and why did she sink in just 18 minutes?

For nearly 50 years, the wreck has been owned by this

American businessman, Gregg Bemis.

Intrigued by the tragedy, he has always wanted answers to

those questions.

He has spent millions on diving operations to find out.

He is now convinced the British government was secretly using

passenger liners like the Lusitania to carrying munitions

for the war effort.

And it was these, not the ship's boiler, that caused

the second devastating explosion.

There is no question in my mind that there were explosives on board.

Whether the explosives were gunpowder or

whether they were the shrapnel shells which were supposedly not

charged, but in fact were, whatever it was, it was certainly a

violent reaction when it went off.

The explosives theory is controversial, because there

is no clear evidence yet.

But Gregg Bemis goes further.

He says she was also laden with millions of rounds of ammunition,

including these bullets.

A deadly cargo completely unknown to the passengers.

If the British and American authorities were responsible

for putting high explosives on board a passenger ship, I think

it should be recorded as such.

It shouldn't be left to the imagination of people,

it should be yes or no.

Now, a century on, the British Foreign Office has made

this limited admission.

"Successive British governments have always maintained that there

was no munitions on board the Lusitania, and that

the Germans were therefore in the wrong to claim to the contrary

as an excuse the sinking ship.

The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck."

For increasing numbers of historians,

that admission suggests the Lusitania was a legitimate target.

I think there are several people to blame here.

The German submarine commander has to take responsibility

for the death of 1200 civilians, but so too must the Admiralty

and the British government for introducing civilians into the mix,

by using civilian vessels for military purposes.

But getting proof of the munitions to the surface has been impossible.

One problem is the wreck is disintegrating.

You have the trauma that she experienced at

the time of her sinking, the first torpedo, the second explosion.

It's like going into a crime scene 100 years later.

Can you find that evidence you're looking for?

We don't know, but we have to have a good attempt at trying.

But there is another problem.

Ireland's president, Michael Higgins, is

among those who say the wreck should be left untouched as a war grave.

It was, if you like, to assure respect.

It also was to enable such investigation to take place

in a regulated and a responsive environment.

# They say its darkest before the dawn.

# This thought keeps us moving on. #

So for now, the Lusitania must be recalled in other ways.

# We should make port before the morning. #

In songs and stories passed down through generations.

# We should make port before the morning. #

And for victims and descendants, the once opulent Lusitania has now

journeyed into history as a liner shrouded in grief,

memories and secrets.

# We will make port before the morning. #

It was a tragedy that should never have happened.

She was so affectionately regarded in Liverpool.

She was Lucy to the people here.

War, now, is completely universal in its destruction, and this was,

in a way, the first sign of that.

When there has been a mass loss of life like this, I think people

should always remember.

After lots of showers to start the weekend,

the second part of the weekend