Authors: Greg King
Lindell Bates came to look for his brother, Lindon; officials in Queenstown took him for a spy and imprisoned him briefly; finally, he was released and he identified the body of Lindon when it washed up on the Irish coast on May 10.
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Gladys Bilicke, too, had desperately looked for her husband, Albert, wandering from morgue to morgue without result.
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Finally, certain that he hadn’t survived, she said his body could be identified by the two abdominal scars from his recent surgery; his monogrammed gold and platinum watch; his sapphire cuff links; his diamond and turquoise ring; and his diamond tiepin.
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Over the weeks and even months that followed, bodies continued to wash up on the Irish coast. The first bodies recovered, Wesley Frost wrote, “made a very strong appeal through their likeness—a sort of unearthly aura of personality.” With the passing days, the bodies were in “revolting condition,” their “rigidity relaxed into an inebriate flabbiness, and the features broke down into a preposterously animal-like repulsiveness.” What remained of faces was “grotesque and hideous. The lips and noses were eaten away by sea birds, and the eyes gouged out into staring pools of blood. It was almost a relief when the faces became indistinguishable.”
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Only 768 people—passengers and crew—had survived; four of those died of their injuries in the next months. Some 1,198 had perished, including 128 Americans. Over 800 of
Lusitania
’s victims were never recovered.
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News of
Lusitania
’s sinking sent shockwaves around the world. Great Britain was both numb with horror and pulsing with a desire for revenge as newspapers battled each other in hyperbolic headlines. “The Huns Carry Out Their Threat to Murder!” ran one; another deemed the tragedy the “latest achievement of German frightfulness.”
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Even the staid
Times
denounced “the diabolic character of Germany’s action” and the “wholesale massacre of those on board.”
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It had been, the newspaper declared, “wholesale murder, and nothing else.”
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The disaster became a powerful weapon in the ongoing propaganda war. Shopkeepers of German ancestry found their store windows broken and their goods looted; German nationals were attacked on the streets. Six days after the sinking, Prime Minister Asquith declared that all German males between seventeen and forty-five would be interned as enemy aliens; others would simply be deported.
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The tragedy needed no distortion to arouse indignation, yet newspapers eagerly published photographs of the dead and offered up salacious stories that the U-boat had machine-gunned desperate survivors and its crew laughed as they watched babies drown.
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American reaction was slightly more subdued. The sinking, wrote the
New York Tribune,
was “in defiance not alone of every principle of international law, but of every dictate of common humanity. American men, women and children, citizens of this neutral nation, have been exposed to death, have, perhaps, been actually murdered by German war craft. For this murder there is no justification.”
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“The civilized world stands appalled,” declared the
New York Herald,
adding, “if ever wholesale murder was premeditated, this slaughter on the high seas was.”
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The
New York World
summed up what must have been on many minds when it wrote: “What Germany expects to gain by her policy is something we cannot guess: what advantage will it be to her to be left without a friend or a well-wisher in the world?”
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Editorials condemned, anger poured out in column after column, and cartoons depicted the Kaiser surrounded by a sea of dead children. Only the
New York Times
looked beyond the emotion of the moment to directly address what it termed “the Admiralty’s neglect,” writing that the lack of a convoy was “unaccountable” and that the Admiralty had failed in its “plain duty.”
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While a few German newspapers decried the sinking, most described it as a great patriotic victory in the ongoing war. “We rejoice over this new success of the Germany Navy,” declared the
Neue Freie Presse
.
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10
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The
Kölnische Volkszeitung
wrote that the
Lusitania
disaster was “a success of moral significance,” explaining, “the English wish to abandon the German people to death by starvation. We are more humane. We simply sank an English ship with passengers, who at their own risk and responsibility entered zone of operations.”
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Kaiser Wilhelm II was outraged over the sinking, telling American ambassador to Berlin James Gerard that “no gentleman would kill so many women and children.”
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Apocryphal stories that the Kaiser gave German schoolchildren a holiday in celebration were widely circulated.
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Germany might have fended off much of the international criticism had she simply apologized and expressed regret: instead, she justified the sinking. It was, wrote Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, sad that many Americans, “in wanton recklessness, and in spite of the warnings of our Ambassador, had embarked in this armed cruiser, heavily laden with munitions,” and had lost their lives, but Germany had been within her rights to torpedo the liner.
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German propagandist Bernard Dernberg, who had been posted to New York City, only exacerbated and aroused American opinion. He not only insisted that
Lusitania
had been carrying contraband and munitions and was therefore a legitimate target, but added that the Americans who had perished had “committed suicide” by sailing on the liner.
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Count Johann von Bernstorff, Germany’s ambassador to America, was shocked by Dernberg’s callous remarks, and quickly sent him packing back to Germany.
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A more formal statement came from Berlin on May 10, three days after the sinking. While the Foreign Office in Berlin expressed “its deepest sympathy at the loss of American lives” aboard the liner, it insisted that responsibility rested “entirely with the British Government, which, through its plan of starving the civilian population of Germany, has forced Germany to resort to retaliatory measures.” The statement pointed out that many British merchant vessels were armed with heavy guns and had previously tried to ram German submarines when they surfaced to give warning. It also declared that
Lusitania
had regularly carried large amounts of arms and ammunition. Such actions effectively turned the liner into a blockade-runner, carrying materials even the British government had deemed to be contraband.
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How would the United States respond? American ambassador Walter Page wrote from his post in London of the widespread feeling that his country “must declare war, or forfeit European respect.”
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Former president Theodore Roosevelt loudly denounced the sinking as “piracy on a vaster scale of murder than any old time pirate ever practiced,” adding, “it seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.”
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Yet President Wilson was cautious. Three days after the disaster, he gave a speech in which he declared, “The example of America must be a special example.” The country, he said, would “not fight” but instead seek peace “because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world.” He ended, “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 that it is right.”
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Six days after the sinking, Wilson’s State Department dispatched a formal note to Berlin. The president expected “that the Imperial German Government will disavow the acts of which the government of the United States complains, that they will make reparation so far as reparation is possible for injuries which are without measure, and that they will take immediate steps to prevent the recurrence of anything so obviously subversive of the principles of warfare for which the Imperial German Government have in the past so wisely and so firmly contended.”
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While decrying the loss of life, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan believed that Germany was fully within her rights to sink the liner. The most vocal public opinion supported a strong American response; Bryan soon resigned in protest over the president’s insistence that “England’s violation of neutral rights is different from Germany’s violation of the rights of humanity.”
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Throughout that long summer of 1915, governments warred in diplomatically polite notes. That the sinking had transcended disaster into the realm of propaganda soon became apparent. Victims were quickly forgotten in the nationalistic rush on all sides to exploit the tragedy. British recruiting posters depicted the last minutes of the liner in horrific exaggeration, or carried provocative images of drowned women clutching dead babies. Then there was the infamous “Medal of Death,” created in Munich by sculptor Karl Goetz. One side depicted the sinking ship; the other showed a Cunard window manned by the skeletal figure of Death, dispensing tickets to waiting passengers beneath a sign that read, “Business Above All.” Goetz mistakenly dated the sinking as having taken place on May 5; the British insisted that this thus revealed a premeditated plot to sink the ship.
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Although Goetz manufactured the image as a private souvenir, to mark what he viewed as Cunard’s lethal business practices, British authorities were quick to realize the propaganda benefit of a medal they insisted celebrated the sinking, and commissioned Selfridge’s Department Store in London to make and sell some 300,000 duplicates to further arouse public indignation, falsely claiming it had been awarded to U-boat crews.
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On Monday, May 10—the same day on which the funerals took place in Queenstown—Kinsale coroner John Horgan summoned Captain Turner to appear at the first inquest into the disaster. Turner seemed to be “a broken man” as he testified before a jury of shopkeepers and fishermen in the Old Market at Kinsale. The captain admitted that he was aware of the submarine danger and had received warnings from the Admiralty; he had, he insisted, carried out his orders “to the best of my ability.” Turner believed only one torpedo had struck the ship. The captain seemed so overwhelmed that Horgan interrupted the proceedings, saying, “We all sympathize with you very much in the terrible crime which has been committed against your vessel.” At these words, Turner lowered his head and burst into tears.
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There was also a fair amount of revisionism: even after the worried confrontations aboard ship with George Kessler, Ian Holbourn, Francis Jenkins, and others, Turner lied, saying that he had never heard any passengers express worries about possible danger.
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Just as Horgan concluded his proceedings, a telegram arrived from the Admiralty in London, ordering Captain Turner to remain silent. The Admiralty were, Horgan commented, “as belated on this occasion as they had been in protecting the
Lusitania
against attack.” The humble jury duly rendered its verdict. The “appalling crime” had been committed “contrary to international law,” it read. Not only the crew of the submarine but also “the Emperor and the Government of Germany” were guilty of “willful and wholesale murder.”
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Lusitania
’s surviving passengers and crew continued to be pawns in the ongoing propaganda efforts that followed the sinking. The British government’s official inquiry conducted by the Board of Trade into the tragedy began on June 15, 1915, in London, just a month after the disaster. Of the 768 survivors—passengers and crew—only 36 were called upon to give evidence. Some passengers, like Oliver Bernard, were willing to testify but were refused when officials suspected they might be openly critical.
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From its inception, the British inquest was meant to absolve the Admiralty and Cunard of any responsibility. The surviving officers and crew, as historians Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan noted, “were no doubt aware that the way to promotion and pay was to say no more than they had to and to avoid giving unduly damaging testimony against their employer.”
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