The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Lusitania telegraph has been recovered
Item from sunken WWI ship may not answer questions.
The sinking of the RMS Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 helped lead the United States into World War I, but more than a century later, researchers are still trying to determine what exactly happened to the doomed British luxury liner.
For years, divers have searched for clues amid the twisted wreck, which lies on the ocean floor roughly 7 miles off the southern coast of Ireland. Each discovery holds the potential for answers. Their most recent find: the ship’s main telegraph, a sturdy metal contraption whose retrieval was announced in late July by the Irish government.
But researchers said the discovery would do little to answer questions that have clouded the story of the ship’s destruction: Why did the Lusitania sink so quickly — in just 18 minutes, compared with the two hours and 40 minutes it took the Titanic to go down? Was it carrying a secret cargo of munitions for the British war effort, and if so, did that help doom its passengers?
These questions stem from an unexplained second explosion that occurred deep inside the ship shortly after it was struck by a torpedo on May 7, 1915. That second explosion is still being investigated, but speculation has long focused on whether it was caused by munitions on board, a charge German officials made at the time, said Diana Preston, a British author and historian.
The attack on the Lusitania — which killed 1,198 people, including more than 100 Americans — outraged the British and American public and was frequently used in war propaganda in both countries to illustrate German atrocities.
It is true that some weapons were aboard, Preston said. The ship’s manifest made no secret that it carried weapons in its hold, including 4,200 cases of Remington rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells and fuses. But they would not have caused the kind of volcanic one-two punch that doomed the ship, she said.
Furthermore, she said, a 1993 expedition by the explorer Bob Ballard indicated there had been no explosion in the area of the ship where those weapons were stored.
“That doesn’t mean, of course, there weren’t other things on board that could have been stored somewhere else, but no one has ever produced evidence of that,” Preston said.
Speculation over a secret cargo intensified in 2014, when Britain released government documents from 1982 that warned a proposed salvage mission to the wreck could “literally blow up on us.”
“The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous,” Noel Marshall, the head of the Foreign Office’s North America department, wrote at the time, according to The Guardian.
He added that to warn the salvage company of the risk would mean “the first acknowledgment of the facts” by the government. In the end, no warning was given and Britain’s official story never changed.