Lusitania and

I READ WITH great interest your article about Joseph Macky and his death on the Lusitania [ Boating, June 2015]. My interest was also piqued by your reference to his ownership of Ilex. She was subsequently owned by my grandfather, Mr John Donald. Much later she was wrecked on Minerva Reef as Tuaikepau after being purchased by a Tongan mission.

There is one issue in your article which is not quite right. It concerns the notice that the Imperial German Embassy to the US wanted posted in all the main US east coast newspapers to warn Americans of the dangers of travelling on British ships in time of war. The ad was pulled at the behest of the State Department who warned the newspapers of the possible dangers of libel suits. Of the 50 newspapers involved, only one, the Des Moines Register, carried the ad on the requested date, so very few, if any, potential passengers would have been aware of the warning. Thus were the maximum number of Americans deliberately placed at risk.

The Germans told the State Department that on all but one of Lusitania’s wartime voyages she had carried munitions. She had been designed to be an armed merchant cruiser with revolving gun platforms and ammunition hoists installed to Admiralty specifications at the time of her building. A previous captain of Lusitania resigned his position on March 8 1915, saying he was prepared to face U-boats but no longer willing “to carry the responsibility of mixing passengers with munitions or contraband”.

The cargo Lusitania carried on her last fateful voyage consisted of 600 tons of gun cotton (pyroxyline), 6 million rounds of ammunition, 1248 cases of shrapnel shells and a further unknown quantity of munitions as well as falsely labelled “cheese, lard and furs” which were likely further weapons of war.

You mention that the Royal Navy vessel Juno had been ordered back to port and yet no one informed the captain of the Lusitania of that decision. Commander Joseph Kenworthy was present in the Admiralty map room when she was torpedoed. He wrote in a book published in 1927: The “Lusitania was sent at considerably reduced (75%) speed into an area where a U-boat was known to be waiting and her escorts withdrawn.” Lusitania passed only 750 yards from U-20. It was a perfect 90-degree shot. You mention the second explosion after the torpedo hit. This second explosion blew the side off number two cargo hold and divers have since reported that the bow was blasted by a massive internal explosion, and large pieces of bow plating, buckled from the inside, are to be found some distance from the hull and caused the rapid sinking.

There was an official enquiry under Lord Mersey to cover up the direct cause of the sinking and to place blame. The Admiralty said to the enquiry: “I am directed to inform you that it is considered politically expedient that Captain Turner, the master of the Lusitania, be most prominently blamed for the disaster.”

However, Mersey attempted to soften the blow. He wrote: “The whole blame for the cruel destruction of life in this catastrophe must rest solely with those who plotted and with those who committed the crime.” The plotters included Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admiralty; US President Woodrow Wilson; his aide Colonel House and J P Morgan, whose banking business was used to attempt to disguise the true nature of the cargoes Lusitania was carrying.

Two days after delivering his judgement, Lord Mersey wrote to the British PM Asquith and turned down his fee for services. He added: “I must request that henceforth I be excused from administering His Majesty’s Justice.”

In later years his only comment on the event was: “The Lusitania case was a damn dirty business.”

There seems little doubt that the British and elements of the US Governments deliberately set Lusitania up in an effort to drag the US into World War I. My authority for the above is a book entitled The Creature from Jekyll Island by G Edward Griffin, 1994.

SV Tiare Taporo III, Langkawi, Malaysia