Was the Lusitania Set Up to Be Sunk?

The Story

On 7 May 1915 the German submarine U-20 torpedoed the Cunard liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland without warning. The Imperial War Museums says it sank in 18 minutes, killing 1,200 of almost 2,000 people aboard, 128 of them American citizens. The BBC gives the death toll as 1,198.

Germany had declared a war zone around Britain that February, in which shipping would be sunk on sight. The outrage in the United States was immense, and so, later, was the suspicion: had Britain let it happen? The Churchill Project says political opponents made that claim against Churchill in the 1930s, and that a 1972 book by Colin Simpson revived it, arguing the liner had been left without an escort.

'No evidence has ever been presented to support the theory.' — historian Thomas A. Bailey, as quoted by the Churchill Project

Some pieces are true. The ship carried British war materiel, and British authorities played down the munitions at the official inquiry. In 1982 a Foreign Office official, according to files reported by the BBC, still worried that the subject 'may yet - literally - blow up on us.' And in 1937 Churchill wrote that he regarded the sinking 'as an event most important and favorable to the Allies.'

Three days after the sinking, Churchill told the Commons that the Admiralty could not escort passenger ships, and that it had sent the Lusitania warnings and directions about her course, which were acknowledged.

The central claim, a deliberate plan to sacrifice the ship, is where the documents run out. The Churchill Project says the Admiralty war diary Simpson quoted has never been found by any historian, and it quotes historian Thomas A. Bailey: 'No evidence has ever been presented to support the theory.' The United States did not enter the war until April 1917, according to the Imperial War Museums. The story has real secrets about the cargo, and a plot that no one has documented.