RMS Lusitania
RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner launched by the Cunard Line in 1906 as a Royal Mail Ship. She was the world's largest passenger ship until the completion of her running mate three months later. In 1907, she gained the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing, which had been held by German ships for a decade.
Though reserved for conversion as an armed merchant cruiser, Lusitania was not commissioned as such during WWI but continued a transatlantic passenger service, sometimes carrying war materials, including a quantity of.303 ammunition, in her cargo. The German submarine hit her with a torpedo on 7 May 1915 at 14:10, off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, leading to her sinking about 18 minutes later. Only six of several dozen lifeboats and rafts were successfully lowered; there were 771 survivors out of the 1,960 people on board, while 1,198 perished.
The sinking killed more than a hundred US citizens and significantly increased American public support for entering the war, which occurred in 1917 with the United States declaration of war on Germany.
Overview
German shipping lines were Cunard's main competitors for the custom of transatlantic passengers in the early 20th century, and Cunard responded by building two new 'ocean greyhounds': Lusitania and. Cunard used assistance from the British Admiralty to build both new ships, on the understanding that the ship would be available for military duty in time of war. During construction gun mounts for deck cannons were installed but no guns were ever fitted. Both Lusitania and Mauretania were powered by steam turbine engines, which enabled them to maintain a service speed of. They were equipped with lifts, wireless telegraph, and electric light, and provided 50 percent more passenger space than any other ship; the first-class decks were known for their sumptuous furnishings.A series of tit-for-tat moves intensified the naval portion of World War I. The Royal Navy had blockaded the German Empire at the start of the war; as a reprisal to German naval mining efforts, the United Kingdom then declared the North Sea a military area in the autumn of 1914 and mined the approaches. As their own reprisal, Germany had declared the seas around the United Kingdom a war zone, wherein all Allied ships would be liable to be sunk without warning. Britain then declared all food imports for Germany were contraband. When submarines failed to sink many ships, the German authorities loosened U-boat rules of engagement. The German embassy in the United States also placed fifty newspaper advertisements warning people of the dangers of sailing on a British ship in the area, which happened to appear just as RMS Lusitania left New York for Britain on 1 May 1915. Objections were made by the British and Americans that threatening to torpedo all ships indiscriminately was wrong, whether it was announced in advance or not.
On the afternoon of 7 May, a German U-boat torpedoed Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland inside the declared war zone. A second internal explosion occurred. The damage caused her to sink in 18 minutes, killing 1,197 passengers and crew. Hundreds of bodies washed ashore, but most were never found.
The German government attempted to find justifications for sinking Lusitania. Special justifications focused on the small declared cargo of 173 tons of war materials on board the 44,000-ton displacement ship, and false claims that she was an armed warship and carried Canadian troops. In defence of indiscriminately sinking ships without warning, they asserted that cruiser rules were obsolete, as British merchant ships could be armed and had been instructed to evade or ram U-boats if the opportunity arose, and that the general warning given to all ships in the war zone was sufficient.
After the First World War, successive British governments maintained that there were no "munitions", apart from small arms ammunition on board Lusitania, and the Germans were not justified in treating the ship as a naval vessel. But the most important protests at the time came from the US. Under neutrality inspections, the US was aware the ship was not armed, was acting in accordance with American law, and was chiefly a passenger vessel carrying almost two thousand civilian passengers and crew, including over a hundred American citizens among the dead. The US government argued that whatever the circumstances, nothing could justify the killing of large numbers of un-resisting civilians, and that the United States had a responsibility to protect the lives of law-abiding Americans. The Americans had already warned the Germans repeatedly about their actions, and the Germans had also demonstrated that submarines were able to sink merchant ships under cruiser rules.
The sinking shifted public and leadership opinion in the United States against Germany. US and internal German pressure led to a suspension of German Admiralty policy of deliberately targeting passenger ships, as well as later stronger restrictions. War was eventually declared in 1917 after the German government chose to violate these restrictions, deliberately attacking American shipping and preparing the way for conflict with the Zimmermann Telegram.
Development and construction
Lusitania and Mauretania were commissioned by Cunard, responding to increasing competition from rival transatlantic passenger companies, particularly the German Norddeutscher Lloyd and Hamburg America Line. They had larger, faster, more modern, and more luxurious ships than Cunard, and they were better placed to capture the lucrative trade in emigrants leaving Europe for North America. The NDL liner captured the Blue Riband from Cunard's in 1897, before the prize was taken in 1900 by the HAPAG ship. NDL regained the prize in 1903 with the and, and Cunard saw its passenger numbers affected as a result of the "s".American businessman J. P. Morgan had decided to invest in transatlantic shipping by creating International Mercantile Marine. He purchased the British freight shipper Frederick Leyland & Co. in 1901, as well as a controlling interest in the British passenger White Star Line, and folded them into IMM. In 1902, IMM, NDL, and HAPAG entered into a "Community of Interest" to fix prices and divide the transatlantic trade. The partners also acquired a 51-percent stake in the Dutch Holland America Line. IMM made offers to purchase Cunard which was now its principal rival, along with the French Compagnie Générale Transatlantique.
Cunard chairman Lord Inverclyde approached the British government for assistance. The government was faced with the impending collapse of the British liner fleet and the consequent loss of national prestige, as well as the reserve of shipping for war purposes which it represented, and they agreed to help. Under the terms of an agreement signed in June 1903, Cunard was given a loan of £2.6 million to finance two ships, repayable over 20 years at a favourable interest rate of 2.75-percent. The ships would receive an annual operating subsidy of £75,000 each plus a mail contract worth £68,000. In return, the ships would be built to Admiralty specifications so that they could be used as auxiliary cruisers in wartime. Lusitania and her sister ship received special permission to fly the Blue Ensign, as a Royal Naval Reserve Merchant Vessel.
Design
Cunard established a committee to decide upon the design for the new ships, of which James Bain, Cunard's Marine Superintendent was the chairman. Other members included Rear Admiral H. J. Oram, who had been involved in designs for steam turbine-powered ships for the Royal Navy, and Charles Parsons, whose company Parsons Marine was now producing turbine engines.Parsons maintained that he could design engines capable of maintaining a speed of, which would require. The largest turbine sets built so far had been of for the battleship, and for s, which meant the engines would be of a new, untested design. Turbines offered the advantages of generating less vibration than the reciprocating engines and greater reliability in operation at high speeds, combined with lower fuel consumption. Having initially turned down the use of this relatively untried type of engine, Cunard was persuaded by the Admiralty to set up a committee of marine professionals to look at its possible use on the new liners. The relative merits of turbines and reciprocating engines were investigated in a series of trials between Newhaven and Dieppe using the turbine-driven cross-Channel ferry Brighton and the similarity-designed Arundel, which had reciprocating engines. The Turbine Committee was convinced by these and other tests that turbines were the way forward and recommended on 24 March 1904 that they should be used on the new express liners. In order to gain some experience of these new engines, Cunard asked John Brown to fit turbines on, the second of a pair of 19,500 GRT intermediate liners under construction at the yard. Carmania was completed in 1905 and this gave Cunard almost two years of experience before the introduction of their new super liners in 1907.
The ship was designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland. The ship's name was taken from Lusitania, an ancient Roman province on the west of the Iberian Peninsula—the region that is now southern Portugal and Extremadura. Her sister ship, Mauretania, was named for the ancient land on the nearby northwest African coast. The name Lusitania had also been used by a previous ship built in 1871 and wrecked in 1901, making the name available from Lloyd's for Cunard's giant.
Peskett had built a large model of the proposed ship in 1902 showing a three-funnel design. A fourth funnel was implemented into the design in 1904 as it was necessary to vent the exhaust from additional boilers fitted after steam turbines had been settled on as the power plant. The original plan called for three propellers, but this was altered to four because it was felt the necessary power could not be transmitted through just three. Four turbines would drive four separate propellers, with additional reversing turbines to drive the two inboard shafts only. To improve efficiency, the two inboard propellers rotated inward, while those outboard rotated outward. The outboard turbines operated at high pressure; the exhaust steam then passing to those inboard at relatively low pressure.
The propellers were driven directly by the turbines, for sufficiently robust gearboxes had not yet been developed, and only became available in 1916. Instead, the turbines had to be designed to run at a much lower speed than those normally accepted as being optimum. Thus, the efficiency of the turbines installed was less at low speeds than a conventional reciprocating steam engine, but considerably superior when the engines were run at high speed, as was usually the case for an express liner. The ship was fitted with 23 double-ended and two single-ended boilers, operating at a maximum and containing 192 individual furnaces.
Work to refine the hull shape was conducted in the Admiralty experimental tank at Haslar, Gosport. As a result of experiments, the beam of the ship was increased by over that initially intended to improve stability. The hull immediately in front of the rudder and the balanced rudder itself followed naval design practice to improve the vessel's turning response. The Admiralty contract required that all machinery be below the waterline, where it was considered to be better protected from gunfire, and the aft third of the ship below water was used to house the turbines, the steering motors and four steam-driven turbo-generators. The central half contained four boiler rooms, with the remaining space at the forward end of the ship being reserved for cargo and other storage.
Coal bunkers were placed along the length of the ship outboard of the boiler rooms, with a large transverse bunker immediately in front of that most forward boiler room. Apart from convenience ready for use, the coal was considered to provide added protection for the central spaces against attack. At the very front were the chain lockers for the anchor chains and ballast tanks to adjust the ship's trim.
The hull space was divided into 13 watertight compartments, any two of which could be flooded without risk of the ship sinking, connected by 35 hydraulically operated watertight doors. A critical flaw in the arrangement of the watertight compartments was that sliding doors to the coal bunkers needed to be open to provide a constant feed of coal whilst the ship was operating, and closing these in emergency conditions could be problematic. The ship had a double bottom with the space between divided into separate watertight cells. The ship's exceptional height was due to the six decks of passenger accommodation above the waterline, compared to the customary four decks in existing liners.
High-tensile steel was used for the ship's plating, as opposed to the more conventional mild steel. This allowed a reduction in plate thickness, reducing weight but still providing 26 per cent greater strength than otherwise. Plates were held together by triple rows of rivets. The ship was heated and cooled throughout by a thermo-tank ventilation system, which used steam-driven heat exchangers to warm air to a constant, while steam was injected into the airflow to maintain steady humidity.
Forty-nine separate units driven by electric fans provided seven complete changes of air per hour throughout the ship, through an interconnected system, so that individual units could be switched off for maintenance. A separate system of exhaust fans removed air from galleys and bathrooms. As built, the ship conformed fully with Board of Trade safety regulations which required sixteen lifeboats with a capacity of about 1,000 people.
At the time of her completion, Lusitania was briefly the largest ship ever built, but was soon eclipsed by the slightly larger Mauretania which entered service shortly afterwards. She was longer, a full faster, and had a capacity of 10,000 gross register tons over and above that of the most modern German liner,. Passenger accommodation was 50% larger than any of her competitors, providing for 552 saloon class, 460 cabin class and 1,186 in third class. Her crew comprised 69 on deck, 369 operating engines and boilers and 389 to attend to passengers. Both she and Mauretania had a wireless telegraph, electric lighting, electric lifts, sumptuous interiors and an early form of air-conditioning.