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German U boats sink Lusitania May 7,1915

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German U boats sink Lusitania May 7,1915

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Without warning to let the solider get off of the boat Germany sink Lusitania killing 1,198 people

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The RMS Lusitania was a British-registered ocean liner that was torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat during the First World War on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles (20 kilometres) off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland. The attack took place in the declared maritime war-zone around the UK, shortly after unrestricted submarine warfare against the ships of the United Kingdom had been announced by Germany following the Allied powers' implementation of a naval blockade against it and the other Central Powers. The passengers had been warned before departing New York of the danger of voyaging into the area in a British ship.

The Cunard liner was attacked by U-20 commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger. After the single torpedo struck, a second explosion occurred inside the ship, which then sank in only 18 minutes. The U-20's mission was to torpedo warships and liners in the Lusitania's area. 761 people survived out of the 1,266 passengers and 696 crew aboard,[inconsistent ] and 128 of the casualties were American citizens. The sinking turned public opinion in many countries against Germany. It also contributed to the American entry into the War two years later; images of the stricken liner were used heavily in US propaganda and military recruiting campaigns.

The contemporary investigations in both the United Kingdom and the United States into the precise causes of the ship's loss were obstructed by the needs of wartime secrecy and a propaganda campaign to ensure all blame fell upon Germany. At time of her sinking she was carrying 4,200,000 rounds of Remington .303 rifle/machine-gun cartridges, almost 5,000 shrapnel shell casings (for a total of some 50 tons), and 3,240 brass percussion artillery fuses, but argument over whether the ship was a legitimate military target raged back and forth throughout the war.

Several attempts have been made since the sinking to dive the wreck seeking information about how the ship sank. Military ammunition has been discovered in the wreck.

When Lusitania was built, her construction and operating expenses were subsidized by the British government, with the provision that she could be converted to an Armed Merchant Cruiser if need be. At the outbreak of the First World War, the British Admiralty considered her for requisition as an armed merchant cruiser, and she was put on the official list of AMCs.

The Admiralty then cancelled their earlier decision and decided not to use her as an AMC after all; large liners such as Lusitania consumed enormous quantities of coal (910 tons/day, or 37.6 tons/hour) and became a serious drain on the Admiralty's fuel reserves, so express liners were deemed inappropriate for the role when smaller cruisers would do. They were also very distinctive; so smaller liners were used as transports instead. Lusitania remained on the official AMC list and was listed as an auxiliary cruiser in the 1914 edition of Jane's All the World's Fighting Ships, along with Mauretania.

At the outbreak of hostilities, fears for the safety of Lusitania and other great liners ran high. During the ship's first eastbound crossing after the war started, she was painted in a drab grey colour scheme in an attempt to mask her identity and make her more difficult to detect visually. When it turned out that the German Navy was kept in check by the Royal Navy, and their commerce threat almost entirely evaporated, it very soon seemed that the Atlantic was safe for ships like Lusitania, if the bookings justified the expense of keeping them in service.

Many of the large liners were laid up over the autumn and winter of 1914-1915, in part due to falling demand for passenger travel across the Atlantic, and in part to protect them from damage due to mines or other dangers. Among the most recognizable of these liners, some were eventually used as troop transports, while others became hospital ships. Lusitania remained in commercial service; although bookings aboard her were by no means strong during that autumn and winter, demand was strong enough to keep her in civilian service. Economizing measures were taken, however. One of these was the shutting down of her No. 4 boiler room to conserve coal and crew costs; this reduced her maximum speed from over 25 to 21 knots (46 to 39 km/h). Even so, she was the fastest first-class passenger liner left in commercial service.

With apparent dangers evaporating, the ship's disguised paint scheme was also dropped and she was returned to civilian colours. Her name was picked out in gilt, her funnels were repainted in their usual Cunard livery, and her superstructure was painted white again. One alteration was the addition of a bronze/gold coloured band around the base of the superstructure just above the black paint.

The British established a naval blockade of Germany on the outbreak of war in August 1914, issuing a comprehensive list of contraband that included even foodstuffs, and in early November 1914 Britain declared the North Sea to be a war zone, with any ships entering the North Sea doing so at their own risk.

By early 1915, a new threat to British shipping began to materialise: U-boats (submarines). At first, the Germans used them only to attack naval vessels, and they achieved only occasional-but sometimes spectacular-successes. U-boats then began to attack merchant vessels at times, although almost always in accordance with the old cruiser rules. Desperate to gain an advantage on the Atlantic, the German government decided to step up its submarine campaign. On 4 February 1915, Germany declared the seas around the British Isles a war zone: from 18 February, Allied ships in the area would be sunk without warning. This was not wholly unrestricted submarine warfare, since efforts would be taken to avoid sinking neutral ships.

Lusitania was scheduled to arrive in Liverpool on 6 March 1915. The Admiralty issued her specific instructions on how to avoid submarines. Despite a severe shortage of destroyers, Admiral Henry Oliver ordered HMS Louis and Laverock to escort Lusitania, and took the further precaution of sending the Q ship Lyons to patrol Liverpool Bay. One of the destroyers' commanders attempted to discover the whereabouts of Lusitania by telephoning Cunard, who refused to give out any information and referred him to the Admiralty. At sea, the ships contacted Lusitania by radio, but did not have the codes used to communicate with merchant ships. Captain Daniel Dow of Lusitania refused to give his own position except in code, and since he was, in any case, some distance from the positions he gave, continued to Liverpool unescorted.

It seems that, in response to this new submarine threat, some alterations were made to Lusitania and her operation. She was ordered not to fly any flags in the war zone; a number of warnings, plus advice, were sent to the ship's commander to help him decide how to best protect his ship against the new threat and it also seems that her funnels were most likely painted a dark grey to help make her less visible to enemy submarines. There was no hope of disguising her actual identity, since her profile was so well known, and no attempt was made to paint out the ship's name at the prow.

Captain Dow, apparently suffering from stress from operating his ship in the war zone, and after a significant " false flag" controversy[further explanation needed ] left the ship; Cunard later explained that he was "tired and really ill." He was replaced with a new commander, Captain William Thomas Turner, who had commanded Lusitania, Mauretania, and Aquitania in the years before the war.

On 17 April 1915, Lusitania left Liverpool on her 201st transatlantic voyage, arriving in New York on 24 April. A group of German-Americans, hoping to avoid controversy if Lusitania were attacked by a U-boat, discussed their concerns with a representative of the German Embassy. The embassy decided to warn passengers before her next crossing not to sail aboard Lusitania, and on 22 April placed a warning advertisement in 50 American newspapers, including those in New York:

Notice!
Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
Imperial German Embassy
Washington, D.C. 22 April 1915

This warning was printed adjacent to an advertisement for Lusitania's return voyage. The warning led to some agitation in the press and worried the ship's passengers and crew.

Recording of Lusitania''s departure from New York on her last voyage

While many British passenger ships had been called into duty for the war effort, Lusitania remained on her regular route between Liverpool and New York City. She departed Pier 54 in New York on 1 May 1915 on her return trip to Liverpool with 1,959 people aboard. In addition to her crew of 694, she carried 1,265 passengers, mostly British nationals as well as a large number of Canadians, along with 159 Americans. Her First Class accommodations, for which she was well regarded on the North Atlantic run, were booked at just over half capacity at 290. Second Class was severely overbooked with 601 passengers, far exceeding the maximum capacity of 460. While a large number of small children and infants helped reduce the squeeze into the limited number of two- and four-berth cabins, the situation was rectified by allowing some Second Class passengers to occupy empty First Class cabins. In Third Class, the situation was considered to be the norm for an eastbound crossing, with only 373 travelling in accommodations designed for 1,186.

Captain Turner, known as "Bowler Bill" for his favourite shoreside headgear, had returned to his old command of Lusitania. He was commodore of the Cunard Line and a highly experienced master mariner, and had relieved Daniel Dow, the ship's regular captain. Dow had been instructed by his chairman, Alfred Booth, to take some leave, due to the stress of captaining the ship in U-boat infested sea lanes and for his protestations that the ship should not become an armed merchant cruiser, making her a prime target for German forces. Turner tried to calm the passengers by explaining that the ship's speed made her safe from attack by submarine. However, Cunard shut down one of the ship's four boiler rooms to reduce costs on sparsely subscribed wartime voyages, reducing her top speed from 25.5 to around 22 knots.

Lusitania steamed out of New York at noon on 1 May, two hours behind schedule, because of a last-minute transfer of forty-one passengers and crew from the recently requisitioned Cameronia. Shortly after departure three German-speaking men were found on board hiding in a steward's pantry. Detective Inspector William Pierpoint of the Liverpool police, who was travelling in the guise of a first-class passenger, interrogated them before locking them in the cells for further questioning when the ship reached Liverpool.: 156, 445-446  Also among the crew was an Englishman, Neal Leach, who had been working as a tutor in Germany before the war. Leach had been interned but later released by Germany. The German embassy in Washington was notified about Leach's arrival in America, where he met known German agents. Leach and the three German stowaways went down with the ship. They had probably been tasked with spying on Lusitania and her cargo. Most probably, Pierpoint, who survived the sinking, would already have been informed about Leach.: 131-132, 445

As the liner steamed across the ocean, the British Admiralty had been tracking the movements of U-20, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, through wireless intercepts and radio direction finding. The submarine left Borkum on 30 April, heading north-west across the North Sea. On 2 May, she had reached Peterhead and proceeded around the north of Scotland and Ireland, and then along the western and southern coasts of Ireland, to enter the Irish Sea from the south. Although the submarine's departure, destination, and expected arrival time were known to Room 40 in the Admiralty, the activities of the decoding department were considered so secret that they were unknown even to the normal intelligence division which tracked enemy ships or to the trade division responsible for warning merchant vessels. Only the very highest officers in the Admiralty saw the information and passed on warnings only when they felt it essential.

On 27 March, Room 40 had intercepted a message which clearly demonstrated that the Germans had broken the code used to pass messages to British merchant ships. Cruisers protecting merchant ships were warned not to use the code to give directions to shipping because it could just as easily attract enemy submarines as steering ships away from them. However, Queenstown (now Cobh) was not given this warning and continued to give directions in the compromised code, which was not changed until after Lusitania's sinking. At this time, the Royal Navy was significantly involved with operations leading up to the landings at Gallipoli, and the intelligence department had been undertaking a program of misinformation to convince Germany to expect an attack on her northern coast. As part of this, ordinary cross-channel traffic to the Netherlands was halted from 19 April and false reports were leaked about troop ship movements from ports on Britain's western and southern coasts. This led to a demand from the German army for offensive action against the expected troop movements and consequently, a surge in German submarine activity on the British west coast. The fleet was warned to expect additional submarines, but this warning was not passed on to those sections of the navy dealing with merchant vessels. The return of the battleship Orion from Devonport to Scotland was delayed until 4 May and she was given orders to stay 100 nautical miles (190 km) from the Irish coast.

U-20 (second from left) and sister ships rafted in harbour at Kiel

On 5 May, U-20 stopped a merchant schooner, Earl of Lathom, off the Old Head of Kinsale, examined her papers, then ordered her crew to leave before sinking the schooner with gunfire. On 6 May, U-20 fired a torpedo at Cayo Romano, a British steamer originating from Cuba flying a neutral flag, off Fastnet Rock, narrowly missing by a few feet. At 22:30 on 5 May, the Royal Navy sent an uncoded warning to all ships - "Submarines active off the south coast of Ireland" - and at midnight an addition was made to the regular nightly warnings, "submarine off Fastnet". On 6 May U-20 sank the 6,000 ton steamer Candidate. It then failed to get off a shot at the 16,000 ton liner Arabic, because although she kept a straight course the liner was too fast, but then sank another 6,000 ton British cargo ship flying no flag, Centurion, all in the region of the Coningbeg light ship. The specific mention of a submarine was dropped from the midnight broadcast on 6-7 May as news of the new sinkings had not yet reached the navy at Queenstown, and it was correctly assumed that there was no longer a submarine at Fastnet.

Captain Turner of Lusitania was given a warning message twice on the evening of 6 May, and took what he felt were prudent precautions. That evening a Seamen's Charities fund concert took place throughout the ship and the captain was obliged to attend the event in the first-class lounge.

At about 11:00 on 7 May, the Admiralty radioed another warning to all ships, probably as a result of a request by Alfred Booth, who was concerned about Lusitania: "U-boats active in southern part of Irish Channel. Last heard of twenty miles south of Coningbeg Light Vessel". Booth and all of Liverpool had received news of the sinkings, which the Admiralty had known about by at least 3:00 that morning. Turner adjusted his heading northeast, not knowing that this report related to events of the previous day and apparently thinking submarines would be more likely to keep to the open sea, so that Lusitania would be safer close to land. At 13:00 another message was received, "Submarine five miles south of Cape Clear proceeding west when sighted at 10:00 am". This report was inaccurate as no submarine had been at that location, but gave the impression that at least one submarine had been safely passed.

U-20 was low on fuel and had only three torpedoes left. On the morning of 7 May, visibility was poor and Schwieger decided to head for home. He submerged at 11:00 after sighting a fishing boat which he believed might be a British patrol and shortly after was passed while still submerged by a ship at high speed. This was the cruiser returning to Queenstown, travelling fast and zig-zagging having received warning of submarine activity off Queenstown at 07:45. The Admiralty considered these old cruisers highly vulnerable to submarines, and indeed Schwieger attempted to target the ship.

On the morning of 6 May, Lusitania was 750 nautical miles (1,390 km) west of southern Ireland. By 05:00 on 7 May, she reached a point 120 nautical miles (220 km) west-southwest of Fastnet Rock (off the southern tip of Ireland), where she met the patrolling boarding vessel Partridge. By 06:00, heavy fog had arrived and extra lookouts were posted. Upon entering the war zone, Captain Turner had 22 lifeboats swung out as a precaution so they could be launched more quickly if needed. As the ship came closer to Ireland, Captain Turner ordered depth soundings to be made and at 08:00 for speed to be reduced to eighteen knots, then to 15 knots and for the foghorn to be sounded. Some of the passengers were disturbed that the ship appeared to be advertising her presence. By 10:00, the fog began to lift, by noon it had been replaced by bright sunshine over a clear smooth sea and speed increased to 18 knots.

U-20 surfaced again at 12:45 as visibility was now excellent. At 13:20, something was sighted and Schwieger was summoned to the conning tower: at first it appeared to be several ships because of the number of funnels and masts, but this resolved into one large steamer appearing over the horizon. At 13:25, the submarine submerged to periscope depth of 11 metres and set a course to intercept the liner at her maximum submerged speed of 9 knots. When the ships had closed to 2 nautical miles (3.7 km) Lusitania turned away, Schwieger feared he had lost his target, but she turned again, this time onto a near ideal course to bring her into position for an attack. At 14:10, with the target at 700m range he ordered one gyroscopic torpedo to be fired, set to run at a depth of three metres.

In Schwieger's own words, recorded in the log of U-20:

Torpedo hits starboard side right behind the bridge. An unusually heavy detonation takes place with a very strong explosive cloud. The explosion of the torpedo must have been followed by a second one [boiler or coal or powder?]... The ship stops immediately and heels over to starboard very quickly, immersing simultaneously at the bow... the name Lusitania becomes visible in golden letters.

U-20's torpedo officer, Raimund Weisbach, viewed the destruction through the vessel's periscope and felt the explosion was unusually severe. Within six minutes, Lusitania's forecastle began to submerge. Though Schwieger states the torpedo hit beneath the bridge, survivor testimony, including that of Captain Turner, gave a number of different locations: some stated it was between the first and second funnels, others between the third and fourth, and one claimed it struck below the capstan.

On board the Lusitania, Leslie Morton, an eighteen-year-old lookout at the bow, had spotted thin lines of foam racing toward the ship. He shouted, "Torpedoes coming on the starboard side!" through a megaphone, thinking the bubbles came from two projectiles, not one. The torpedo struck Lusitania abaft the bridge, sending a plume of water upward which knocked Lifeboat No. 5 off its davits and a geyser of steel plating, coal smoke, cinders, and debris high above the deck "It sounded like a million-ton hammer hitting a steam boiler a hundred feet high", one passenger said. A second, more powerful explosion followed, ringing throughout the ship, and thick grey smoke began to pour out of the funnels and ventilator cowls that led deep into the boiler rooms. Schwieger's log entries attest that he launched only one torpedo. Some doubt the validity of this claim, contending that the German government subsequently altered the published fair copy of Schwieger's log, but accounts from other U-20 crew members corroborate it. The entries were also consistent with intercepted radio reports sent to Germany by U-20 once she had returned to the North Sea, before any possibility of an official coverup.

German drawing of Lusitania being torpedoed which incorrectly depicts the torpedo hitting the port side of ship

British drawing of Lusitania being torpedoed; shows disputed "second torpedo"

Lusitania is shown sinking as Irish fishermen race to the rescue. In fact, the launching of the lifeboats was more chaotic

At 14:12, Captain Turner had Quartermaster Johnston stationed at the ship's wheel to steer 'hard-a-starboard' towards the Irish coast, which Johnston confirmed, but the ship could not be steadied and rapidly ceased to respond to the wheel. Turner signalled for the engines to be reversed to halt the ship, but although the signal was received in the engine room, nothing could be done. Steam pressure had collapsed from 195 psi before the explosion, to 50 psi and falling afterwards, meaning Lusitania could not be steered or stopped to counteract the list or to beach herself. Lusitania's wireless operator sent out an immediate SOS, which was acknowledged by a coastal wireless station. Shortly afterward he transmitted the ship's position, 10 nautical miles (19 km) south of the Old Head of Kinsale. At 14:14, electrical power failed, plunging the cavernous interior of the ship into darkness. Radio signals continued on emergency batteries, but electric lifts failed, trapping crew members in the forward cargo hold who had been preparing luggage to go ashore at Liverpool later that evening; it was these seamen precisely who were to report to muster stations to launch lifeboats in the event of a sinking; bulkhead doors, that were closed as a precaution before the attack, could not be reopened to release trapped men. The rudder became inoperable with the loss of power as well, meaning the ship could not be steered to counteract the list or to beach herself. Few testimonies report passengers trapped in the two central elevators, though one saloon passenger claimed to have seen the lifts stuck between the boat deck and the deck below while passing through the First Class entrance.

About one minute after the electrical power failed, Captain Turner gave the order to abandon ship. Water had flooded the ship's starboard longitudinal compartments, causing a 15-degree list to starboard.

Lusitania's severe starboard list complicated the launch of her lifeboats. Ten minutes after the torpedo struck, when she had slowed enough to start putting boats in the water, the lifeboats on the starboard side swung out too far to step aboard safely. While it was still possible to board the lifeboats on the port side, lowering them presented a different problem. As was typical for the period, the hull plates of Lusitania were riveted, and as the lifeboats were lowered they dragged on the inch-high rivets, which threatened to seriously damage or capsize the boats before they landed in the water.

Many lifeboats overturned while loading or lowering, spilling passengers into the sea and others were overturned by the ship's motion when they hit the water. It has been claimed that some boats, because of the negligence of some officers, crashed down onto the deck, crushing other passengers, and sliding down towards the bridge. This has been disputed by passenger and crew testimony. Some untrained crewmen would lose their grip on handheld ropes used to lower the lifeboats while trying to lower the boats into the ocean, spilling their occupants into the sea. Others tipped on launch as some panicking people jumped into the boat. Lusitania had 48 lifeboats, more than enough for all the crew and passengers, but only 6 were successfully lowered, all from the starboard side. Lifeboat 1 overturned as it was being lowered, spilling its original occupants into the sea, but it managed to right itself shortly afterwards and was later filled with people from in the water. Lifeboats 9 (5 people on board) and 11 (7 people on board) managed to reach the water safely with a few people, but both later picked up many swimmers. Lifeboats 13 and 15 also safely reached the water, overloaded with around 150 people. Finally, Lifeboat 21 (52 people on board) reached the water safely and cleared the ship moments before her final plunge. A few of her collapsible lifeboats washed off her decks as she sank and provided flotation for some survivors.

Two lifeboats on the port side cleared the ship as well. Lifeboat 14 (11 people on board) was lowered and launched safely, but because the boat plug was not in place, it filled with seawater and sank almost immediately after reaching the water. Later, Lifeboat 2 floated away from the ship with new occupants (its previous ones having been spilled into the sea when they upset the boat) after they removed a rope and one of the ship's "tentacle-like" funnel stays. They rowed away shortly before the ship sank.

There was panic and disorder on the starboard side of the deck. Schwieger had been observing this through U-20's periscope, and by 14:25, he dropped the periscope and headed out to sea. Later in the war, Schwieger was killed in action when, as he commanded U-88 the vessel struck a British mine and sank on 5 September 1917, north of Terschelling. There were no survivors from U-88's sinking.

Surviving passengers on the port side of the deck, however, paint a calmer picture. Many, including author Charles Lauriat, who published his account of the disaster, stated that a few passengers climbed into the early portside lifeboats before being ordered out by Staff Captain James Anderson, who proclaimed, "This ship will not sink" and reassured those nearby that the liner had "touched bottom" and would stay afloat. In reality, he had ordered the crew to wait and fill Lusitania' s portside ballast tanks with seawater to even the ship's trim so the lifeboats could be lowered safely. As a result, few boats on the port side were launched, none under Anderson's supervision.

The track of Lusitania. View of casualties and survivors in the water and in lifeboats. Painting by William Lionel Wyllie

The second explosion made passengers believe U-20 had torpedoed Lusitania a second time

Captain Turner was on the deck near the bridge clutching the ship's logbook and charts when a wave swept upward towards the bridge and the rest of the ship's forward superstructure, knocking him overboard into the sea. He managed to swim and find a chair floating in the water which he clung to. He survived, having been pulled unconscious from the water after spending three hours there. Lusitania's bow slammed into the bottom about 100 metres (330 ft) below at a shallow angle because of her forward momentum as she sank. Along the way, some boilers exploded and the ship returned briefly to an even keel. Turner's last navigational fix had been only two minutes before the torpedoing, and he was able to remember the ship's speed and bearing at the moment of the sinking. This was accurate enough to locate the wreck after the war. The ship travelled about two nautical miles (4 km) from the time of the torpedoing to her final resting place, leaving a trail of debris and people behind. After her bow sank completely, Lusitania's stern rose out of the water, enough for her propellers to be seen, and went under. As the tips of Lusitania' s four, 70-foot-tall funnels dipped beneath the surface, they formed whirlpools which dragged nearby swimmers down with the ship. Her masts and rigging were the last to disappear.

Lusitania sank in only 18 minutes, at a distance of 11.5 nautical miles (21 km) off the Old Head of Kinsale. Despite being relatively close to shore, it took several hours for help to arrive from the Irish coast. By the time help arrived, however, many in the 52 °F (11 °C) water had succumbed to the cold. By the days' end, 764 passengers and crew from Lusitania had been rescued and landed at Queenstown. The final death toll for the disaster came to a catastrophic number. Of the 1,959 passengers and crew aboard Lusitania at the time of her sinking, 1,199 had been lost.[inconsistent ] In the days following the disaster, the Cunard line offered local fishermen and sea merchants a cash reward for the bodies floating all throughout the Irish Sea, some floating as far away as the Welsh coast. Only 289 bodies were recovered, 65 of which were never identified. The bodies of many of the victims were buried at either Queenstown, where 148 bodies were interred in the Old Church Cemetery, or the Church of St Multose in Kinsale, but the bodies of the remaining 885 victims were never recovered.

Two days before, U-20 had sunk Earl of Lathom, but first allowed the crew to escape in boats. According to international maritime law, any military vessel stopping an unarmed civilian ship was required to allow those on board time to escape before sinking it. The conventions had been drawn up in a time before the invention of the submarine and took no account of the severe risk a small vessel, such as a submarine, faced if it gave up the advantage of a surprise attack. Schwieger could have allowed the crew and passengers of Lusitania to take to the boats, but he considered the danger of being rammed or fired upon by deck guns too great.[citation needed ] Merchant ships had, in fact, been advised to steer directly at any U-boat that surfaced. A cash bonus had been offered for any that were sunk, though the advice was carefully worded so as not to amount to an order to ram. This feat would be accomplished only once during the war by a commercial vessel when in 1918 the White Star Liner HMT Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic and Britannic, rammed SM U-103 in the English Channel, sinking the submarine.

According to Bailey and Ryan, Lusitania was travelling without any flag and her name painted over with darkish dye.

One story-an urban legend-states that when Lieutenant Schwieger of U-20 gave the order to fire, his quartermaster, Charles Voegele, would not take part in an attack on women and children, and refused to pass on the order to the torpedo room - a decision for which he was court-martialed and imprisoned at Kiel until the end of the war. This rumour persisted from 1972, when the French daily paper published a letter to the editor. Despite seemingly putting an end to this rumor, Voegele's alleged hesitation was depicted in the torpedoing scene of the 2007 docudrama Sinking of the Lusitania: Terror at Sea.

Passengers

Oliver Percy Bernard, 34. Scenic designer whose sketches of the sinking were published in The Illustrated London News.

Josephine Brandell, 27. Musical actress and singer.

Avis Dolphin, 12. A friend of Ian Holbourn, who inspired his bestselling children's book, The Child of the Moat, A Story for Girls, 1557 A.D. (1916).

Ogden H. Hammond, 45. Politician and future United States Ambassador to Spain.

Ian Holbourn, 42. Oxford professor and writer.

Charles T. Jeffery, 38. Automobile manufacturer. Head of the Thomas B. Jeffery Company following his father's death in 1910.

Rita Jolivet, 30. French-American stage and screen actress.

Kathleen Kaye, 16. Returning alone to England from New York. Assumed charge of a lifeboat following the sinking.

Margaret Mackworth (Lady Humphrey Mackworth), 31. British suffragist and daughter of D. A. Thomas. Later 2nd Viscountess Rhondda

Sir Frederick Orr-Lewis, 55. 1st Baronet and Canadian businessman.

Theodate Pope Riddle, 48. American architect and philanthropist.

D. A. Thomas, 59. British former MP (later Viscount Rhondda).

Scott Turner, 34. Mining engineer.

Gwynn Parry Jones, 24. World-famous Welsh tenor, one of the 16 soloists of Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music.

Marguerite, Lady Allan, 42. Montreal socialite, philanthropist and patron of the arts, wife of Sir H. Montagu Allan

George Beauchamp, 32. Sailor and crew member that survived both the sinking of the RMS Titanic and RMS Lusitania.

Frank Tower, 59. Claimed to have survived the RMS Titanic, RMS Empress of Ireland, and RMS Lusitania. There is no claim to show this man was on all three ships.

Thomas O'Brien Butler, 53. Irish composer and conductor.

William Broderick Cloete, 62. Mining entrepreneur who was returning to London from Mexico. His body was never found.

Marie Depage, 42. Belgian nurse and wife of surgeon Antoine Depage.

Justus Miles Forman, 39. American novelist and playwright.

Charles Frohman, 58. American theatre impresario and one of four American "men of world wide prominence" named in the film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).

Albert L. Hopkins, 44. President of Newport News Shipbuilding.

Elbert Hubbard, 58. American philosopher, writer and Roycroft founder, and one of four American "men of world wide prominence" named in the film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).

Alice Moore Hubbard, 53. Author and woman's rights activist, wife of Elbert Hubbard.

Charles Klein, 48. Playwright and one of four American "men of world wide prominence" named in film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918).

Sir Hugh Lane, 39. Renowned Irish art collector and founder of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin.

Rev. Dr. Basil W. Maturin, 68. British theologian, author, and convert to Catholicism

Frederick Stark Pearson, 53. American engineer and entrepreneur. His wife, Mabel Ward Pearson, also perished in the sinking.

Frances McIntosh Stephens, 64. Montreal socialite and wife of politician George Washington Stephens; with her perished her infant grandson.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 37. Sportsman, millionaire, member of the Vanderbilt family, and one of four American "men of world wide prominence" named in the 1918 film The Sinking of the Lusitania - last seen fastening a life vest onto a woman holding a baby.

Lothrop Withington, 59. American genealogist, historian and book editor, and famous singer.

On 8 May, the local county coroner John Hogan opened an inquest in Kinsale into the deaths of two males and three females whose bodies had been brought ashore by a local boat, Heron. Most of the survivors (and dead) had been taken to Queenstown instead of Kinsale, which was closer. On 10 May Captain Turner gave evidence as to the events of the sinking where he described that the ship had been struck by one torpedo between the third and fourth funnels. This had been followed immediately by a second explosion. He acknowledged receiving general warnings about submarines, but had not been informed of the sinking of Earl of Lathom. He stated that he had received other instructions from the Admiralty which he had carried out but was not permitted to discuss. The coroner brought in a verdict that the deceased had drowned following an attack on an unarmed non-combatant vessel contrary to international law. Half an hour after the inquest had concluded and its results given to the press, the Crown Solicitor for Cork, Harry Wynne, arrived with instructions to halt it. Captain Turner was not to give evidence and no statements should be made about any instructions given to shipping about avoiding submarines.

The formal Board of Trade investigation into the sinking was presided over by Wreck Commissioner Lord Mersey and took place in the Westminster Central Hall from 15 to 18 June 1915 with further sessions at the Westminster Palace Hotel on 1 July and Caxton Hall on 17 July. Lord Mersey had a background in commercial rather than maritime law but had presided over a number of important maritime investigations, including that into the loss of Titanic. He was assisted by four assessors, Admiral Sir Frederick Inglefield, Lieutenant Commander Hearn and two merchant navy captains, D. Davies and J. Spedding. The Attorney General, Sir Edward Carson, represented the Board of Trade, assisted by the Solicitor General, F. E. Smith. Butler Aspinall, who had represented the Board of Trade at the Titanic inquiry, was retained to represent Cunard. A total of 36 witnesses were called, Lord Mersey querying why more of the survivors would not be giving evidence. Most of the sessions were public but two on 15 and 18 June were held in camera when evidence regarding navigation of the ship was presented.

Statements were collected from all the crew. These were all written out for presentation to the inquiry on standard forms in identical handwriting with similar phrasing. Quartermaster Johnston later described that pressure had been placed upon him to be loyal to the company, and that it had been suggested to him it would help the case if two torpedoes had struck the ship, rather than the one which he described. Giving evidence to the tribunal he was not asked about torpedoes. Other witnesses who claimed that only one torpedo had been involved were refused permission to testify. In contrast to his statement at the inquest, Captain Turner stated that two torpedoes had struck the ship, not one. In an interview in 1933, Turner reverted to his original statement that there had been only one torpedo. Most witnesses said there had been two, but a couple said three, possibly involving a second submarine. Clement Edwards, representing the seamen's union, attempted to introduce evidence about which watertight compartments had been involved but was prevented from doing so by Lord Mersey.

Churchill and Fisher

It was during the closed hearings that the Admiralty tried to lay the blame on Captain Turner, their intended line being that Turner had been negligent. The roots of this view began in the first reports about the sinking from Vice-Admiral Coke commanding the Navy at Queenstown. He reported that "ship was especially warned that submarines were active on south coast and to keep mid-channel course avoiding headlands also position of submarine off Cape Clear at 10:00 was communicated by W/T to her". Captain Webb, Director of the Trade Division, began to prepare a dossier of signals sent to Lusitania which Turner may have failed to observe. First Sea Lord Fisher noted on one document submitted by Webb for review: "As the Cunard company would not have employed an incompetent man its a certainty that Captain Turner is not a fool but a knave. I hope that Turner will be arrested immediately after the enquiry whatever the verdict". First Lord Winston Churchill noted: "I consider the Admiralty's case against Turner should be pressed by a skilful counsel and that Captain Webb should attend as a witness, if not employed as an assessor. We will pursue the captain without check". In the event, both Churchill and Fisher were replaced in their positions before the enquiry because of the failures of the Gallipoli campaign.

Part of the proceedings turned on the question of proper evasive tactics against submarines. It was put to Captain Turner that he had failed to comply with Admiralty instructions to travel at high speed, maintain a zig-zag course and keep away from shore. Naval instructions about zig-zag were read to the captain, who confirmed that he had received them, though later added that they did not appear to be as he recollected. This was unsurprising, since the regulations quoted had been approved only on 25 April, after Lusitania's last arrival in New York, and started distribution on 13 May, after she sank. Lusitania had slowed to 15 knots at one point because of fog, but had otherwise maintained 18 knots passing Ireland. 18 knots was faster than all but nine other ships in the British merchant fleet could achieve and was comfortably faster than the submarine. Although he might have achieved 21 knots and had given orders to raise steam ready to do so, he was also under orders to time his arrival at Liverpool for high tide so that the ship would not have to wait to enter port. Thus, he chose to travel more slowly. At the time, no ship had been torpedoed travelling at more than 15 knots. Although the Admiralty instructed ships to keep well offshore and it was claimed that Turner had only been 8 nautical miles (15 km) away, his actual distance when hit was thirteen nautical miles (24 km). As a matter of established procedure, only ships travelling closer than five nautical miles (9.3 km) from shore were ordinarily being censured for being too close.

Turner stated that he had discussed the matter of what course the ship should take with his two most senior officers, Captain Anderson and Chief Officer Piper, neither of whom survived. The three had agreed that the Admiralty warning of "submarine activity 20 miles [37 km] south of Coningbeg" effectively overrode other Admiralty advice to keep to 'mid channel', which was where the submarine had been reported. He had, therefore, ordered the change of course at 12:40, intending to bring the ship closer to land and then take a course north of the reported submarine.

At one point in the proceedings, Smith attempted to press a point he was making, by quoting from a signal sent to British ships. Lord Mersey queried which message this was, and it transpired that the message in question existed in the version of evidence given to Smith by the Board of Trade Solicitor, Sir Ellis Cunliffe, but not in versions given to others. Cunliffe explained the discrepancy by saying that different versions of the papers had been prepared for use, depending whether the enquiry had been in camera or not, but the message quoted appeared never to have existed. Lord Mersey observed that it was his job to get at the truth, and thereafter became more critical of Admiralty evidence.

On 10 June, just before the hearing, significant changes were made to the Defence of the Realm Act, which made it an offence to collect or publish information about the nature, use, or carriage of "war materials" for any reason. Previously, this had only been an offence if the information was collected to aid the enemy. This was used to prohibit discussion about the ship's cargo. The rifle cartridges carried by Lusitania were mentioned during the case, Lord Mersey stating that "the 5,000 cases of ammunition on board were 50 yards away from where the torpedo struck the ship".

An additional hearing took place on 1 July, at the insistence of Joseph Marichal, who was threatening to sue Cunard for their poor handling of the disaster. He testified that the second explosion had sounded to him like the rattling of machine gun fire and appeared to be below the second class dining room at the rear of the ship where he had been seated. Information about Marechal's background was sought out by the British government and then distorted and leaked to the press so as to discredit him.

Captain Turner, the Cunard Company, and the Royal Navy were absolved of any negligence, and all blame was placed on the German government. Lord Mersey found that Turner "exercised his judgment for the best" and that the blame for the disaster "must rest solely with those who plotted and with those who committed the crime".

Two days after he closed the inquiry, Lord Mersey waived his fees for the case and formally resigned. His last words on the subject were: "The Lusitania case was a damned, dirty business!" The full report has never been made available to the public. A copy was thought to exist amongst Lord Mersey's private papers after his death, but has since proved untraceable.

In the United States, 67 claims for compensation were lodged against Cunard, which were all heard together in 1918 before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Julius Mayer, presided over the case: he had previously presided over the case brought following the loss of the Titanic, where he had ruled in favour of the shipping company. Mayer was a conservative who was considered a safe pair of hands with matters of national interest, and whose favourite remark to lawyers was to "come to the point". The case was to be heard without a jury. The two sides agreed beforehand that no question would be raised regarding whether Lusitania had been armed or carrying troops or ammunition. Thirty-three witnesses who could not travel to the US gave statements in England to Commissioner R. V. Wynne. Evidence produced in open court for the Mersey investigation was considered, but evidence from the British closed sessions was not. The Defence of the Realm Act was invoked so that British witnesses could not give evidence on any subject it covered. Statements had been collected in Queenstown after the sinking by the American Consul, Wesley Frost, but these were not produced.

Captain Turner gave evidence in Britain and now gave a more spirited defence of his actions. He argued that up until the time of the sinking he had no reason to think that zig-zagging in a fast ship would help. Indeed, that he had since commanded another ship which was sunk while zig-zagging. His position was supported by evidence from other captains, who said that prior to the sinking of Lusitania no merchant ships zig-zagged. Turner had argued that maintaining a steady course for 30 minutes was necessary to take a four-point bearing and precisely confirm the ship's position, but on this point he received less support, with other captains arguing a two-point bearing could have been taken in five minutes and would have been sufficiently accurate.

Many witnesses testified that portholes across the ship had been open at the time of the sinking, and an expert witness confirmed that such a porthole three feet under water would let in four tons of water per minute. Testimony varied on how many torpedoes there had been, and whether the strike occurred between the first and second funnel, or third and fourth. The nature of the official cargo was considered, but experts considered that under no conditions could the cargo have exploded. A record exists that Crewman Jack Roper wrote to Cunard in 1919 requesting expenses for his testimony in accord with the line indicated by Cunard.

The decision was rendered on 23 August 1918. Mayer's judgement was that "the cause of the sinking was the illegal act of the Imperial German Government", that two torpedoes had been involved, that the captain had acted properly and emergency procedures had been up to the standard then expected. He ruled that further claims for compensation should be addressed to the German government (which eventually paid $2.5 million in 1925).

On 8 May Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, the former German Colonial Secretary, made a statement in Cleveland, Ohio, in which he attempted to justify the sinking of Lusitania. Described by the New York Times as "the Kaiser's official mouthpiece", Dernburg had served as a leading voice for German propaganda in the United States since 1914. Dernburg said that because Lusitania "carried contraband of war" and also because she "was classed as an auxiliary cruiser" Germany had had a right to destroy her regardless of any passengers aboard. Dernburg further said that the warnings given by the German Embassy before her sailing, plus the 18 February note declaring the existence of "war zones" relieved Germany of any responsibility for the deaths of the American citizens aboard. He referred to the ammunition and military goods declared on Lusitania's manifest and said that "vessels of that kind" could be seized and destroyed under the Hague rules without any respect to a war zone.

The following day the German government issued an official communication regarding the sinking in which it said that the Cunard liner Lusitania "was yesterday torpedoed by a German submarine and sank", that Lusitania "was naturally armed with guns, as were recently most of the English mercantile steamers" and that "as is well known here, she had large quantities of war material in her cargo".

Dudley Field Malone, Collector of the Port of New York, issued an official denial to the German charges, saying that Lusitania had been inspected before her departure and no guns were found, mounted or unmounted. Malone stated that no merchant ship would have been allowed to arm itself in the Port and leave the harbour. Assistant Manager of the Cunard Line, Herman Winter, denied the charge that she carried munitions:

She had aboard 4,200 cases of cartridges, but they were cartridges for small arms, packed in separate cases... they certainly do not come under the classification of ammunition. The United States authorities would not permit us to carry ammunition, classified as such by the military authorities, on a passenger liner. For years we have been sending small-arms cartridges abroad on the Lusitania.

Herman Winter spoke in the context of US testing of small arms ammunition that found them to be "non-explosive in bulk", leading to a 1911 ruling that such ammunition can be transported without restriction on passenger ships, unlike explosives "likely to endanger the health or lives of the passengers or the safety of the vessel." The fact that Lusitania had been carrying shell casings and rifle cartridges was not made known to the British public at the time, as it was felt that, although allowed under the regulations of the time, it would be used in German propaganda.

The sinking was severely criticised by and met with disapproval in Turkey and Austria-Hungary, while in the German press, the sinking was deplored by , the daily newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and also by Captain Persius, an outspoken naval critic who wrote for the Berliner Tageblatt.

One Catholic Centre Party newspaper, the , stated: "The sinking of the giant English steamship is a success of moral significance which is still greater than material success. With joyful pride we contemplate this latest deed of our Navy. It will not be the last. 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 the zone of operations."

In the aftermath of the sinking, the German government tried to justify it by claiming in an official statement that she had been armed with guns, and had "large quantities of war material" in her cargo. They also stated that since she was classed as an auxiliary cruiser, Germany had had a right to destroy her regardless of any passengers aboard, and that the warnings issued by the German Embassy before her sailing plus 18 February note declaring the existence of "war zones", relieved Germany of any responsibility for the deaths of American citizens aboard. While it was true that Lusitania had been fitted with gun mounts as part of government loan requirements during her construction, to enable rapid conversion into an Armed Merchant Cruiser (AMC) in the event of war, the guns themselves were never fitted. However, she was still listed officially as an AMC. Her cargo had included an estimated 4,200,000 rifle cartridges, 1,250 empty shell cases, and 18 cases of non-explosive fuses, all of which were listed in her manifest, but the cartridges were not officially classed as ammunition by the Cunard Line.

Take Up the Sword of Justice, a UK propaganda poster with Lusitania in the background

Schwieger was condemned in the Allied press as a war criminal.

Of the 139 US citizens aboard Lusitania, 128 lost their lives, and there was massive outrage in Britain and America, calling it "a deed for which a Hun would blush, a Turk be ashamed, and a Barbary pirate apologize" and the British felt that the Americans had to declare war on Germany. However, US President Woodrow Wilson refused to over-react. He said at Philadelphia on 10 May 1915:

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 by force that it is right.

When Germany began its submarine campaign against Britain, Wilson had warned that the US would hold the German government strictly accountable for any violations of American rights. On 1 May he stated that "no warning that an unlawful and inhumane act will be committed" could be accepted as a legitimate excuse for that act.

During the weeks after the sinking, the issue was hotly debated within the administration. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan urged compromise and restraint. The US, he believed, should try to persuade the British to abandon their interdiction of foodstuffs and limit their mine-laying operations at the same time as the Germans were persuaded to curtail their submarine campaign. He also suggested that the US government issue an explicit warning against US citizens travelling on any belligerent ships. Despite being sympathetic to Bryan's antiwar feelings, Wilson insisted that the German government must apologise for the sinking, compensate US victims, and promise to avoid any similar occurrence in the future.

Backed by State Department second-in-command Robert Lansing, Wilson made his position clear in three notes to the German government issued on 13 May, 9 June, and 21 July.

The first note affirmed the right of Americans to travel as passengers on merchant ships and called for the Germans to abandon submarine warfare against commercial vessels, whatever flag they sailed under (including 3 other ships: the Falaba, the Cushing, and the Gulflight).

In the second note, Wilson rejected the German arguments that the British blockade was illegal, and was a cruel and deadly attack on innocent civilians, and their charge that Lusitania had been carrying munitions. William Jennings Bryan considered Wilson's second note too provocative and resigned in protest after failing to moderate it, to be replaced by Robert Lansing who later said in his memoirs that following the tragedy he always had the "conviction that we [the United States] would ultimately become the ally of Britain".

The third note, of 21 July, issued an ultimatum, to the effect that the US would regard any subsequent sinkings as "deliberately unfriendly".

While the American public and leadership were not ready for war, the path to an eventual declaration of war had been set as a result of the sinking of Lusitania. On 19 August U-24 sank the White Star liner Arabic, with the loss of 44 passengers and crew, three of whom were American. The German government, while insisting on the legitimacy of its campaign against Allied shipping, disavowed the sinking of Arabic; it offered an indemnity and pledged to order submarine commanders to abandon unannounced attacks on merchant and passenger vessels.

The British public, press, and government in general were upset at Wilson's actions - not realising it reflected general US opinion at the time. They sneered "too proud or too scared?". Shells that did not explode at the front were called "Wilsons".

Germany, however, continued to sink merchant vessels bound for Britain, particularly after the Battle of Jutland in late May 1916.

German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg persuaded the Kaiser to forbid action against ships flying neutral flags and the U-boat war was postponed once again on 27 August, as it was realised that British ships could easily fly neutral flags.

There was disagreement over this move between the navy's admirals (headed by Alfred von Tirpitz) and Bethman Hollweg. Backed by Army Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn, Kaiser Wilhelm II endorsed the Chancellor's solution, and Tirpitz and the Admiralty backed down. The German restriction order of 9 September 1915 stated that attacks were allowed only on ships that were definitely British, while neutral ships were to be treated under the Prize Law rules, and no attacks on passenger liners were to be permitted at all. The war situation demanded that there could be no possibility of orders being misinterpreted, and on 18 September Henning von Holtzendorff, the new head of the German Admiralty, issued a secret order: all U-boats operating in the English Channel and off the west coast of the United Kingdom were recalled, and the U-boat war would continue only in the North sea, where it would be conducted under the Prize Law rules.

In January 1917 the German Government announced it would now conduct full unrestricted submarine warfare. Once again, Woodrow Wilson was furious and on 6 April 1917 the United States Congress followed Wilson's request to declare war on Germany. US buildup of participation was at first slow, but during the German spring offensive in March 1918, which at first went well for the Germans with the Allies barely holding the lines, was reversed with the arrival by April 1918 of two million American troops.

It was in the interests of the British to keep US citizens aware of German actions and attitudes. One over-enthusiastic propagandist's fabricated story was circulated that in some regions of Germany, schoolchildren were given a holiday to celebrate the sinking of Lusitania. This story was based on the popular reception given the Goetz medal (see below) and was so effective that James W. Gerard, the US ambassador to Germany, recounted it being told in his memoir of his time in Germany, Face to Face with Kaiserism (1918), though without vouching for its validity.

In August 1915, the Munich medallist and sculptor Karl X. Goetz (1875-1950), who had produced a series of propagandist and satirical medals as a running commentary on the war, privately struck a small run of medals as a limited-circulation satirical attack (fewer than 500 were struck) on the Cunard Line for trying to continue business as usual during wartime. Goetz blamed both the British government and the Cunard Line for allowing Lusitania to sail despite the German embassy's warnings. Popular demand led to many unauthorised copies being made.

One side of the popular medal showed Lusitania sinking laden with guns (incorrectly depicted sinking stern first) with the motto "KEINE BANNWARE!" ("NO CONTRABAND!"), while the reverse showed a skeleton selling Cunard tickets with the motto "Geschäft Über Alles" ("Business Above All").

Goetz had put an incorrect date for the sinking on the medal, an error he later blamed on a mistake in a newspaper story about the sinking: instead of 7 May, he had put "5. Mai", two days before the actual sinking. Not realising his error, Goetz made copies of the medal and sold them in Munich and also to some numismatic dealers with whom he conducted business.

The British Foreign Office obtained a copy of the medal, photographed it, and sent copies to the United States where it was published in the New York Times on 5 May 1916. Many popular magazines ran photographs of the medal, and it was falsely claimed that it had been awarded to the crew of the U-boat.

Emile Henry Lacombe wrote a letter to the New York Times advancing a conspiracy theory about the German sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. His letter was published Monday 22 October 1917 on page 14 titled "A NEW THEORY OF THE LUSITANIA SINKING. The Evidence of the German Medal Dated May 5 and the Report of the Explosive "Cigars" on Board."

The Goetz medal attracted so much attention that Lord Newton, who was in charge of Propaganda at the Foreign Office in 1916, decided to develop the anti-German feelings aroused by it for propaganda purposes and asked department store entrepreneur Harry Gordon Selfridge to reproduce the medal again. The replica medals were produced in an attractive case and were an exact copy of the German medal, and were sold for a shilling apiece. On the cases it was stated that the medals had been distributed in Germany "to commemorate the sinking of Lusitania" and they came with a propaganda leaflet which denounced the Germans and used the medal's incorrect date (5 May) to incorrectly claim that the sinking of Lusitania was premeditated, rather than just being incident to Germany's larger plan to sink any ship in a combat zone without warning. The head of the Lusitania Souvenir Medal Committee later estimated that 250,000 were sold, proceeds being given to the Red Cross and St Dunstan's Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Hostel. Unlike the original Goetz medals which were sand-cast from bronze, the British copies were of diecast iron and were of poorer quality. However, a few original medals were also made in iron. Originals usually have "KGoetz" on the edge. Over the years various other copies have been made.

Realising his mistake, Goetz issued a corrected medal with the date of "7. Mai". The Bavarian government, alarmed at the strong worldwide reaction to Goetz's work, suppressed the medal and ordered confiscation in April 1917. The original German medals can easily be distinguished from the English copies because the date is in German, i.e. with a dot behind the numeral; the English version was altered to read 'May' rather than 'Mai'. After the war Goetz expressed his regret that his work had been the cause of increasing anti-German feelings, but it remains a celebrated propaganda act.

Circa 1920 the French medallist René Baudichon created a counterblast to the Goetz medal. The Baudichon medal is in bronze, 54 millimetres (2.1 in) diameter and weighs 79.51 grams (2.805 oz). The obverse shows Liberty as depicted on the Statue of Liberty but holding a raised sword and rising from a stormy sea. Behind her the sun is breaking through clouds and six ships are steaming. Signed R Baudichon. Legend: Ultrix America Juris, 1917 U.S.A 1918 (America avenger of right). The reverse shows a view of the starboard quarter of the Lusitania correctly depicted sinking bow first. In the foreground there is a capsized lifeboat. The upper field shows a child drowning, head, hands and feet above the water; RB monogram. Legend: Lusitania May 7, 1915.

The last survivor was Audrey Warren Lawson-Johnston (née Pearl), who was born in New York City on 15 February 1915. She was the fourth of six children (the youngest two born after the disaster) born to Major Frederic "Frank" Warren Pearl (1869-1952) and Amy Lea (née Duncan; 1880-1964). She was only three months old when she boarded Lusitania in New York with her parents, three siblings, and two nurses - and due to her age had no first hand recollection of the disaster. She and her brother Stuart (age 5) were saved by their British nursemaid Alice Maud Lines, then 18 years old, who jumped off the boat deck and escaped in a lifeboat. Her parents also survived, but her sisters Amy (age 3) and Susan (age 14 months) died. Pearl married Hugh de Beauchamp Lawson-Johnston, second son of George Lawson Johnston, 1st Baron Luke, on 18 July 1946. They had three children and lived in Melchbourne, Bedfordshire. Hugh was Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1961. Johnston gifted an inshore lifeboat, Amy Lea, to New Quay Lifeboat Station in 2004 in memory of her mother. Audrey Johnston died on 11 January 2011, a month before her 96th birthday.

The last American survivor was Barbara McDermott (born Barbara Winifred Anderson in Connecticut on 15 June 1912, to Roland Anderson and Emily Pybus). She was almost three years old at the time of the sinking. Her father worked as a draftsman for an ammunitions factory in south-western Connecticut. He was unable to accompany his wife and daughter on Lusitania as the First World War had created high demands for ammunition manufacturing at the factory where he worked. Barbara recalled being in the ship's dining room eating dessert when the torpedo hit. She remembered holding onto her spoon as she saw fellow passengers running about the badly damaged ship. In the midst of chaos, Barbara was separated from her mother and loaded into Lifeboat No. 15. Barbara later learned that her mother fell into the sea but was rescued and placed into the same lifeboat as her daughter. Neither Barbara nor her mother was seriously injured. After their rescue, Barbara and her mother travelled to Darlington, County Durham, England, to live with Barbara's maternal grandmother. Barbara's mother died on 22 March 1917 at the age of 28. Two years later, Barbara left Britain and travelled back to the United States aboard Mauretania and arrived in New York City on 26 December 1919. Barbara died on 12 April 2008 in Wallingford, Connecticut, at the age of 95.

American cartoonist Winsor McCay spent nearly two years making The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), at the time the longest animated film, and the oldest existing animated documentary

There is no footage of the sinking.

Animation pioneer Winsor McCay spent nearly two years animating the disaster for his film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918). At 12 minutes, it was the longest animated film on record at the time. It was also the earliest-known dramatic animation.[92]

The docudrama Sinking of the Lusitania: Terror at Sea (2007) depicts the last voyage of the Lusitania and the political and military decisions that led to the sinking.

The National Geographic documentary Dark Secrets of the Lusitania (2012) describes an expedition investigating the wreck made by Greg Bemis and a crew of divers in 2011.[93]

One of the three propellers from the Lusitania that were salvaged from the wreck in 1982 is now on display as a memorial at Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, England

The events of Agatha Christie's 1922 novel The Secret Adversary are set off by the sinking of Lusitania.

A majority of Kim Izzo's Seven Days in May[102] (2017) takes place aboard the Lusitania. The historical fiction alternates between a group of people on board, including Alfred Vanderbilt and Charles Frohman, and in a secret room in Whitehall in London, where coded messages are being intercepted.

The Glass Ocean (2019), written by Karen White, Lauren Willig and Beatriz Williams, rotates narrators and time periods.[103] One of the storylines takes place aboard the Lusitania. It is a fictional account from a passengers' perspective, and weaves in with storylines told in 2013.

David Butler's novel Lusitania (1982) is a fictionalised account of the sinking and events leading up to it.[104]

Erik Larson's non-fiction book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (2015), describes the ship's final voyage from multiple perspectives.[105]

H.P. Lovecraft's first published book was The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania 1915 (published in Wales), a poem on the sinking of the vessel.[106]

Graham Masterton's 2002 novel A Terrible Beauty (Katie Maguire No. 1) (published as Black River in France)[citation needed ] includes a scene that claims to find evidence of how British intelligence informed the German Admiralty that a wanted murderer was aboard the ship, thus encouraging them to carry out the sinking.[107]

The sinking was the inspiration for Michael Morpurgo's novel Listen to the Moon (2014).[108]

Nora Roberts' novel Three Fates (2002) begins with the sinking of the Lusitania from the point of view of a fictitious passenger, Felix Greenfield, who survives. The plot centers around the descendants of Greenfield and another fictitious passenger, Henry W. Wyley, (who perished in the attack) and their quest to find a set of priceless statues called The Three Fates.[109]

Robert H. Pilpel's novel To the Honor of the Fleet (1979) included the sinking of Lusitania as an important plot point concerning the adventures of two U.S. Navy intelligence officers, each attached to either the British Royal Navy or the Imperial German Navy, prior to the Battle of Jutland and the American entry into the war.[110]

In the first chapter of Trevor D'Silva's debut novel Fateful Decisions[111] (2017), the story begins on the Lusitania, where the protagonist Rachel Williams meets two friends who fall in love with her. One of them saves her when the ship is torpedoed. She later makes a decision to marry one of them when they propose to her after meeting at a fund raiser when America enters World War I. Her decision has good and devastating consequences for herself, her family and strangers, as their lives get entangled in world events including World War II.

English composer Frank Bridge had strong pacifist convictions and was deeply disturbed by the First World War. In 1915, he wrote his Lament (for Catherine, aged 9 "Lusitania" 1915), for string orchestra, as a memorial to the sinking of the ship.[112] The piece was premiered by the New Queen's Hall Orchestra, conducted by the composer, on 15 September, at the 1915 Proms, as part of a programme of "Popular Italian music", the rest of which was conducted by Henry Wood.[113]

Charles Ives's Orchestral Set No. 2 concludes with a movement entitled, From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose. It recounts Ives's experience waiting for an elevated train in New York City as the news of the sinking of Lusitania came through. The passengers assembled on the platform began singing "In The Sweet By and By" in time to a barrel organ which was playing the tune. Echoes of their voices can be heard at the start of the music, and the hymn tune itself appears at the end.[114]

A popular song, "As the Lusitania Went Down" (1915) by Arthur J. Lamb and F. Henri Klickmann[115] was published by C. K. Root & Co. of Chicago and New York.[116] It was described by The Music Trade Review on 29 May 1915 as "One of the most interesting of the songs that have made their appearance in the commemoration of the Lusitania disaster."[117]

The song "When the Lusitania Went Down" (1915) by Charles McCarron and Nat Vincent was published by Leo Feist, in New York.[118] Columbia Records issued a recording sung by baritone Herbert Stuart (otherwise known as Albert Wiederhold) and with orchestra accompaniment, as an 80 rpm disc.[119]

The song "Lusitania" from American black metal band Minenwerfer, on their second album Nihilistischen.

"Lusitania" from American singer-songwriter Andrew Bird. The song features vocals by Annie Clark of St. Vincent.

The song "Dead Wake" from post-hardcore band Thrice.

The song "Lusitania" from post-hardcore band June of 44 from the album "Tropics and Meridians".

The " Prize rules" or " Cruiser rules", laid down by the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, governed the seizure of vessels at sea during wartime, although changes in technology such as radio and the submarine eventually made parts of them irrelevant. Merchant ships were to be warned by warships, and their passengers and crew allowed to abandon ship before they were sunk, unless the ship resisted or tried to escape, or was in a convoy protected by warships. Limited armament on a merchant ship, such as one or two guns, did not necessarily affect the ship's immunity to attack without warning, and neither did a cargo of munitions or materiel.

In November 1914 the British announced that the entire North Sea was now a War Zone, and issued orders restricting the passage of neutral shipping into and through the North Sea to special channels where supervision would be possible (the other approaches having been mined). It was in response to this, and to the British Admiralty's order of 31 January 1915 that British merchant ships should fly neutral colours as a ruse de guerre, that Admiral Hugo von Pohl, commander of the German High Seas Fleet, published a warning in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger (Imperial German Gazette) on 4 February 1915:

(1) The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the whole of the English Channel, are hereby declared to be a War Zone. From February 18 onwards every enemy merchant vessel encountered in this zone will be destroyed, nor will it always be possible to avert the danger thereby threatened to the crew and passengers. (2) Neutral vessels also will run a risk in the War Zone, because in view of the hazards of sea warfare and the British authorization of January 31 of the misuse of neutral flags, it may not always be possible to prevent attacks on enemy ships from harming neutral ships.

In response, the Admiralty issued orders on 10 February 1915 which directed merchant ships to escape from hostile U-boats when possible, but "if a submarine comes up suddenly close ahead of you with obvious hostile intention, steer straight for her at your utmost speed..." Further instructions ten days later advised armed steamers to open fire on a submarine even if it had not yet fired. Given the extreme vulnerability of a submarine to ramming or even small-calibre shellfire, a U-boat that surfaced and gave warning against a merchantman which had been given such instructions was putting itself in great danger. The Germans knew of these orders, even though they were intended to be secret, copies having been obtained from captured ships and from wireless intercepts; Bailey and Ryan in their "The Lusitania Disaster", put much emphasis on these Admiralty orders to merchantmen, arguing it was unreasonable to expect a submarine to surface and give warning under such circumstances. In their opinion this, rather than the munitions, the nonexistent armament, or any other suggested reason, is the best rationale for the Germans' actions in the sinking.

The cause of the second explosion aboard the Lusitania has been the subject of debate since the disaster. At the time, most attributed it to a second torpedo attack from the U-boat. However, evidence from the U-boat itself corroborates that only one torpedo was fired towards the Lusitania, Schwieger even commenting in his war diary that firing a second torpedo was impossible due to the crowd of frenzied passengers who dived into the ocean in panic.

A debated theory assigns the blame for the second blast on Lusitania's payload. The cargo included 4,200,000 rounds of Remington .303 rifle/machine-gun cartridges, 1,250 cases of empty 3-inch (76 mm) fragmentation shell casings and eighteen cases of percussion fuses, all of which were listed on the ship's two-page manifest, filed with US Customs after she departed New York on 1 May. However, these munitions were classed as small arms ammunition, were non-explosive in bulk, and were clearly marked as such. It was perfectly legal under American shipping regulations for the liner to carry these; experts agreed they were not to blame for the second explosion. Allegations the ship was carrying more controversial cargo, such as fine aluminium powder, concealed as cheese on her cargo manifests, or guncotton ( pyroxylene) disguised as casks of beef, have never been proven. In the 1960s, American diver John Light dived repeatedly to the site of the shipwreck in efforts to prove the existence of contraband explosives aboard Lusitania's cargo hold, which had been ignited by the torpedo. Light claimed to have found a large hole on Lusitania's port side, opposite of where the torpedo had struck, though later expeditions disproved his findings.

In 1993, Dr. Robert Ballard, the famous explorer who discovered Titanic and Bismarck, conducted an in-depth exploration of the wreck of Lusitania. Ballard tried to confirm John Light's findings of a large hole on the port side of the wreck, and did not find anything. During his investigation, Ballard noted a large quantity of coal on the sea bed near the wreck, and after consulting an explosives expert advanced the theory of a coal dust explosion. He believed dust in the bunkers would have been thrown into the air by the vibration from the explosion; the resulting cloud would have been ignited by a spark, causing the second explosion. In the years since he first advanced this theory, it has been argued that this is nearly impossible. Critics of the theory say coal dust would have been too damp to have been stirred into the air by the torpedo impact in explosive concentrations; additionally, the coal bunker where the torpedo struck would have been flooded almost immediately by seawater flowing through the damaged hull plates.

In 2007, marine forensic investigators considered that an explosion in the ship's steam-generating plant could be a plausible explanation for the second explosion. However, accounts from the few survivors who managed to escape from the forward two boiler rooms reported that the ship's boilers did not explode. Leading Fireman Albert Martin later testified he thought the torpedo entered the boiler room and exploded between a group of boilers, which was a physical impossibility. It is also known the forward boiler room filled with steam, and steam pressure feeding the turbines dropped dramatically following the second explosion. These point toward a failure, of one sort or another, in the ship's steam-generating plant. It is possible the failure came, not directly from one of the boilers in boiler room no. 1, but rather in the high-pressure steam lines to the turbines.

The original torpedo damage alone, striking the ship on the starboard coal bunker of boiler room no. 1, would probably have sunk the ship without a second explosion. This first blast was enough to cause, on its own, serious off-centre flooding, although the sinking would possibly have been slower. The deficiencies of the ship's original watertight bulkhead design exacerbated the situation, as did the many portholes which had been left open for ventilation.

The ship's telegraph on the wreck of Lusitania

The wreck of Lusitania lies on her starboard side at an approximately 30-degree angle in 305 feet (93 metres) of sea water. She is severely collapsed onto her starboard side as a result of the force with which she slammed into the sea floor, and over decades, Lusitania has deteriorated significantly faster than Titanic because of the corrosion in the winter tides. The keel has an "unusual curvature", in a boomerang shape, which may be related to a lack of strength from the loss of her superstructure. The beam is reduced with the funnels missing, presumably due to deterioration. The bow is the most prominent portion of the wreck with the stern damaged from the removal of three of the four propellers by Oceaneering International in 1982 for display.

Some of the prominent features on Lusitania include her still-legible name, some bollards with the ropes still intact, pieces of the ruined promenade deck, some portholes, the prow and the remaining propeller. Recent expeditions to the wreck have revealed that Lusitania is in surprisingly poor condition compared to Titanic, as her hull has already started to collapse.

1. "The Lusitania, therefore, carried over 4 million rounds of small-arms ammunition (.303 calibre), almost 5,000 shrapnel shell casings, and 3,240 brass percussion fuses." Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay Incidents, by Douglas Carl Peifer, Oxford University Press, 1 June 2016, pg 269:

2. "More lethal cargo loaded into the forward holds between the bow and bridge included 4,2 million rounds of Remington .303 rifle ammunition consigned to the British Royal Arsenal at Woolwich; 1,248 cases of shrapnel-filled artillery shells from the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, each case containing four 3-inch shells for a total of some fifty tons; eighteen cases of percussion fuses; and forty-six tons of volatile aluminum powder used to manufacture explosives." Lusitania: Triumph, Tragedy, and the End of the Edwardian Age, by Greg King, Penny Wilson, St. Martin's Press, 24 Feb 2015 - page 5

3. Referred to in ^ Lusitania, by Diana Preston, and Lusitania: An Illustrated Biography by J. Kent Layton (2010, Amberley Books).

4. Preston, D. (2002) Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy. New York: Walker & Company.

5. ^ The Sinking of the Lusitania: Terror at Sea or ("Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic") puts this at 14:30, two minutes after Lusitania sank.

6. Des Hickey and Gus Smith, ^ Seven Days to Disaster: The Sinking of the Lusitania, 1981, William Collins, ISBN 0-00-216882-0

7. ^ "Sinking Justified, Says Dr. Dernburg; Lusitania a "War Vessel", Known to be Carrying Contraband, Hence Search Was Not Necessary" (PDF). The New York Times. 9 May 1915. p. 4. Justification of the sinking of the liner Lusitania by German submarines as a man of war was advanced today by Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, former German Colonial Secretary and regarded as the Kaiser's official mouthpiece in the United States. Dr. Dernburg gave out a statement at the Hollenden Hotel following his arrival in Cleveland to address the City Club at noon on Germany's attitude in the present war

8. Halsey, Francis Whiting (1919). The Literary Digest History of the World War. Funk & Wagnalls. p. 255.

9. ^ "Sinking Justified, Says Dr. Dernburg; Lusitania a "War Vessel", Known to be Carrying Contraband, Hence Search Was Not Necessary" (PDF). New York Times. 9 May 1915. p. 4.

10. Jones, Howard (2001). Crucible of Power: A History of U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1897. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-8420-2918-6.

11. Protasio, John. (2011). ^ The Day the World was Shocked; The Lusitania Disaster and Its Influence on the Course of World War I pp. 200-201, Casemate Publications (US) ISBN 978-1-935149-45-3

12. Burns, G. (2003). "Excerpt from The Lusitania Medal and its Varieties". LusitaniaMedal.com. Archived from the original on 3 March 2012.

13. ^ "A NEW THEORY OF THE LUSITANIA SINKING.; The Evidence of the German Medal Dated May 5 and the Report of the Explosive "Cigars" on Board" (PDF).

14. ^ Barbara Winifred Anderson McDermott: Visit on a Sunday Afternoon, 21 July 2002 Archived 9 October 2002 at the Wayback Machine Journeys in Time Web site

15. ^ Theisen, Earl (1967) [1933]. "The History of the Animated Cartoon". In Fielding, Raymond (ed.). A Technological History of Motion Pictures and television. University of California Press. pp. 84-87. ISBN 978-0-520-00411-5.

16. Kirkpatrick, John (1973). Charles E. Ives: Memos. London: Calder & Boyars. ^ ISBN 978-0-7145-0953-2

17. ^ "British 'Not to Blame' for Rapid Sinking and Loss of Life on Liner RMS Lusitania, Find Underwater Researchers". The Daily Telegraph. 1 July 2012. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022.

18. Layton, J. Kent (2007). ^ Lusitania: An Illustrated Biography of the Ship of Splendor. pp. 194

Burns, Greg, Commemoration of Death: the medals of the Lusitania murders. (2012), full color bleed, 194 pages, ISBN 978-1-4791-1573-0 Available on Createspace e-store

Bailey, Thomas A. "The Sinking of the Lusitania", The American Historical Review, Vol. 41, No. 1 (October 1935), pp. 54-73 in JSTOR

Bailey, Thomas A. "German Documents Relating to the 'Lusitania'", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Sep. 1936), pp. 320-337 in JSTOR

Doubleday, F.N. (January 1908). "A Trip on the Two Largest Ships". The World's Work: A History of Our Time. XV: 9803-9810.(available at Internet Archive)

Bernier, Michelle. "Did these Stories Really Happen?". (2010). Createspace

Ellis, Edward R. Echoes of Distant Thunder: Life in the United States 1914-1918 (Kodansha Globe, 1996). Chapter 14 covers the sinking of Lusitania, survivors' personal memories and political response.

Handlin, Oscar. "A Liner, a U-Boat ... and History. American Heritage (June 1954) 6#3 online. Episode in long-term perspective.

Larson, Erik (2015). Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania. New York: Crown Publishing. ISBN 978-0-307-40886-0.

Lauriat, Charles E. Jr. (1915). "The Lusitania's Last Voyage"

Ljungström, Henrik. Lusitania. The Great Ocean Liners.

Martin, Michael. (2014). RMS Lusitania, It Wasn't & It Didn't. Dublin: The History Press Ireland. ISBN 978 1 84588 854 1

Peifer, Douglas Carl. (2016). Choosing war: presidential decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay incidents. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190939601

Peifer, Douglas. (2015) "The Sinking of the Lusitania, Wilson's Response, and Paths Not Taken: Historical Revisionism, the Nye Committee, and the Ghost of William Jennings Bryan." Journal of Military History 79, no. 4 (2015): 1025-45.

Simpson, Colin. Life Magazine, 13 October 1972, p. 58. Excerpts from Colin Simpson's The Lusitania (1973) The Lusitania Sinking.

Simpson, Colin (1972). Lusitania. Book club associates.

The Sunday Times, (2008) "Is The Riddle of The Lusitania About to be Solved?"

Linda and Gary Cargill "Those Who Dream By Day"

Timeline, The Lusitania Resource.

Facts and Figures, The Lusitania Resource.

Droste, C.L. (1972). The Lusitania Case. Riverside, Conn: 7 C's Press. ISBN 978-0-85059-097-5

Protasio, John. (2011). The Day the World was Shocked; The Lusitania Disaster and Its Influence on the Course of World War I, Casemate Publications (US) ISBN 978-1-935149-45-3

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Sinking of the RMS Lusitania - Wikipedia

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The RMS Lusitania was a British-registered ocean liner that was torpedoed by an Imperial German Navy U-boat during the First World War on 7 May 1915, about 11 nautical miles (20 kilometres) off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland.

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Allies like New Zealand and Australia land in Gallipoli, Turkey through a key international waterway

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Forcing the straits

The ongoing deadlock on the Western Front led the Allies to formulate plans to attack Turkey, an ally of the Central Powers. If the Turkish capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul) was attacked via the Dardanelles Straits, it might relieve the pressure on Britain's ally Russia. It could also open a supply route to Russia through the Black Sea and at best knock Turkey out of the war altogether.

Plans were made for a naval expedition to seize the Dardanelles in February and March 1915. Given their strategic importance, the straits were well defended by minefields and fortifications. There were also many Turkish gun emplacements on the Gallipoli peninsula to the north and the Asian coast to the south.

When the naval attacks failed to destroy these defences, it became clear that troops would have to seize the peninsula and destroy the guns and minefields. Only then could the Royal Navy force the straits and push on to Constantinople.

However, the naval operation had alerted the Ottomans to the danger of an attack in the region. Any Allied landing had now lost the crucial element of surprise.

Cape Helles

The 29th Division landed on five beaches at Helles. Y Beach was relatively undefended and the troops advanced to within a third of a mile (500m) of Krithia. But it was evacuated the following day when Ottoman reinforcements arrived.

At W and V Beaches, the British faced well-defended positions obstructed with barbed wire, and suffered appalling casualties. At V Beach men disembarked from ports cut in the sides of the troopship SS 'River Clyde', but faced heavy machine-gun fire from Sedd-el-Bahr fortress. Out of the first wave of 200 men, only 21 made it ashore.

The Turks tried desperately to drive the British off the beaches, but were unable to do so. Crucially, the Gurkhas took the high ground of Sari Bair above the landing beaches. The fighting at W Beach was so furious that the Lancashire Fusiliers won an unprecedented 'six VCs [Victoria Crosses] before breakfast'.

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The ongoing deadlock on the Western Front led the Allies to formulate plans to attack Turkey, an ally of the Central Powers. If the Turkish capital of Constantinople (now Istanbul) was attacked via the Dardanelles Straits, it might relieve the pressure on Britain's ally Russia.

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In the second battle of Ypres is when the Germans first used poisonous gases where more than 10000 allied troops were affected

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The Second Battle of Ypres was fought during the First World War from 22 April to 25 May 1915. It was the first major battle fought by Canadian troops in the Great War. The battle took place on the Ypres salient on the Western Front, in Belgium, outside the city of Ypres (now known by its Flemish name, Ieper). The untested Canadians distinguished themselves as a determined fighting force, resisting the horror of the first large-scale poison gas attack in modern history. Canadian troops held a strategically critical section of the frontline until reinforcements could be brought in. More than 6,500 Canadians were killed, wounded or captured in the Second Battle of Ypres.

At the Second Battle of Ypres, Belgium, 1915.

Second Battle of Ypres

Date

22 April to 25 May 1915

Location

Ypres (now Ieper), West Flanders, Belgium

Participants

United Kingdom (Canada, India), France (Algeria and Morocco), Belgium; German Empire

Casualties

59,000 British (including 6,500 Canadians)

22,000 French*

35,000 Germans

*estimate

Ypres Salient

The men of the First Canadian Division - farmers, lumberjacks, lawyers, factory workers, business owners, teachers and doctors - were among the first Canadians to volunteer for service in the war. More than 31,000 men travelled to England as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in October 1914, and after a training period in England, arrived in France in February 1915. By this time, the fighting on the Western Front had stabilized into a war of attrition between the great armies of Germany on one side and France, Britain and its empire on the other - dug into a vast system of opposing trenches, running from the North Sea to Switzerland.

In April 1915, after a short taste of trench life in a relatively quiet sector of the front, the First Canadian Division was ordered into the Ypres salient - a bulge in the front lines on the Flanders plain, east of the ancient Belgian city of Ypres. The Allies wanted to protect Ypres partly because it offered rail and road links to ports on the coast that the Allies were determined to keep out of German hands. Defending the Belgian people was also a powerful justification for Britain's role in the war, and abandoning Ypres - the last major Belgian center unoccupied by German forces - would have signalled an important German victory.

The salient was a dangerous place for Allied defenders. It was surrounded on three sides by enemy soldiers and artillery. The trench works the Canadians moved into in April were also woefully inadequate - shallow, poorly constructed, and littered with human excrement, pools of water, and the unburied corpses of soldiers killed in previous fighting.

Second Battle of Ypres, 1915.

First Gas Attack of the First World War

Chemical weapons had been outlawed by international treaties before the First World War. In the spring of 1915, however, Germany decided to test a new weapon - chlorine gas - on the Ypres salient. On 22 April 1915, the Germans released more than 160 tonnes of the gas from thousands of canisters arranged along German lines. The Canadians, and the French-Algerian troops manning the trenches to their left, watched as a mysterious yellow-green cloud appeared first over no man's land between the opposing armies, and then drifted with the wind southward over the Allied lines.

The heaviest part of the gas cloud hit the Algerians, the chlorine burning their throats and causing their lungs to fill with foam and mucus, effectively drowning the men in their own fluids. The Canadians watched in shock and horror as the suffocating Algerians broke from their lines, many fleeing toward them in panic - leaving a 6 km hole in the front lines on the Canadians' left flank.

As German forces moved from behind the drifting gas cloud toward the now-empty Algerian trenches, Canadian and British battalions - including soldiers suffering from the gas - moved to plug the hole. During hours of desperate fighting that day, with help from isolated groups of French and Algerians, they managed to stop the enemy from encircling the First Canadian Division inside the salient, and from marching on the city of Ypres.

Second Gas Attack

Canadian and British forces spent the next several days launching counterattacks and fighting a series of chaotic engagements - at Mauser Ridge, Gravenstafel Ridge and in hand-to-hand combat at Kitchener's Wood - trying to blunt the German assault and hold the lines outside Ypres.

On 24 April 1915, a second gas attack hit the Canadians head-on. None of the troops carried gas masks at this point in the war. Some Canadians fled, and many sought refuge by lying face-down in the crevices of their trenches, where the green, hazy gas cloud, heavier than air, found and killed them. But many others survived by holding urine-soaked cloths and handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses - after being instructed to do so by medical officers who had identified the gas as chlorine.

DID YOU KNOW?
There were about one million gas casualties during the First World War - 12,000 of them Canadian. According to the Canadian War Museum, "Many soldiers never reported their multiple minor gassings, which, at the time, were not immediately debilitating. Suffering in later years from chemically-induced illnesses and disabilities, they would sometimes fight unsuccessfully to have medical claims approved, having failed to document their injuries at the time."

Canadian soldier wearing gas mask, Shorncliffe, Kent, 1917.

"[The gas] came up and went over the trenches and it stayed, not as high as a person, all the way across," said Lester Stevens, a member of the Eighth Battalion from Winnipeg, who witnessed the second gas attack. "Two fellows, one on my right and one on my left, dropped. And eventually they got them to hospital, but they both died.... I was a bit of an athlete in those days and a good swimmer, and I could hold my breath... as soon as I saw that gas coming, I tied a handkerchief over my nose and mouth.... That saved my life."

The 24 April attack opened serious gaps in the Canadian lines and forced the retreat of several battalions. But overall, the battered First Division held the ground outside Ypres, buying time until French and British reinforcements could be brought in. After four days of intense fighting, the Canadians were mostly relieved on 25 April.

DID YOU KNOW?
Dr. Cluny Macpherson, from St. John's, Newfoundland, is credited with inventing the Phenate Helmet after the Second Battle of Ypres. The Tube Helmet, as it was also known, was a canvas gas mask that was treated with chemicals that protected against chlorine and phosgene gas. The mask was introduced to soldiers across the British army in July 1915.

Gas mask drill, 92nd Highlanders, 15 August 1916.

In Flanders Fields

Among those deeply affected by the horror of the fighting was Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian Army Medical Corps officer, who wrote his famous poem, " In Flanders Fields," in the midst of the battle. McCrae's lungs were damaged by gas during the battle, making his asthma much worse; nevertheless, he tended soldiers at Essex Farm dressing station near Ypres - a bunker with a dirt floor and with light provided only by lanterns and the doorway.

McCrae jotted down this most famous of war poems in 20 minutes during the Battle of Ypres (courtesy Library and Archives Canada/C-128809).

Significance and Legacy

The second battle of Ypres continued for another month after the Canadians were relieved, fought largely by British units - and by a battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry - who re-established control of the Ypres salient.

For holding the line amid the gas attacks of the first critical four days of the battle, the Canadians were praised for their courage and tenacity, a reputation that would grow as the war continued. The price, however, was high. Overall, British forces lost 59,000 men - dead, wounded or captured - in the month-long battle. More than 6,500 of those casualties were Canadian, including more than 2,000 Canadian dead.

Said Private Albert Roscoe of Ontario, in a letter home to his mother weeks after the battle: "I do not know how I came to be alive today. It is more than I can explain."

Canadian forces would return to the Ypres salient in 1917 for the Battle of Passchendaele - also known as the Third Battle of Ypres - a bloody conflict that resulted in 15,654 Canadian casualties (including over 4,000 killed).

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The Second Battle of Ypres was fought during the First World War from 22 April to 25 May 1915. It was the first major battle fought by Canadian troops in the Great War. The battle took place on the Ypres salient on the Western Front, in Belgium, outside the city of Ypres (now known by its Flemish name, Ieper).

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Submarine warfare threats from Germany on February 4,1915

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Submarine warfare threats from Germany on February 4,1915

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Germany issued a notice saying any ship would be destroyed without any warning

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From the start of the First World War in 1914, Germany pursued a highly effective U-boat campaign against merchant shipping. This campaign intensified over the course of the war and almost succeeded in bringing Britain to its knees in 1917.

At first, U-boats obeyed 'prize rules', which meant that they surfaced before attacking merchant ships and allowed the crew and passengers to get away. This left U-boats vulnerable to attack, especially after the British introduced 'Q-ships' - disguised warships with hidden guns intended to lure U-boats in close and then sink them. The use of Q-ships contributed to Germany's eventual abandonment of prize rules.

On 4 February 1915, Germany declared a war zone around Britain, within which merchant ships were sunk without warning. This 'unrestricted submarine warfare' angered neutral countries, especially the United States. The tactic was abandoned on 1 September 1915, following the loss of American lives in the torpedoed liners and Arabic.

After failing to seize control of the sea from the British at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917. This, coupled with the Zimmermann Telegram, brought the United States into the war on 6 April. But the new U-boat blockade nearly succeeded and between February and April 1917, U-boats sank more than 500 merchant ships. In the second half of April, an average of 13 ships were sunk each day.

In November 1916, Admiral Jellicoe created an Admiralty Anti-Submarine Division, but effective countermeasures arrived slowly. Most important was the introduction of convoys, in which merchant ships were grouped together and protected by warships. In addition, merchant ships were painted in dazzle camouflage, aircraft and shore-based direction finding stations were introduced to locate U-boats, and warships acquired new weapons such as an early form of sonar and depth charges. On 23 April 1918, British naval forces attacked U-boat bases at Ostend and Zeebrugge. By the Armistice, the U-boat threat had been neutralised.

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The U-Boat Campaign That Almost Broke Britain

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From the start of the First World War in 1914, Germany pursued a highly effective U-boat campaign against merchant shipping. This campaign intensified over the course of the war and almost succeeded in bringing Britain to its knees in 1917.

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On the Christmas of 1914 on the western front lines the sound of Christmas carols filled the air of no mans land and no body fought

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In 2016, IWM was contacted by the family of one of the soldiers shown in this photograph. We now know that this is Arno Bohm, a German soldier, standing alongside British troops from the London Rifle Brigade. They're standing together in the middle of no man's land during the Christmas truce of 1914. This photograph captures a moment so unusual in the First World War that many people at the time, and to this day, believed it to be a myth.

In the midst of a brutal total war, how did this momentary peace come about,what impact did it have in the course of the First World War and why did it never happen again?

Marmaduke Walkinton: "We were in the front line. We were about 300 yards from the Germans and we had I think on Christmas Eve, we'd been singing carols and this that and the other, and the Germans had been doing the same, and we'd been shouting to each other, sometimes rude remarks, more often just joking remarks.

Eventually a German said, 'Tomorrow you no shoot, we no shoot'."

At the start of the war many believed it would all be over by Christmas. However, by December that year it was obvious that this was not the case, and thousands of families and soldiers were facing a Christmas of separation, grief and hardship.

Anthony Richards: "So for those soldiers who are in the trenches over winter 1914, the conditions would have got gradually worse and worse. You got a lot of rain; a lot of frost and the general living conditions would have been terrible."

But the British troops were not alone. In the trenches opposite theirs, sometimes only 30 yards away across the strip of no man's land, were German soldiers in the exact same situation.

Anthony Richards: "There was lots of opportunity for each side to communicate with the other, and this was a regular thing which happened right from the start of trench warfare. But communication would often be in the form of soldiers from one side shouting over insults to those in the other trenches. But what was interesting at Christmas is that both sides actually started to communicate in more friendly terms. It really began with the Germans singing Christmas carols and setting up Christmas trees on top of their parapets. And so, they came to very much empathise with one another."

Mr Rickner: "I remember very well Christmas. I remember the Christmas Day when the German and the French soldiers left their trenches, went to the barbed wire between them with champagne and cigarettes in their hands and had feelings of fraternisation and shouted they wanted to finish the war. And that lasted only two days - one and a half really - and then strict order came that no fraternisation was allowed, and we had to stay back in our trenches."

The Christmas truce varied in different parts of the front line. Ceasefires were hastily arranged, sometimes to enable the collection and burial of bodies or to allow the trenches to be repaired, in other cases the soldiers simply enjoyed fraternising with the other side.

Ernie Williams: "And we shared fags and goodies with the Germans, and then from somewhere, somehow this football appeared."

Interviewer: "Was it a proper football?"

Ernie Williams: "It was a proper football. But we didn't form a team, it wasn't a team game in any sense of the word. You know it was a kickabout. Everybody was having a go. It came from their side; it wasn't from our side where the ball came."

Interviewer: "How many people were taking part do you think?"

Ernie Williams: "Well I should think there'd be at least a couple of hundred."

Interviewer: "Did you kick the ball?"

Ernie Williams: "Oh yes I had to go at it, I was pretty good then, at 19."

But while some parts of the front line were playing football and swapping stories, others were confused by what they heard or felt no inclination to socialise with those they had so recently been fighting.

Clifford Lane: "After a few moments, there were lighted objects raised above the German parapets. The Germans were shouting over to our trench, there's no doubt about that at all, and before we could take any action or do anything, we were ordered to open rapid fire you see, which we did. The Germans did not reply to our rapid fire, they simply carried on with their celebrations and were having a very fine time indeed. They certainly were not going to do it anymore; they thought that we were idiots I suppose, which we were. Not us but the command, you see."

Anthony Richards: "The way that trench warfare was organised in the First World War, each sector was very distinctive and so you wouldn't necessarily know what was happening in the sector next door to you, and you do get stories of one area of the front where they're experiencing a truce but then suddenly they get fired on by the troops in the next sector who don't realise what's happening."

For those soldiers not involved, the truce must have seemed unbelievable, and even more so for those back home. For months the media and government propaganda had shaped the perception of German soldiers as bloodthirsty enemies, baby eaters, devils, ruthless killers. But news of the remarkable Christmas truce soon spread aboard. By the end of December, letters and photos arrived home and newspapers began to publish accounts of the truce.

John Wedderburn-Maxwell: "My father was delighted to have a letter giving such a description of events and he sent it or sent them up to the Daily Telegraph. I got into frightful rocket; it showed up that it must have been me who wrote it and he got hold of me gave me an awful dressing down for daring to write to the press, but of course I didn't, my old man wrote to the press!"

These photographs were taken on personal cameras that some soldiers had taken with them into the trenches. Photography in the trenches was discouraged for obvious reasons but during the Christmas Truce of 1914, soldiers on both sides of the trenches could not resist the opportunity to document such a unique event.

Anthony Richards: "At the beginning of January 1915, the newspapers suddenly start printing these letters and to begin with there was a certain amount of disbelief but then over time suddenly photographs started to appear as well, and by that time the evidence was clear that this did happen it wasn't a myth, and the media at the time absolutely loved it. There were lots of discussions in the newspapers about whether this was a good thing, or a bad thing and you know in a way it's a wonderful snapshot of Christmas 1914 when attitudes were still slightly naïve because the war had only really just begun. You find that in 1915 and onwards the war becomes almost a much more serious endeavour."

The Christmas truce would come to be remembered as something of a blip in the regular conduct of the war. It conflicted with the patriotic aggression required by both sides. It also served to highlight the great contrast between war and religion: how can you fight a war of aggression while also celebrating Christmas, the traditional time for peace and goodwill? For those reasons the Christmas truce was increasingly seen as unimportant and awkward to fit into the standard narrative of the First World War.

Anthony Richards: "You never get anything like the Christmas truce happening again, and over time not only is it seen as an anomaly but almost as a myth, and it gets to the point where people are actually doubting whether it happened in the first place, which continues right up to this day. So, there's still a lot of confusion about whether there was a football match played and things like this."

Harold Lewis: "We didn't cross to France until March of 1915 but although it would be arrogant to say that the thing didn't actually take place I very much doubt whether anything of the nature or magnitude that had been claimed for it took place at all. Now the purpose of that barbed wire and the trenches was to keep each side in its own place therefore why would anybody try to break that and if anybody tried what are the NCOs doing? What were the officers doing? I think the whole thing borders on the fairy tale and may be classed with the Russians with snow on their boots and the Angels of Mons."

Anthony Richards: "We know by looking at German newspapers that the Christmas truce was covered there in a very similar way to how it was in Britain. In the 1920s and the 1930s you see definite examples of how the Christmas truce changes in its depiction because there was a much greater emphasis then on the German soldier as a hero fighting a noble war, whereas the Christmas truce conflicts with that to a degree. So, in Germany in particular the Christmas truce goes out of favour definitely in the 20s and 30s, whereas in Britain it continues to be a popular celebrated story as part of the First World War."

The letters and photographs that reached home in Britain confirmed that this remarkable event had indeed taken place but it was one that was not to be repeated.

Anthony Richards: "The Christmas truce was unique and nothing like it happened again to that scale, and the reasons for this are varied. Immediately after the truce, the high command of both sides stepped in to make sure that fraternisation and ceasefires like this would not happen in the same way. But also, in the long term the real reason the truth is like this didn't happen is that the war changed the way in which it was being fought. As the war progressed there's a more centralised method of command: those in the front line would have been forced into constant aggression, you would have had artillery and trench mortar units constantly going. And also of course as the war progressed it took a far nastier turn, so you get things like gas warfare introduced, an increasing number of civilian casualties. You also get incidents like sinking of the Lusitania. The temptation I suppose to empathise with the enemy and the desire to fraternise with them changed dramatically from 1915 onwards."

It can be argued that the Christmas truce made little difference to the course of the First World War, but it would be remembered as a crucial moment in history. The truce has featured in films, television programs, inspired songs, and even featured in adverts. It's become part of the symbolism used when discussing the First World War, as synonymous with that conflict as poppies, mud and war poets. This unique event has become legendary, in part because the idea of peace at Christmas in such an unlikely place is an irresistible story. But its enduring legacy is also due to these incredible photographs and the interviews from those who were there, documenting an event that to so many still seems wholly unbelievable.

Thanks for watching. Don't forget to hit the button to subscribe to IWM's YouTube channel for more videos like this and much more.

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The Christmas Truce has become one of the most famous and mythologised events of the First World War. But what was the real story behind the truce? Why did it happen and did British and German soldiers really play football in no-man's land?

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Commission For Relief of Belgium on October 1,1914

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Commission For Relief of Belgium on October 1,1914

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A relief move by engineer Herbert Hoover started a relief program to distribute millions of tons of food to civilians

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Herbert Hoover and Belgian Relief in World War I

Spring 1989, Vol. 21, No. 1

By George H. Nash

© 1989 by George H. Nash

Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois was once asked by a group of junior high school students to define diplomacy. The senator replied: "If I said to my wife, 'You have a face that would stop a thousand clocks,' that would be stupidity. But if I turned to her and said, 'Dear, when I behold you, time stands still,' that's diplomacy!"

The subject of my essay, and of the book that I have just published, is, in a way, diplomacy, but diplomacy of a special sort-indeed, of a character that the world had never seen before. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, is also a book about politics, again of a special sort: the politics of philanthropy and humanitarian relief on a scale previously unknown and unimagined. And, of course, my book is the second installment in a biography of one of the least understood of all American leaders.

While preparing this volume, I spent many rewarding days in the research rooms and corridors of the National Archives, where I received the courteous assistance of people like Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries John Fawcett and archivists Ronald Swerczek and Gerald Haines. I was drawn here by two superb collections: Record Group 59 (the General Records of the Department of State) and RG 84 (the Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State). Of the latter, two in particular-the files of our embassy in London and legation in Brussels for the years of World War I-proved to be indispensable. And no doubt like innumerable other scholars over the years who have explored these particular treasures, I say: Hurrah for the State Department's decimal file and the access to the past that it facilitates. Would that every other agency of government used a similar classification scheme.

This summer the nations of Europe and North America will recall the seventy-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. For the people of the United States this commemoration will evoke many images. Of battle sites like Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Of soldiers like John J. Pershing and Sergeant York. Of Flanders Fields where poppies grow. Of a musical call to arms, "Over There." For some Americans the remembrance will elicit another image as well: of the grim, chaotic month of August 1914, when the independent kingdom of Belgium courageously resisted an invading German army, only to fall victim to a four-year ordeal of conquest.

One American will be forever linked in history with Belgium's travail in that awful war. His name, of course, is Herbert Hoover. After the battle of the Marne, giant European armies bogged down in the trenches, and famine threatened beleaguered Belgium, a highly industrialized nation of 7 million dependent upon imports for three-quarters of her food. On one side the German army of occupation refused to take responsibility for victualing the civilian population. Let Belgium import food from abroad as she had done before the war, said the Germans. On the other side stood the tightening British naval blockade of Belgian ports. Let the Germans, as occupiers of Belgium, feed its people, said the British. Besides, they argued, how could one be sure that the Germans would not seize imported food for themselves?

As the tense days passed in the early autumn of 1914, food supplies dwindled ominously in Belgium. To the outside world went emissaries pleading for the Allies to permit food to filter through the naval noose. Finally, on October 22, after weeks of negotiations, Herbert Hoover established under diplomatic protection a neutral organization to procure and distribute food to the Belgian populace. Great Britain agreed to let the food pass unmolested through its blockade. Germany in turn promised not to requisition this food destined for helpless noncombatants.

Why Hoover? In the summer of 1914 Herbert Clark Hoover was a prosperous forty-year-old international mining engineer living in London-and dreaming of a career of public service in the United States. This orphaned son of an Iowa blacksmith had come far indeed from his humble beginnings in the American Middle West. Rising rapidly in his chosen profession, by 1914 he directed or in part controlled a worldwide array of mining enterprises that employed a hundred thousand men. "If a man has not made a fortune by 40 he is not worth much," Hoover had said, while still in his thirties. By August 1914 he had achieved his goal yet was not content. "Just making money isn't enough," he confessed to a friend. Instead, he wanted (as he put it) to "get into the big game somewhere." Fascinated by the power of the press to mold and direct public opinion, Hoover that summer was negotiating to purchase a newspaper in California. Events in Europe compelled him to abandon his quest. Had it not been for "the guns of August," he would have entered American public life-and might even be remembered today-as a newspaper magnate.

In the first tumultuous weeks of the war, tens of thousands of American travelers in Europe fled the war-shocked continent for the comparative safety of London-and, they hoped, passage home. It was not as easy as that. Arriving in the British capital, many Yankee tourists found themselves unable to cash their instruments of credit or obtain temporary accommodation, let alone tickets for ships no longer crossing the Atlantic. Responding to the travelers' panic and necessities, Hoover and other American residents of London organized an emergency relief effort that provided food, temporary shelter, and financial assistance to their stranded fellow countrymen. Eventually the passenger ships resumed their sailings, and more than 100,000 weary and frightened travelers headed back to the United States. Hoover's untiring and efficient leadership during the crisis earned him the gratitude of the American ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page. And when a few weeks later the plight of Belgium became perilous, Ambassador Page and others agreed upon Hoover, a man of demonstrated competence, to administer this new mission of mercy. The globe-trotting mining engineer who had done well, and who now wanted to do good, had found an unexpected entrée into the "big game."

And so began an undertaking unprecedented in world history: an organized rescue of an entire nation from starvation. Initially no one expected this humanitarian task to last more than a few months. Few foresaw the gruesome stalemate that developed on the western front. As Hoover himself later wrote, "The knowledge that we would have to go on for four years, to find a billion dollars, to transport five million tons of concentrated food, to administer rationing, novel relief organization, which went by the name of the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), possessed some of the attributes of a government. It had its own flag, it negotiated "treaties" with the warring European powers, and its leaders parleyed regularly with diplomats and cabinet ministers in several countries. It even had a "pirate" leader in Hoover, who enjoyed price controls, agricultural production, to contend with combatant governments and with world shortages of food and ships, was mercifully hidden from us."

Within a few months Hoover and a team of mostly American volunteers built up what one British government official called "a piratical state organized for benevolence." Indeed, the informal diplomatic immunity and traveled freely through enemy lines-probably the only American citizen permitted to do so in the entire war.

As a historian and biographer of Mr. Hoover, I am particularly impressed by four aspects of his wartime service to the people of Belgium. First, by the sheer complexity and magnitude of the relief commission that he led. Today we are apt to take for granted the prompt intervention of humanitarian agencies in areas of distress, be it a famine in Ethiopia, an earthquake in Mexico, or a typhoon in Bangladesh. In 1914, however, no institution for the succor of Belgium existed; it became Hoover's awesome responsibility to create one.

Consider the array of tasks that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was obliged to perform. First it had to raise money throughout the world-partly through charitable appeals, but primarily, as the war went on, through subsidies from the Allied governments. With this money it had to purchase wheat and other foodstuffs from North America, South America, and Australia. Then it had to arrange for shipping these foodstuffs to Belgium; eventually the CRB had a fleet of several dozen ships continuously at its disposal. When these ships entered the European war zone, they were required to navigate carefully lest they be seized or subjected to submarine attack. And when the food-laden vessels reached the neutral Dutch port of Rotterdam, their cargo had to be unloaded for conveyance by canal into Belgium.

Once inside the occupied country the supplies had to be prepared in mills, dairies, and bakeries for human consumption. Then the food had to be distributed equitably to an anxious population scattered over more than 2,500 villages, cities, and towns. As part of its undertaking, the CRB needed to verify that the daily rations did indeed reach their intended recipients and not the German army of occupation. Working with Hoover and his staff was a vast network of forty thousand Belgian volunteers who handled the distribution of food throughout their land. This parallel Belgian organization was known as the Comité National de Secours et d'Alimentation. At its head were some of the country's most eminent business leaders. In early 1915 Hoover's team was allowed to extend its life-sustaining operations to 2 million desperate French civilians caught behind the German battle lines on the western front. Thus the CRB's work came to encompass a total area of nearly twenty thousand square miles.

The commission's functions were even more complex than this summary suggests. Writing in early 1917, one of the CRB's young supervisory delegates, Joseph C. Green, explained in a letter what providing food to a civil population under enemy control actually entailed:

Take the one item of bread for example. First the [CRB] Provincial Representative has to figure out periodically the exact population of his Province, and the exact quantities of native wheat and rye and of imported wheat and maize on hand. From this he calculates the quantity of imported grain necessary to cover a certain period. This he reports to Brussels, and Brussels to London. London supplies the ships. New York purchases and sees to the loading. Rotterdam tranships into canal barges. In the meantime Brussels has decided upon the exact quantities to be shipped to each mill in the country, and Rotterdam ships accordingly. The provincial man must see to the unloading and the milling. The milling involves questions of percentages of bran and flour, of mixtures of native and foreign grains, of the disposal of byproducts and so on.

And this was just the start:

When the flour is finally milled, the real work of distribution begins. Sacks must be provided and kept in rotation. The exact quantity of flour required by a given Commune for a given period must be ascertained. Shipments by canal or rail or tram or wagon must be made to every Commune dependent upon the mill. Boats and cars and horses must be obtained and oil must be supplied for engines and fodder for horses. When the flour has reached the Local Committee it must be carefully distributed among the bakers in accordance with the needs of each. Baking involves yeast, and the maintenance of yeast factories, and the disposal of byproducts, and questions of hygiene and a dozen other minor matters. When the bread is baked it must be distributed to the population by any one of a dazes methods which guarantee an absolutely equitable distribution, each man, woman and child getting the varying ration to which he is entitled, paying for it if he can afford it, and getting it free if he can't. All this involves financial problems, and bookkeeping, and checking and inspection, all along the line; and the whole process to the tune of endless bickering with German authorities high and low, and endless discussions with a thousand Belgian committees.

Now, if you have digested that, you have some idea of what it means to supply a nation with bread. But that is only one item among many. Lard, rice, milk, clothing, etc., etc.: each involves its own special series of problems.

But "relief in Belgium" meant even more than this. By the middle of April 1917 nearly 5 million people in Belgium and northern France were destitute. Using the CRB's gifts from abroad and the profits from its own food sales to the well-to-do, the Comité National financed a vast and growing web of benevolence, including more than 2,700 local charitable committees as well as various other more specialized institutions. All in all, Hoover calculated that more than half the entire population was receiving some kind of assistance in the spring of 1917, including at least 2,700,000 who were helped by the communal charitable committee.

One object of special solicitude was the young. It was our task and the Belgians', Hoover wrote later, "to maintain the laughter of the children, not to dry their tears." Thanks to the CRB's external fund raising and food imports, and the dedicated zeal of Belgian volunteers, the challenge was impressively met. By early 1917 (to cite but one example) three-fourths of Belgium's children were receiving daily hot lunches at canteens established especially for this purpose.

Another particular concern to Hoover was the plight of Belgium's renowned lace workers. Deprived of essential raw material by the invasion and subsequent blockade, a workforce of forty thousand women faced destitution, long-term idleness, and possible attenuation of their skills until Hoover and his associates stepped in. The CRB arranged to import needed thread for the lacemakers and to sell some of their finished products abroad. It also helped committees make advances to the women for their unsold production, such money to be recovered from the export of accumulated merchandise after the war. In these ways an entire industry was kept alive and thousands of skilled women self-supporting. The sale of the exquisite lace in England and the United States also no doubt helped to sharpen "the club of public opinion" that Hoover wielded in behalf of Belgium's cause.

No enterprise so massive, so multifaceted, so exposed to the passions of war, could hope to function undisturbed. This is the second feature of Hoover's relief experience that impresses the biographer: the unremitting pressures and troubles that beset him at every turn. From the day of its inception, the CRB had to cope with critics in the various belligerent governments who were convinced that its work was enhancing the military strength of one side or the other. Scarcely a month went by that did not witness some challenge to the precarious existence of the commission. Time and again Hoover was immersed in exhausting negotiations in an endless race against famine and malnutrition. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George, the British Admiralty, the German high command: all at one time or another opposed him-and felt the sting of his relentless entreaties. At times, too, he had furious disagreements with his Belgian counterpart Emile Francqui, a man, like himself, of great ability and formidable force of personality. Let no one think that humanitarian relief, because of its noble and generous purpose, was exempt from political intrigue, personal ambition, and diplomatic rivalry. It was not.

Sometimes, weary from incessant conflicts with one or another belligerent power, Hoover contemplated resigning. "Were it not for the haunting picture in one's mind of all the long line of people standing outside the relief stations in Belgium," he wrote early in the war, "I would have thrown over the position long since." Ofttimes, too, he threatened to resign-the better to obtain his objectives. But Hoover did not quit. When the chips were down, it was his critics who yielded, recognizing his indispensability and growing stature and the risk of angering American public opinion that he had so skillfully mobilized.

Third, I continue to be impressed-as were so many observers at the time-by the energy, resourcefulness, and public relations acumen of the man at the apex of the CRB. While the relief commission had many volunteers-all, like Hoover, working without pay-and while Hoover himself emphasized the value of organization, his loyal subordinates knew that one man dominated their endeavors: the man they called "the Chief."

What kind of person was he? Here is Edward Eyre Hunt's description of him in the Belgian relief period:

In appearance he is astonishingly youthful, smooth-shaven, dark haired, with cool, watchful eyes, clear brow, straight nose, and firm, even mouth. His chin is round and hard.

One might not mark him in a crowd. There is nothing theatrical or picturesque in his looks or bearing. . . . At work he seems passive and receptive. He stands still or sits still when he talks, perhaps jingling coins in his pocket or playing with a pencil. His repertory of gestures is small. He can be so silent that it hurts.

Being an American he sometimes acts first and explains afterwards. But his explanations, like his actions, are direct and self-sufficient.

To Ambassador Walter Hines Page, life was "worth more . . . for knowing Hoover. But for him Belgium would now be starved. . . . He's a simple, modest, energetic little man who began his career in California and will end it in Heaven; and he doesn't want anybody's thanks."

Hoover's ability to concentrate on the relief problems at hand was almost legendary. Joseph C. Green later described an encounter he had with "the Chief" in the Brussels office of the CRB:

. . . I found Mr. Hoover standing with his back to the wall, gazing fixedly at a spot on the floor five or six feet in front of me.

I went over, said good morning, and was about to proffer my hand in the Belgian fashion when I became aware that he was absolutely unconscious of my presence. I stood about awkwardly for a few minutes fill he came to with a start, and recognized me with a nod. This extreme absorption in the business of the moment is one of Mr. Hoover's chief characteristics. Belgians, with their more elaborate code of good manners, find it difficult to understand him.

Sometimes Hoover's ability to concentrate had amusing aspects. Hugh Gibson, an American diplomat, told Green one day of the time

that Mr. Hoover once came to the Legation to see him on business. During the entire conversation he paced the floor in the little salon upstairs. One of his parings led him to the door, and he walked out. Gibson thought that he was going to continue his walking up and down in the hall, and his first intimation that the interview was terminated was the sound of footsteps hurrying downstairs. Gibson ran after him and just reached the outside door in time to shout a hurried goodbye.

When the United States entered the European conflict in 1917, Hoover returned home to head a new wartime agency, the United States Food Administration. But the relief commission that brought him fame continued to function, although in a reorganized form necessitated by the end of American neutrality. Throughout the war the CRB and Comité National indefatigably fed more than nine million people a day in Belgium and northern France. And when the commission finally closed its accounts, it found that it had spent nearly a billion dollars. It had sustained the health and morale of the Belgian people. It had made Herbert Hoover an international symbol of practical idealism, and it had launched him on what he later called "the slippery road of public life."

Hoover was not a man to covet what he called "European decorations." Moreover, once he became an official of the United States government he could not accept a title of nobility. In August 1918, therefore, when Hoover visited the tiny portion of Belgium not under German control, King Albert, on petition of his ministers, presented his American guest a specially created, unique title: "Ami de la nation belge," Friend of the Belgian Nation. By royal directive only Hoover would ever hold this title of esteem.

Hoover's association with Belgium did not terminate with the end of World War I. At point he could easily have retired from the scene; most men no doubt would have done so. But even before the cessation of hostilities he was thinking ahead to the reconstruction of the strife-torn land whose history had intersected so fatefully with his own. As early as 1916 he suggested to the exiled Belgian minister of finance that the CRB's excess funds at the end of the war be used to establish a foundation "for the stimulation of scientific and industrial research." In 1918 Hoover confided to the American minister to Belgium, Brand Whitlock:

As to the question of re-building in Belgium and Northern France,-it is the one job that I would like to have. I believe that it contains usefulness and sentiment beyond any other occupation after this War is ended, and there is nothing that would appeal to me so much as to join with you in a mission of this kind. . . .

In 1920, after various negotiations, Hoover's dreams achieved practical fruition. Upon liquidating, the CRB had a surplus of over $35 million. Of this sum it distributed more than $18 million in outright gifts to the Universities of Brussels, Ghent, Liege, Louvain, and other educational institutions. The remainder of the money was divided between two foundations created that year: the CRB Educational Foundation in the United States, and the Fondation Universitaire in Belgium.

Through this device Hoover and his wartime associates forged enduring bonds of Belgian-American cultural exchange, bonds that persist to this day. During the 1920s, for instance, Hoover's foundation granted over $1,600,000 for the rebuilding of the University of Louvain, so terribly ravaged during the German occupation. Thus was born in the tragedy of World War I an empire of philanthropy with which Hoover was identified for the rest of his life.

Finally-and this is the fourth theme to which I call your attention-the creation of the Commission for Relief in Belgium turned out to be more than a passing episode in a great war-and more than a springboard to one man's political career. Hoover's endeavor was in fact a pioneering effort in global altruism-in his own words, "an American epic" that in some ways was the prototype of much that followed in this bloody century. In 1916 Lord Eustace Percy of the British Foreign Office described Hoover as "the advance guard and symbol of the sense of responsibility of the American people towards Europe." A few months later the New Republic echoed this assertion, acclaiming the CRB as "an outpost of the Republic" whose continued success was of the highest national priority. Hoover and his colleagues, declared the journal, had "created an American obligation in Europe." To the New York Times in early 1917, Hoover's administration of the CRB ranked as "perhaps the most splendid American achievement of the last two years."

In more recent times the world has grown accustomed to American action to save lives and restore the fractured economies of far-off lands. Indeed, today such involvement is almost universally taken for granted. One reason for this expectation, one reason for its acceptance-although few today know it-is the institution created nearly seventy-five years ago by Herbert Hoover.

For Hoover, also, the Belgian experience was but a prologue. In the years 1917 to 1921, he as well as his country moved even more prominently onto the international stage. No longer just the almoner of Belgium, he became (in General Pershing's words) "the food regulator for the world"-or, as one admirer put it, a "Napoleon of mercy." It has been said that Hoover was responsible for saving more lives than any other person in history. The story of that achievement during the remainder and aftermath of World War I will be a principal focus of the next volume of my biography.

Sixty years ago this fall, while Hoover was seeking the office of President, a certain mediocrity was running for city council in Augusta, Georgia. The candidate apparently knew his limitations, for he announced in his campaign advertisements, "I know I'm not much, but why vote for less?" Without discussing Hoover's later political odyssey, I hope I have said enough here to suggest why his contemporaries came to feel that with him they did not, so to speak, have to "vote for less," and how it was possible for him to become President of the United States without ever having held an elective office.

Why did he do it? An autobiographical statement that he composed sometime during World War I provides a clue:

There is little importance to men's lives except the accomplishments they leave to posterity. What a man accomplishes is of many categories and of many points of view; moral influence, example, leadership in thought and inspiration are difficult to measure, to prove or to treasure . . . and the proportion of success to be attributed to their effort is always indeterminate. In the origination or administration of tangible institutions or constructive works men's parts can be more certainly defined. When all is said and done accomplishment is all that counts.

During his lifetime Hoover created and administered many "tangible institutions," the most remarkable of which was the Commission for Relief in Belgium. He also left behind a panoply of achievements long obscured by the bitter memory of the Great Depression. When Hoover died in 1964 at the age of ninety, he had spent fifty years -a half century-in one form or another of public service. It was a record that in sheer scope and duration may be without parallel in American history.

A life like that requires not pages but volumes to measure.

George H. Nash received his doctorate from Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian, 1914-1917, the second volume in a projected multivolume biography of our thirty-first President. This essay was first presented as a lecture at the National Archives on November 3, 1988.

Articles published in Prologue do not necessarily represent the views of NARA or of any other agency of the United States Government.

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Herbert Hoover and Belgian Relief in World War I Spring 1989, Vol. 21, No. 1 By George H. Nash © 1989 by George H. Nash Enlarge Through the efforts of Hoover and the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, over 9 million people a day were fed in Belgium and Northern France.

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First battles of Ypres on October 31,1914

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First battles of Ypres on October 31,1914

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A battle where both sides were flanking each other and where trench warfare started around the English channel

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

World War I destruction in Ypres, Winter 1917

The Battle of Ypres was a series of engagements during the First World War, near the Belgian city of Ypres, between the German and the Allied armies (Belgian, French, British Expeditionary Force and Canadian Expeditionary Force). During the five engagements, casualties may have surpassed one million.

First Battle of Ypres (19 October - 22 November 1914). During the Race to the Sea. More than 220,000 casualties.

Second Battle of Ypres (22 April - 15 May 1915). First mass use of poison gas by the German army. Around 100,000 casualties.

Battle of Passchendaele (31 July - 10 November 1917) also known as the Third Battle of Ypres. Between 400,000 and 900,000 casualties.

Battle of the Lys (7 - 29 April 1918) also known as the Battle of Estaires or the Fourth Battle of Ypres. Around 200,000 casualties.

Fifth Battle of Ypres (28 September - 2 October 1918) an informal name given to a series of battles in northern France and southern Belgium, also known as Advance of Flanders and Battle of the Peak of Flanders. Around 100,000 Allied casualties; German casualties unknown.

Dancocks, Daniel G. Welcome to Flanders Fields: the First Canadian Battle of the Great War : Ypres, 1915. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Battle of Ypres was a series of engagements during the First World War, near the Belgian city of Ypres, between the German and the Allied armies (Belgian, French, British Expeditionary Force and Canadian Expeditionary Force). During the five engagements, casualties may have surpassed one million.

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The start of bread rationing in Germany January 1, 1915

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The start of bread rationing in Germany January 1, 1915

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The government issued a card for 225 grams of bread a day in germany

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Contributed by Dr Helen Boak

In August 1916 a group of soldiers' wives wrote to the Hamburg Senate demanding its support for a peace settlement: 'we want to have our husbands and sons back from the war and we don't want to starve any more'. 1 The government's failure to ensure adequate food supplies and their equitable distribution, particularly to poorer people living in Germany's towns and cities, impacted upon popular opinion towards the government and also the population's support for the war.

The German government had made no economic plans for a long war. In 1914 Germany depended on imports for about a third of her foodstuffs, fodder and fertiliser, and these were affected by, among other things, the blockade put in place by the British navy from November 1914. Germany became, to a large extent, dependent on what her own farmers could produce. German agriculture was a mix of large estates in Northern Germany and some four million small farms elsewhere. As men and horses were called up, farmers' wives took over the running of the farm, but lack of equipment, fertiliser and manpower, even though some 900,000 prisoners of war worked on the land, saw substantial falls in crop yields, which almost halved by the war's end. A lack of fodder led to livestock losing weight, impacting on the supply of meat and milk. In July 1918 meat rations amounted to 12% of pre-war consumption. ²

The government, claiming that Germany had enough food to survive the blockade provided people reduced consumption, had to try and lower consumption and, at the same time, ensure that there was an equitable distribution of food at affordable prices at a time when priority was given to providing food for the army. Food provisioning on the home front was the responsibility of the local authorities. Across Germany individual towns and cities had traditional food supply chains, with some securing their provisions from the surrounding district and others, such as the Ruhr, dependent on supplies from further afield in Germany and abroad. This was to be significant as food shortages grew and transportation was affected by military demands, and, in the winter of 1916/17, by the weather.

At the start of the war there was a rush to buy staple foods to hoard, leading to price rises, and so the government allowed local authorities to introduce a system of price ceilings, which varied from place to place, not just in the maximum prices set but also the foodstuffs affected. Farmers, who resented interference in the free market, took their produce to places with higher or no price ceilings, or used it for animal fodder. This led in early 1915 to the slaughter of about one-third of Germany's pigs, seen as competitors for scarce food resources, impacting on later meat and fertiliser supplies. From October 1914 to eke out grain supplies bakers were allowed to use potato flour in the making of bread, the so-called K-Brot (K for Kartoffeln (potatoes) or, more patriotically, Krieg (war)), but continuing shortages led to the rationing of bread from January 1915. Throughout the war, other additives such as corn, lentils and even sawdust were used to eke out bread.

The autumn of 1915 was to see food riots in several German cities, as women protested about the new higher price ceiling for butter and food shortages.The government responded by decreeing that no fats were to be sold on Mondays and Thursdays, no meat on Tuesdays and Fridays and no flour at week-ends. A wave of food-related riots spread across Germany in summer 1916 and women would march to the town hall and demand better food supplies. Potatoes had been rationed in April 1916, butter and sugar in May, meat in June and eggs, milk and other fats in November. In late 1916 the government decreed that workers in heavy industry could receive extra rations. Women in the last three months of pregnancy also got extra rations, including full milk, to which children under six were also entitled. The amount of rations varied from place to place, which caused unrest as some areas felt others were receiving more. Women would begin to queue for their rations early, often bringing their folding chairs and their knitting, to ensure they got something. If the shop sold out, they had to go and queue elsewhere. However, rations were not always available. Toni Sender, a pacifist feminist, later wrote 'more often than not the word "butter" on the ticket was all one saw of butter'. ³ In the winter of 1916/17 weeks went by without potatoes, because of the poor harvest and transportation difficulties, and the turnip was used extensively as a replacement - it, too, was rationed. The Head of the Prussian Commission for the Provisioning of the People noted, 'women's wallets were filled with food ration cards of every kind, but the rations were often so minimal that it wasn't even worth picking them up'. ⁴ In January 1917 Princess Blücher, an Englishwoman married to a Prussian aristocrat, wrote in her diary: 'we are all growing thinner every day, and the rounded contours of the German nation have become a legend of the past. We are all gaunt and bony now, and have dark shadows round our eyes, and our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering what our next meal will be'. ⁵ By summer 1917, rations amounted to some 1,000 calories daily, about 40% of pre-war intake, but fluctuations in the harvest saw the calorific value of rations increase to 1,400 by summer 1918. ⁶ During the war over 11,000 substitute foodstuffs were approved and they were of dubious nutritional value. Princess Blücher noted in her diary that 'I don't believe that Germany will ever be starved out, but she will be poisoned out first with these substitutes'. ⁷

Food shortages were felt most acutely in urban areas, and affected the poor disproportionately as they were dependent on rations and could not afford to buy food on the black market. By 1918 an estimated one third of Germany's food supplies were being sold on the black market, and one of its biggest customers was heavy industry which bought in supplies to boost its workers' rations. Ethel Cooper, an Australian musician who spent the war in Leipzig, could afford to eat in restaurants and throughout the war received food and hospitality from an English friend married to a German wool merchant who got food from their estate in the countryside. Ethel noted that she could eat pheasant and pigeon, but had no sugar, flour or milk. ⁸

Food was more readily available in the countryside, and urban consumers came to believe that rural producers were profitting from their suffering. If the urban poor had relatives in the countryside they could obtain food from them, or they could 'hamster' - travel into the countryside and barter, buy or steal from rural producers, though they ran the risk of having the food confiscated by inspectors at railway stations on their return. On one day in June 1917 inspectors at a small West German town confiscated '36 pounds of butter, 421 eggs, 5 hundredweight of flour, nearly 30 pounds of peas, 42 pounds of veal and 12 pounds of ham'. ⁹ But the authorities were complicit - the railways put on extra trains to cater for the hamsterers, who were aggrieved that black marketeers and war profiteers could go about their business with impunity.

In 1916, with food prices having doubled since the start of the war, the government ordered all towns with over 10,000 inhabitants to expand their provision of soup kitchens, to ensure that people had access to one warm meal a day. By October 1916 some 357 towns had 1,438 kitchens, by February 1917 472 towns had 2,207 soup kitchens. 10 Use of the kitchens depended on the amount of foodstuffs available in the shops, and the spring of 1917, following the failure of the potato harvest in 1916 and the difficulties caused by the harsh winter in the transportation and storage of food, saw an increase in demand. In Hamburg, where the use of soup kitchens was high, some six million portions were served in April 1917 and over a year later some 20% of the population continued to eat a meal from a soup kitchen. ¹¹ From late 1916 customers had to exchange their weekly meat and potato ration cards in order to get a week's ticket for a soup kitchen meal, and they also paid a small sum.

Those who could tried producing food for themselves - on balconies, keeping goats, rabbits and hens. Towns, too, turned parks into fruit and vegetable plots to feed the people. In Stuttgart authorities bought 740 acres of land to keep pigs fed by recycled kitchen waste. Once sold the money was used to feed 7,500 schoolchildren. ¹² But the opportunities for the urban poor to produce food for themselves were limited, and so they were reduced to hamstering, and, as the war went on, looting or stealing. The numbers of women convicted of crimes against property doubled between 1913 and 1917, and there was a growth in youth crime, as they, too, stole.

From 1917 onwards a deterioration in the health of the nation was clearly visible, with increases in stomach and intestinal illnesses. The Germans estimated that some 763,000 people died during the war from malnutrition and its effects. Between 1913 and 1918 the death rate from tuberculosis in towns with more than 15,000 inhabitants rose 91.1%. The numbers dying of typhoid doubled between 1916 and 1917. ¹³ In Düsseldorf the number of reported cases of dysentry rose from 8 in 1914 to 351 in 1917. ¹⁴ By December 1918 over half the children in Chemnitz's schools suffered from anaemia, children across Germany were smaller and lighter, and 40% of them suffered from rickets. ¹⁵

The armistice in November 1918 did not bring much easing in the food crisis. It was to be July 1919 before the blockade was lifted and disturbances over food continued throughout 1919. Some price controls and rationing of various foodstuffs remained in place until 1922. In June 1921 a million children a day were fed in the 2,271 food kitchens run by the Quakers in 1,640 German communities. ¹⁶ The Nazis were to learn the lessons of the government's inadequacies in maintaining adequate food supplies on the home front during the First World War and tried to ensure that racially valuable Germans had sufficient to eat during the Second World War.
References
1 Quoted in Ute Daniel, 'Der Krieg der Frauen 1914-1918: Zur Innenansicht des Ersten Weltkriegs in Deutschland', in Gerhard Hirschfeld, Gerd Krumeich, Irina Renz (eds), 'Keiner fühlt sich hier mehr als Mensch...'. Erlebnis und Wirkung des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen: 1993), p. 131.
2 David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I. Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2000), p.128.
3 Toni Sender, The Autobiography of a German Rebel (London, 1940), p.81.

4 Quoted in Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning. Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000), p. 197.

5 Evelyn, Princess Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin (New York, 1920), p. 158.

6 Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I, p. 165; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge 3rd ed., 2014), p. 165.

7 Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin, p. 122.

8 Decie Denholm (ed.), Behind the Lines. One Woman's War 1914-1918 (London, 1982), p. 165, letter of 5 November 1916.

9 Ute Daniel, 'The Politics of Rationing versus the Politics of Subsistence: Working-Class Women in Germany, 1914-1918', in Roger Fletcher (ed.), Bernstein to Brandt. A Short History of German Social Democracy (London, 1987), p. 92.

10 Christoph Regulski, Klippfisch und Steckrüben. Die Lebensmittelversorgung der Einwohner Franfurt am Mains im Ersten Weltkrieg 1914-1918 (Frankfurt am Main, 2012), p. 179.

11 Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, p. 166; Keith Allen, 'Food and the German Home Front: Evidence from Berlin', in Gail Braybon (ed.), Evidence, History, and the Great War: Historians and the Impact of 1914-1918 (Oxford, 2003), p. 178.)

12 Keith Allen, 'Sharing Scarcity: Bread Rationing and the First World War in Berlin, 1914-1923', Journal of Social History, 32:2 (1998), pp.371-93, here p. 377.

13 Regulski, Klippfisch und Steckrüben, pp. 319-20.

14 Elizabeth Tobin, 'War and the Working Class: The Case of Düsseldorf 1914-1918', Central European History, 13:3/4 (1985), pp. 257-98, here p. 292.

15 Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, p. 144.

16 http://www.quakersintheworld.org/quakers-in-action/302, accessed 13 March 2015.
Useful Further Reading Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge 3rd ed., 2014) Ute Daniel, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women in the First World War, trans. Margaret Ries (Oxford, 1997)
Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning. Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill, 2000)
Gerald D. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in German 1914-1918 (Providence, 1992)
Elizabeth Tobin, 'War and the Working Class: The Case of Düsseldorf 1914-1918', Central European History, 13:3/4 (1985), pp. 257-98.
David Welch, Germany and Propaganda in World War I. Pacifism, Mobilization and Total War (London, 2000) Benjamin Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany, 1914-1923 (Oxford, 2007) Ida Zweiniger-Bargielowski, Rachel Duffett, Alain Drouard (eds), Food and War in Twentieth Century Europe (Farnham, 2011). Chapters by Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg and Peter Lummel

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Contributed by Dr Helen Boak In August 1916 a group of soldiers' wives wrote to the Hamburg Senate demanding its support for a peace settlement: 'we want to have our husbands and sons back from the war and we don't want to starve any more'.

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Japan takes and captures Tsingtao on October 31, 1914

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Japan takes and captures Tsingtao on October 31, 1914

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Germans have held this land since 1898 and eventually surrendered on November 6th

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Siege of Tsingtao

Part of the Asian and Pacific theatre of World War I

German forces during the siege, November 1914

Belligerents

Commanders and leaders

Strength

24,500

1 seaplane carrier

5 battleships

2 battlecruisers

1 protected cruiser

2 destroyers

2 airplanes

3,750

1 protected cruiser

1 unprotected cruiser

1 torpedo boat

4 gunboats

2 airplanes

Casualties and losses

727 killed

1,335 wounded

1 protected cruiser sunk

1 destroyer sunk

1 battleship damaged

1 airplane destroyed

199 killed

504 wounded

3,047 captured

1 protected cruiser scuttled

1 unprotected cruiser scuttled

1 torpedo boat scuttled

4 gunboats scuttled

98 Chinese civilians killed and 30 wounded by Japanese forces[3]

The siege of Tsingtao (German: Belagerung von Tsingtau; Japanese: 青島の戦い) was the attack on the German port of Qingdao (Tsingtao) during World War I by Japan and the United Kingdom. The siege was waged against Imperial Germany between 27 August and 7 November 1914. The siege was the first encounter between Japanese and German forces, the first Anglo-Japanese operation of the war, and the only major land battle in the Asian and Pacific theatre during World War I.

Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany joined other European powers in a scramble for colonial possessions. As with the other world powers (including the United States and Japan), Germany began to interfere in Chinese local affairs. After two German missionaries were killed in the Juye Incident in 1897, China was forced to agree to the Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory in Shandong to Germany in 1898 on a 99-year lease. Germany then began to assert its influence across the rest of the province and built the city and port of Qingdao, which became the base of the German East Asia Squadron of the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy), which operated in support of the German colonies in the Pacific. Britain viewed the German presence in China with suspicion and leased Weihaiwei, also in Shandong, as a naval port and coaling station. Russia leased its own station at Port Arthur (now Lüshunkou) and France at Kouang-Tchéou-Wan. Britain also began to forge close ties with Japan, and diplomatic relations became closer, with the Anglo-Japanese Alliance being signed on 30 January 1902. Japan saw the alliance as a necessary deterrent to its main rival, Russia. Japan demonstrated its potential by its victory in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War, and the alliance continued into World War I.

When the war in Europe began in August 1914, Britain promptly requested Japanese assistance. On 15 August, Japan issued an ultimatum, stating that Germany must withdraw her warships from Chinese and Japanese waters and transfer control of its port of Qingdao to Japan. The next day, Major-General Mitsuomi Kamio, General Officer Commanding (GOC), 18th Infantry Division, was ordered to prepare to take Qingdao by force. The ultimatum expired on 23 August, and Japan declared war on Germany. At the beginning of hostilities in Europe, the ships of the East Asia Squadron under Vice Admiral Maximilian von Spee were dispersed at various Pacific colonies on routine missions. Spee's ships rendezvoused in the Northern Mariana Islands for coaling. SMS Emden then headed for the Indian Ocean, while the rest of the squadron made their way to the west coast of South America. The squadron engaged and destroyed two cruisers of a Royal Navy squadron at the Battle of Coronel, before itself being destroyed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.

The Boxer Rebellion, at the beginning of the century, had led Germany to consider the defence of Qingdao. The port and the town were divided from the rest of the peninsula by steep hills. The main line of defence lay along three hills, Mount Moltke, Mount Bismarck, and Mount Iltis, from the Kaiserstuhl to Litsuner Heights. Guarding the left wing was Fort Moltke, on the hill of the same name, with two 9.4 in. (240 mm) guns. The heaviest firepower was concentrated in the four 11 in. (280 mm) howitzers of Fort Bismarck. On the right wing, Fort Iltis contained two 9.4 in. guns at the hill's summit. A second 17 km (11 mi) line of defence was set up along a closer line of steep hills. The final line of defence was along hills 200 m (660 ft) above the town. A network of trenches, batteries, and other fortifications had been built in preparation for the coming siege. Germany had strengthened the defences from the sea by laying mines in the approaches to the harbour and building four batteries and five redoubts. The fortifications were well equipped (though some with obsolete Chinese artillery) and were well manned.

Suwo was the flagship of the Japanese expeditionary fleet during the Siege of Tsingtao.

On 27 August the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) sent ships under Vice-Admiral Sadakichi Kato, flying his flag in the pre-dreadnought battleship Suwo, to blockade the coast of Jiaozhou. The British Royal Navy (RN) strengthened the Japanese fleet by sending the China Station's pre-dreadnought HMS Triumph and the destroyer HMS Usk. On October 14, the Triumph was slightly damaged by a German shore battery, killing one member of its crew and injuring two others. The blockading fleet consisted mainly of nearly obsolete warships, though it did at times include a few modern vessels. These included the dreadnoughts Kawachi, Settsu, the battlecruiser Kongō, her sister Hiei, and the seaplane carrier Wakamiya, whose airplanes became the first of its kind in the world to attack sea and land targets. These Japanese airplanes would also take part in another military first, a night-time bombing raid.

The 18th Infantry Division was the primary Japanese Army formation that took part in the initial landings, numbering some 23,000 soldiers with support from 142 artillery pieces. They began to land on 2 September at Lungkow, which was experiencing heavy floods at the time, and later at Lau Schan Bay on 18 September, about 29 km (18 mi) east of Qingdao. China protested against the Japanese violation of her neutrality but did not interfere in the operations.

The British Government and the other European great powers were concerned about Japanese intentions in the region and decided to send a small symbolic British contingent from Tientsin in an effort to allay their fears. The 1,500-man contingent was commanded by Brigadier-General Nathaniel Walter Barnardiston and consisted of 1,000 soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, The South Wales Borderers; later followed by 500 soldiers of the 36th Sikhs. Following a friendly fire incident, British troops were given Japanese raincoats to wear so they would be more easily identifiable to the Japanese. The grandfather of film director Peter Jackson, William John Jackson (1889-1940) was present at the siege.

The Germans responded to the threat against Qingdao by concentrating all of their available East Asian troops in the city. Kaiser Wilhelm II made the defence of Qingdao a top priority, saying that "... it would shame me more to surrender Tsingtao to the Japanese than Berlin to the Russians". The German garrison, commanded by naval Captain and Governor Alfred Meyer-Waldeck, consisted of the marines of III Seebataillon, naval personnel, Chinese colonial troops, and Austro-Hungarian sailors, for a total strength of 3,625 men. He also had a modest complement of vessels, including the torpedo boat S90; the decommissioned unprotected cruiser Cormoran; the auxiliary cruiser Cormoran, which was the former captured Russian steamer Ryazan manned with the crew of cruiser Cormoran; four small gunboats: the Iltis, Jaguar, Tiger, and Luchs; and the Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, whose crew was initially divided in two: half to man the ship, and half to fight with the German land forces.

On 22 August HMS Kennet of the China squadron, under the command of Lieutenant Commander F. A. Russell, while routinely monitoring the naval trade routes, encountered and was damaged in action by the German torpedo boat S90, the German gunboat SMS Lauting and a 4-inch shore battery off Qingdao. She was hit twice from the retreating S90.

The Japanese seaplane carrier Wakamiya conducted the world's first naval-launched air raids in September 1914 against German positions in Qingdao.

Japanese troops coming ashore near Qingdao

As the Japanese approached their positions, Meyer-Waldeck withdrew his forces from the two outer defensive lines and concentrated his troops on the innermost line of defence along the hills closest to the town. The Austro-Hungarian cruiser SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth was stationed in Qingdao at the start of the war. On 2 September 1914 the German gunboat Jaguar sank the stranded Japanese destroyer Shirotae. On 5 September a Japanese reconnaissance airplane scouted the port and reported that the Asian German fleet had departed, the Japanese ordered the dreadnought, pre-dreadnought, and cruiser to leave the blockade. The next day the second air-sea battle in history took place (the first air-sea battle in history was at the Balkan wars in 1913) when a Farman seaplane launched by the Wakamiya unsuccessfully attacked the Kaiserin Elisabeth and the Jaguar in Qiaozhou Bay with bombs. Early in the siege, the Kaiserin Elisabeth and German gunboat Jaguar made an unsuccessful sortie against Japanese vessels blockading Qingdao. Later, the cruiser's 15‑cm and 4.7‑cm guns were removed from the ship and mounted onshore, creating the Batterie Elisabeth. The ship's crew took part in the defence of Qingdao. On 13 September the Japanese land forces launched a cavalry raid on the German rear guard at Jimo, which the Germans gave up and retreated. Subsequently, the Japanese took control of Jiaozhou and the Shandong railway. Lt. Gen. Kamio considered this the point of no return for his land forces and as the weather became extremely harsh he took no risk and fortified the troops at the town, returned the reinforcements that were on the way, re-embarked and landed at Lau Schan Bay.

On 26 September, Kamio resumed his advance, and the Germans were forced to retreat beyond the river Litsun. The Japanese made good time, crossing the river Paisha early in the day, swiftly crossing the seven-mile lowland plain and reaching the northern bank of the Litsun.

On 27 September, Kamio tried to take Prince Heinrich Hill by a frontal assault and was caught in a murderous crossfire. From the summit, the Germans rained down bullets from four Maxim guns. Out in the harbour, Kaiserin Elisabeth and Leopard shelled the exposed slopes, nearly routing the Japanese right flank. The Japanese assault was saved by the allied fleet. As the siege progressed, the naval vessels trapped in the harbour, Cormoran, Iltis and Luchs, were scuttled on 28 September. On 17 October, the torpedo boat S90 slipped out of Qingdao harbour and fired a torpedo which sank the Japanese cruiser Takachiho with the loss of 271 officers and men. S90 was unable to run the blockade back to Qingdao and was scuttled in Chinese waters when the ship ran low on fuel. Tiger was scuttled on 29 October, Kaiserin Elisabeth on 2 November, followed finally by Jaguar on 7 November, the day the fortress surrendered to the Japanese forces.

The Japanese started shelling the fort and the city on 31 October and began digging parallel lines of trenches, just as they had done at the siege of Port Arthur nine years earlier. Very large 11‑inch howitzers from land, in addition to the firing of the Japanese naval guns, brought the German defences under constant bombardment during the night, the Japanese moving their own trenches further forward under the cover of their artillery. The bombardment continued for seven days, employing around 100 siege guns with 1,200 shells each on the Japanese side. While the Germans were able to use the heavy guns of the port fortifications to bombard the landward positions of the Allies, they soon ran out of ammunition. When the artillery ran out of ammunition on 6 November, surrender was inevitable.

The German garrison was able to field only a single Etrich Taube airplane during the siege flown by Lieutenant Gunther Plüschow. (A second Etrich Taube piloted by Lt. Friedrich Müllerskowsky crashed early in the campaign.) That airplane was used for frequent reconnaissance flights and Plüschow made several nuisance attacks on the blockading squadron dropping improvised munitions and other ordnance on them. Plüschow claimed the downing of a Japanese Farman MF.VII with his pistol, the first aerial victory in aviation history. Plüschow flew from Qingdao on 6 November 1914 carrying the governor's last dispatches, which were forwarded to Berlin through neutral diplomatic channels.

On the night of 6 November, waves of Japanese infantry attacked the third line of defence and overwhelmed the defenders. The next morning, the German forces, along with their Austro-Hungarian allies, asked for terms. The Allies took formal possession of the colony on 16 November 1914.

British troops arriving at Qingdao in 1914

British, Indian and Japanese soldiers in Qingdao, 1914.

Soldiers of the 18th division, Imperial Japanese Army occupy an abandoned German trench during the Siege of Tsingtao, 1914

German front line at Qingdao 1914; the head cover identifies these men as members of III Seebataillon (III Sea Battalion) of Marines.

German gun in the Bismarck Fortress, Qingdao, crumpled by Japanese naval bombardment.

German PoWs returning to Wilhelmshaven, Germany from Japan in February 1920

As the German garrison was able to hold out for nearly two months despite the naval blockade with sustained artillery bombardment and being outnumbered 6 to 1, the defeat nevertheless temporarily served as a morale booster. The German defenders watched the Japanese with curiosity as they marched into Qingdao but turned their backs on the British when they entered into town. So deep was their anger that some German officers spat in the faces of their British counterparts.

Japanese casualties numbered 733 killed and 1,282 wounded; the British had 12 killed and 53 wounded. The German defenders lost 199 dead and 504 wounded. The German dead were buried at Qingdao, while the remaining soldiers were transported to prisoner of war camps in Japan. During the march to Qingdao and the subsequent siege, Japanese forces killed 98 Chinese civilians and wounded 30; there were also countless incidents of rape against Chinese women committed by Japanese soldiers. The 4,700 German prisoners were treated well and with respect in Japan, such as in Bandō prisoner-of-war camp. The German troops were interned in Japan until the formal signature of the Versailles peace treaty in 1919, but due to technical questions, the troops were not repatriated before 1920. 170 prisoners chose to remain in Japan after the end of the war.

1. Tang, Chi-hua: ^ War Losses and Reparations (China), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War

2. ^ 刘平; 江林泽 (2014). "第一次世界大战中的远东战场---青岛之战述评" [The Far Eastern Theatre in the First World War - A Review of the Battle of Tsingtao]. 军事历史研究 (in Chinese) (4): 52. ISSN 1009-3451.

3. ^ Rees, Thomas (Oral history) (1964). Interview with [10285 Private] Thomas Rees, talking of his experiences at Tsingtao and landing at Gallipoli (Audio recording). London: BBC TV and Imperial War Museum.

4. ^ Wade, Martin (24 September 1915). "Long view: The Gwent soldiers who fought alongside the Japanese". South Wales Argus. There were problems too of "friendly fire" at least from the Japanese... After this tragedy, the soldiers started to wear a piece of white cloth on their helmets as a means of identification. A better solution came when British soldiers were issued with a Japanese style smock which they wore over their uniform. This at least stopped Japanese sentries firing long enough for them to identify the British as friendly.

5. ^ Joseph Trainor (1976). War Monthly - Issue 37: Tsingtao 1914, p. 11. ISSN 0307-2886.

6. ^ Adelaide Advertiser, Page 8, "The War" section, subparagraph "The China Fight - Australian who was wounded." summary of interview with Captain M. J. G. Colyer, December 28, 1914

7. Tang, Chi-hua: ^ War Losses and Reparations (China), in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War

Denis, Colin (2000). "Tsingtao campaign". Archived from the original on 3 May 2003.

Haupt, Werner (1984). Deutschlands Schutzgebiete in Übersee 1884-1918 [Germany's overseas protectorates 1884-1918]. Friedberg: Podzun-Pallas Verlag. ISBN 978-3790902044.

Radó, Antal, ed. (1919). "Csingtao eleste" [The fall of Tsingtao]. A világháború naplója [Diary of the World War] (in Hungarian). Vol. IV. Budapest, Hungary: Lampel R. könyvkiadó.

Saxon, Timothy D. (2000). "Anglo-Japanese Naval cooperation, 1914-1918". Naval War College Review. 53 (1): 62-93.

Schultz-Naumann, Joachim (1985). Unter Kaisers Flagge, Deutschlands Schutzgebiete im Pazifik und in China einst und heute [Under the Kaiser's Flag, Germany's protectorates in the Pacific and in China then and today]. Munich: Universitas. ISBN 978-3800410941.

Veperdi, András. "The protected cruiser SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth in defence of Tsingtao in 1914". mateinfo.hu. Budapest, Hungary: Hungarian seamen's association.

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Siege of Tsingtao Part of the Asian and Pacific theatre of World War I German forces during the siege, November 1914 Belligerents Commanders and leaders Strength 24,500 1 seaplane carrier 5 battleships 2 battlecruisers 1 protected cruiser 2 destroyers 2 airplanes 3,750 1 protected cruiser 1 unprotected cruiser 1 torpedo

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The air raid brought little military value but was intended to scare the civilians

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Second Schweinfurt raid
(Eighth Air Force Mission 115)

Part of Operation Pointblank

A B-17 returning to England above Schweinfurt in flames

Belligerents

Eighth Air Force

Luftwaffe

Units involved

1st Air Division: 91st, 92nd, 303rd, 305th, 306th, 351st, 379th, 381st and 384th BGs
3rd Air Division: 94th, 95th, 96th, 100th, 385th, 388th and 390th BGs.

JGs 1, 3, 11, 25, 26, 27, 54

Strength

291 B-17 Flying Fortresses

60 B-24 Liberators[Note 1] (diverted)

Casualties and losses

3 P-47 fighters [6]
77 B-17s lost[Note 2]
121 damaged

35-38 Messerschmitt Bf 109s & Focke-Wulf Fw 190 lost
20 damaged

The second Schweinfurt raid, also called Black Thursday, was a World War II air battle that took place on 14 October 1943, over Nazi Germany between forces of the United States 8th Air Force and German fighter arm ( Jagdwaffe). The American bombers conducted a strategic bombing raid on ball bearing factories to reduce production of these vital parts for all manner of war machines. This was the second attack on the factories at Schweinfurt. American wartime intelligence claimed the first Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission in August had reduced bearing production by 34 percent but had cost many bombers. A planned follow-up raid had to be postponed to rebuild American forces.

As the squadrons rebuilt, plans for the return mission were modified based on the lessons learned. Planners added additional fighter escorts to cover the outward and return legs of the operation and sent the entire force against Schweinfurt alone, instead of splitting the force. Despite these changes, a series of minor mishaps combined with the ever-increasing efficiency of the German anti-aircraft effort proved to be devastating. Of the 291 B-17 Flying Fortresses sent on the mission, 60 were lost, another 17 damaged so heavily that they had to be scrapped and another 121 had varying degrees of battle damage. Losses represented over 26 percent of the attacking force and losses in aircrew were equally severe, with 650 men lost of 2,900, 22 percent of the bomber crews. The American Official History of the Army Air Forces in the Second World War acknowledged losses had been so great that the USAAF would not return to the target for four months, "The fact was that the Eighth Air Force had for the time being lost air superiority over Germany".

The operation was a failure. The bomber formations were left exposed to attacks by German fighters and the faulty preparations for the creation of reserves in the summer of 1943 meant that such costly operations could not be sustained. An escort of 24 squadrons of Spitfires equipped with drop tanks was provided on the first and last leg of the mission.

The strategy of the Allied air forces was flawed. Arthur Harris, Air Officer Commanding RAF Bomber Command questioned the intelligence that claimed ball bearings to be vital to the German war economy. Harris refused to cooperate with the Americans, believing ball bearing targets to be a "panacea". Post-war analysis has shown Harris's objections to be correct. The Germans had built up enormous reserves of ball bearings and were receiving supplies from all over Europe, particularly Italy, Sweden and Switzerland. The operation against these industries would, even if successful, have achieved little. By 1945, the Germans had assembled more reserves than ever.

USAAF map of the flight to Schweinfurt

Factories in and around Schweinfurt accounted for a significant amount of German ball bearing production. The Kugelfischer plant produced 22 percent, the Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken I and II produced 20 percent, and another one percent came from the Fichtel & Sachs factory. After the supposed German ball bearing "bottleneck" had been identified in 1942 and ball bearings had been named the second-most-vital Pointblank industry for the Combined Bomber Offensive in March 1943, Schweinfurt's ball bearing plants were selected for a second air raid after being bombed during the August Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission.

Each of the three bomber wings was to be escorted by fighters from a single group with multiple squadrons of P-47 Thunderbolts. The fighters were inexplicably not employing drop tanks which limited their escort range. One fighter outfit was sidetracked to escort a squadron of 29 B-24s that switched to a diversion mission to Emden because of the bad weather forecast. Some 229 of 291 B-17s hit the city area and ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt in two groups: the first group bombed at 1439-1445 hours, the second group at 1451-1457 hours. They claimed 186 Luftwaffe aircraft - more than four times the Germans' actual losses of 35-38 aircraft. Sixty B-17s were lost, two damaged beyond repair and 13 damaged; casualties amounted to five KIA, 40 WIA and 594 MIA.

USAAF map of the withdrawal from Schweinfurt

The bomber formations were spread out and vulnerable because of bad weather. The Luftwaffe military intelligence officers had suspected a deep penetration air raid because of the substantial amount of bombers. Jagdgeschwader 3 Udet fighter wing intercepted the bombers as they crossed the coast but P-47s succeeded in shooting down seven Bf 109s while losing just one P-47. However one P-47 was also lost when it crashed at Herongate and another during a one-wheel landing on base. Over the Netherlands elements of two more "named" Luftwaffe fighter wings, JG 1 Oesau and JG 26 Schlageter made repeated attacks. The 305th Bomb Group lost 13 of its 16 B-17s in minutes. The B-17s were attacked after bombing by fighters that had refueled and rearmed ( JG 11 downed 18 B-17s).

A total of 13 bombers were shot down by German fighters and flak and 12 bombers were damaged so badly that they crashed upon return or had to be scrapped. Another 121 bombers returned with moderate damage. Of 2,900 crewmen, about 254 men did not return (65 survived as prisoners-of-war), while five killed-in-action and 43 wounded were in the damaged aircraft that returned (594 were listed as missing-in-action). Among the most seriously affected American units was the 306th Bomb Group. It lost 100 men: 35 died on the mission or of wounds and 65 were captured. The 305th Bomb Group lost 130 men (87%), with 36 killed.

The defensive efforts of both JG 1 and JG 11 during the "Black Thursday" raid are said to have included substantial use of the BR 21 unguided stand-off rockets against the USAAF combat boxes, as both Luftwaffe fighter wings had started use of the ordnance some six months earlier.

Destruction at Schweinfurt after 14 October 1943 raid

Although the Schweinfurt factories were badly hit, the mission failed to achieve any lasting effect. The production of ball bearings in the factories was halted for only 6 weeks and Germany's war industry could easily rely on its substantial inventory of ball bearings as well as a large production surplus. In addition, the ball bearing facilities were dispersed to reduce their bombing risk. Consequently, despite General Henry H. Arnold's claim that the Black Thursday " loss of 60 [downed/ditched] American bombers in the Schweinfurt raid was incidental", unescorted daylight bomber raids deep into Germany were suspended until the February 1944 Big Week missions with P-51B Mustang escorts that included additional Schweinfurt day/night USAAF/RAF bombing on the 24th.

Another example of the strategy of using heavy bombers against a particular wartime resource, the Oil Campaign of World War II was essentially started by the RAF Bomber Command as early as August 1941 - two months after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, and six months before the United States entered the war. It went forward relentlessly from that time with the USAAF joining in on the efforts by late June 1943 during daylight. The Oil Campaign had its priority diminished from time to time with important events, such as the lead-up to Operation Overlord, which by June 1944 demanded heavy bomber support for a time, but soon thereafter the relentless attacks by day and night resumed, starving the entire German Wehrmacht military of fuel and lubricants from the autumn of 1944 onwards.

Bibliography

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McFarland, Stephen L; Newton, Wesley P (1998). Hall, Cargill (ed.). Case Studies in Strategic Bombardment. Air Force History and Museums Program. ISBN 978-0-16-049781-0. OCLC 1050667372.

Craven, Wesley; Cate, James Lea (1983) [1949]. The Army Air Forces in World War II: Europe, Torch to Pointblank, August 1942 to December 1943. Vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago. OCLC 580439316.

Hess, William N. (1994). B-17 Flying Fortress: Combat and Development History of the Flying Fortress. St. Paul, Minnesota: Motorbook International. ISBN 0-87938-881-1.

Hughes, Robert L. (2014). "Black Thursday". 100th Bomb Group Foundation.

McKillop, Jack. "Combat Chronology of the USAAF: October 1943". The United States Army Air Forces in World War II. USAAF.net. Archived from the original on 31 May 2012.

Murray, Williamson; Millett, Allan Reed (2000). A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00680-5.

Tedder, Arthur W. (1966). With Prejudice: The War Memoirs of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Lord Tedder. Cassell. ASIN B007T56EHW.

Webster, C. K.; Frankland, Noble (1961). The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945, Part 4: Endeavour. Vol. II. London: HMSO. OCLC 1068104819.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Second Schweinfurt raid(Eighth Air Force Mission 115) Part of Operation Pointblank A B-17 returning to England above Schweinfurt in flames Belligerents Eighth Air Force Luftwaffe Units involved 1st Air Division: 91st, 92nd, 303rd, 305th, 306th, 351st, 379th, 381st and 384th BGs3rd Air Division: 94th, 95th, 96th, 100th, 385th, 388th and 390th BGs.