Over the past 120 years, there have been quite a few instances in which attacks on American soil or against Americans abroad have led the United States to engage in war. The explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in the harbor of Havana, for example, led the country to declare war on Spain (and end up annexing Cuba and the Philippines as territories). Later, of course, it was found that the explosion that destroyed that ship came from within, not from external saboteurs. The attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center led to American involvement in World War II and the campaign against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban – and both of those attacks were verified to have come from enemy forces. The bombing of the R.M.S. Lusitania, which angered even the peace-minded President Woodrow Wilson enough to consider joining the fray against Kaiser Wilhelm and the German forces in what was then called the Great War. A German U-boat sank the British-flagged ship off the coast of Ireland. The German government had warned the world that it would sink ships with the flags of nations against whom it was fighting; nevertheless, 123 Americans chose to cross the Atlantic on the Lusitania, and it was their deaths that began revving up American enthusiasm for sending the “doughboys” to help the nations of Western Europe fight back against the German threat.
In the decades since, there has been considerable scrutiny into various aspects of the sinking of this ship. Of particular interest is the fact that the Royal Navy has conducted its own bombing exercises around the wreck, which has caused some to think that the government is trying to destroy evidence that would help explain the circumstances of the bombing. There are some who think that the Lusitania was carrying contraband cargo that attracted the interest of the German navy. The fact that there were two explosions reported when the ship sank has added to this line of thinking, since only one torpedo was fired. Other questions have to do with the rapidity with which the ship sank; the unlikelihood of one torpedo sinking a liner of that side; the possible arming of the Lusitania. In the years since, exploratory expeditions have found that one cause for the second explosion could have been the ignition of coal dust (coal powered the engines) when the torpedo hit. Also, a look at the ship’s manifest reveals that the ship was indeed carrying over 4,000 cases of rifle ammunition, over 1,000 cases of shrapnel, and boxes of percussion fuses as well. Those were definitely part of the materiel of war.
In addition to the controversy of the sinking of the ship itself, of course, is the propaganda that it served to fuel. Even though the American people were not prepared to go to war in 1915 (it would take two more years to draw the American side into the conflict), the sinking of the ship was just one of many events that led to the mistreatment of German immigrants in the United States. Unfairly connecting these immigrants with the behavior of the Kaiser, many Americans would discriminate against Germans at home, and there were more than a few laws passed during that time period to harass Germans that would not have passed constitutional muster in our own time. The scope of this paper will be to analyze the bombing, the initial reactions, and the scientific study into the causes, concluding with the ways in which it served the needs of the propagandists.
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