The Lusitania Disaster: An Episode in Modern Warfare and Diplomacy

On May 7, 1915, the German U-boat 20 torpedoed and sank the "unarmed" passenger liner Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale on the southwest coast of Ireland, killing some twelve hundred men, women, and children, many of them Americans. The world raged at the barbarity of the Kaiser and the German people, and the act did much to precipitate the later entrance of the United States into WWI. But the real truth of the disaster has never been revealed.