The Lusitania.
Sister ship of you know who.
There wasn’t enough time to separate the rich and poor.
Sibling of Daedalus writes:
Contemporary news photos [above] showing survivors of the Lusitania, torpedoed off the Old Head of Kinsale on the afternoon of May 7th, 1915.
The liner took between 15-18 minutes to sink, and though there were lots of lifeboats, enough for everyone, the crew wasn’t trained in lowering them and there was no policy of ‘women and children first’.
1198 passengers and crew, among them 94 children and 31 babies, drowned in the disaster.
Those who survived were brought to hotels in Cobh, where some of them caught pneumonia, adding further to the casualties.
The German captain who fired the torpedo, Walter Schweiger, was killed in action a year and a half after the disaster.
The sinking, much used by the British and Americans for propaganda purposes (ghoulish example below), contributed to the subsequent American decision to enter the war.
Pics National Library of Congress
