"The Lucy"

Oceangoing David Kaplan was our speaker today and he spoke about The Lusitania.The Cunard Line launched Lusitania in 1906, at a time of fierce competition for the North Atlantic trade. She made a total of 202 trans-Atlantic crossings. On the afternoon of 7 May, 1915 a German U-boat torpedoed Lusitania, 11 mi (18 km) off the southern coast of Ireland and inside the declared war zone. A second, unexplained, internal explosion sent her to the seabed in 18 minutes, with the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew. The sinking caused a storm of protest in the United States because 128 American citizens were among the dead. The sinking helped shift public opinion in the United States against Germany, and was a factor in the United States' declaration of war nearly two years later.