After seven leisurely days of sailing, it took only 18 minutes of panic and mayhem to send the ship down. Each takes us along on the ship’s fateful last voyage, providing such a wealth of testament and episodic detail that we seem to share in the experience, and each provides a gripping account of the astonishingly rapid sinking that followed the torpedo strike. The two books-Erik Larson’s “Dead Wake” and Greg King and Penny Wilson’s “Lusitania”-complement each other nicely. But as the authors of two highly informed, compellingly written studies of Lusitania show us, there was a great deal more to the story than its heart-wrenching tragedy. In the United Kingdom, the death of hundreds of British passengers-not to mention the sinking of one of Britain’s most luxurious vessels-shocked even a nation hardened by the daily carnage of the battlefield. For Americans eager to join the war against Germany, the loss of 128 out of 139 of their fellow citizens onboard-amid a shocking overall death toll of 1,198-was a strong argument for their cause. On both sides of the Atlantic, the cry “Remember the Lusitania” rang out after the British passenger liner was torpedoed off the southeast coast of Ireland on a voyage from New York to Liverpool in May 1915. Norman Wilkinson’s painting of the sinking of Lusitania by a German U-boat first appeared in the Illustrated London News a week later.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |