Sos Lusitania

One of the most dramatic seafaring tragedies ever ... Thirteen-year-old Finbar Kennedy runs away from home in Queenstown (Cobh) to follow his sea-captain father onto the Lusitania. On the return journey from New York, Finbar works as a deck-hand, and running messages gives him a lot of information. He begins to understand that something strange is happening. But what can he do? And whom can he trust? Fact is stranger than fiction: In May 1915 the huge liner, the Lusitania, sank off the Cork coast near the Old Head of Kinsale. This happened during the First World War. But, unlike the Titanic tragedy, this was no accident. The ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Rumour had it that there were spies, arms and gold on board the Lusitania. These rumours were true.

On May 7, 1915, toward the end of her 101st eastbound crossing, from New York to Liverpool, England, R.M.S. Lusitania-pride of the Cunard Line and one of the greatest ocean liners afloat-became the target of a terrifying new weapon and a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. Sunk off the southern coast of Ireland by a torpedo fired from the German submarine U-20, she exploded and sank in eighteen minutes, taking with her some twelve hundred people, more than half of the passengers and crew. Cold-blooded, deliberate, and unprecedented in the annals of war, the sinking of the Lusitania shocked the world. It also jolted the United States out of its neutrality and hastened the nation's entry into World War I. In her riveting account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the Lusitania is a window on the maritime world of the early twentieth century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage-a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival.

This novel concerns the passenger ship that was sunk by the Germans in 1915.

The sinking of the Lusitania is one of the most famous naval disasters in history.

The Lusitania Story is the complete story of this most famous ocean liner, told for the first time in a single volume. The Lusitania is today most remembered for controversy surrounding her loss by a German submarine attack in 1915, during the First World War. But this book also tells of her life before that cataclysmic event. It tells of the ground-breaking advances in maritime engineering that she represented, as well as a hitherto unheard of degree of opulence. This book also takes a close look at the disaster which befell her and, with the help of leading experts, the authors examine the circumstances of her loss and try to determine why this magnificent vessel was lost in a mere eighteen minutes.

Uncertain of their son's fate, his family leaped into action. The sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania was a maritime disaster that may have changed the course of history by making American involvement in World War I almost inevitable. This part of the story has been told before but here, for the first time, The Lusitania Sinking has a far more personal tale to tell, of a family looking for information on their son's death. On 1 May 1915 Preston Prichard, a 29-year-old student, embarked as a second-class passenger on the Lusitania, bound from New York for Liverpool. Just after 2 p.m. on 7 May, a single torpedo, fired by the German submarine U-20, caused a massive explosion in the Lusitania's hold, and the ship began sinking rapidly. Within 20 minutes she disappeared and 1,198 men, women and children, including Preston, died. Preston's mother wrote hundreds of letters to survivors to find out more about what might have happened in his last moments. The replies she received included an extensive selection of moving and evocative survivors' accounts. Although this was not Mrs Prichard's intention, she thus assembled an outstanding collection of vivid first-hand recollections. The Lusitania Sinking tells the story of this tragedy using this previously unseen historical treasure trove.

The terrifying story of the British ocean liner torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915.

An account of one of the greatest maritime disasters in history—the Lusitania’s proud service, its sinking by a German U-Boat, and the tragic aftermath. When the RMS Lusitania entered service in 1907, she was the pride of the Cunard fleet. The first transatlantic express liner powered by marine turbines, she had a top speed of twenty-five knots and could make the Liverpool-New York crossing in five days, restoring British supremacy along the key North Atlantic route. All this ended during World War I, on 7 May 1915, when she was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank eighteen minutes later, taking with her the lives of the 1,198 passengers and crew. In this well-researched book, the author concentrates not just on the disaster but its consequences, including the political recriminations and the governmental inquiry. The loss of American citizens was a major reason why the United States entered the War. Fully-illustrated with rare historical photographs, this is a fascinating study of a major shipping catastrophe with profound repercussions that would have an effect not just on maritime law, but on the future of the world.

Diana Preston curates a spectacular and harrowing collection of voices from the Lusitania tragedy. Eyewitness accounts capture the ship's sinking in real-life detail as more than half the ship's crew and passengers were drowned when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship on its 101st crossing of the Atlantic on May 7th, 1915.

On the 100th Anniversary of its sinking, King and Wilson tell the story of the Lusitania's glamorous passengers and the torpedo that ended an era and prompted the US entry into World War I. Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, carrying millionaires and aristocrats, actresses and impresarios, writers and suffragettes – a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the Twentieth Century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old; yet an encounter with the machinery of the New World, in the form of a primitive German U-Boat, sent her – and her gilded passengers – to their tragic deaths and opened up a new era of indiscriminate warfare. A hundred years after her sinking, Lusitania remains an evocative ship of mystery. Was she carrying munitions that exploded? Did Winston Churchill engineer a conspiracy that doomed the liner? Lost amid these tangled skeins is the romantic, vibrant, and finally heartrending tale of the passengers who sailed aboard her. Lives, relationships, and marriages ended in the icy waters off the Irish Sea; those who survived were left haunted and plagued with guilt. Authors Greg King and Penny Wilson resurrect this lost, glittering world to show the golden age of travel and illuminate the most prominent of Lusitania's passengers. Rarely was an era so glamorous; rarely was a ship so magnificent; and rarely was the human element of tragedy so quickly lost to diplomatic maneuvers and militaristic threats.