Post by KG on Jul 14, 2012 17:42:12 GMT
Was the Lusitania Britain's war crime?
Within seconds of the initial shock, the great passenger liner listed and began to sink, her four funnels belching smoke.
Women and children shrieked in panic, and lifeboats half-full of people swung drunkenly from their davits, some crashing on to the deck, crushing other passengers.
A familiar picture – yet this is not the Titanic going down, but her lookalike, rival trans-Atlantic liner, Cunard’s RMS Lusitania, which sank off the Irish coast with the loss of 1,198 lives on 7 May 1915, three years after the Titanic went down.
LINK: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2172654/Was-Lusitania-war-crime-1-198-passengers-died-liner-sank-1915--German-torpedo-really-blame.html#ixzz20cCAWzS8
‘There are only three possibilities,’ says Bemis. ‘Either the torpedo ruptured one or more of the ship’s 25 boilers, causing an explosion; or it set off a coal dust explosion in the coal bunkers; or it triggered a gun-cotton or aluminium-powder explosion – which would mean the Lusitania was carrying dangerous high-explosives, unknown to the passengers who died. And that would have been a war crime on a par with the action of the U-boat that fired the fatal torpedo.’
So what did the scientists at the laboratory decide? You’ll have to watch the documentary to find out.
Dark Secrets Of The Lusitania, tomorrow, 7pm, National Geographic.
K.
Within seconds of the initial shock, the great passenger liner listed and began to sink, her four funnels belching smoke.
Women and children shrieked in panic, and lifeboats half-full of people swung drunkenly from their davits, some crashing on to the deck, crushing other passengers.
A familiar picture – yet this is not the Titanic going down, but her lookalike, rival trans-Atlantic liner, Cunard’s RMS Lusitania, which sank off the Irish coast with the loss of 1,198 lives on 7 May 1915, three years after the Titanic went down.
LINK: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2172654/Was-Lusitania-war-crime-1-198-passengers-died-liner-sank-1915--German-torpedo-really-blame.html#ixzz20cCAWzS8
‘There are only three possibilities,’ says Bemis. ‘Either the torpedo ruptured one or more of the ship’s 25 boilers, causing an explosion; or it set off a coal dust explosion in the coal bunkers; or it triggered a gun-cotton or aluminium-powder explosion – which would mean the Lusitania was carrying dangerous high-explosives, unknown to the passengers who died. And that would have been a war crime on a par with the action of the U-boat that fired the fatal torpedo.’
So what did the scientists at the laboratory decide? You’ll have to watch the documentary to find out.
Dark Secrets Of The Lusitania, tomorrow, 7pm, National Geographic.
K.