He looks at the milieu in which American president Woodrow Wilson existed, politically and personally. In parallel, he looks at the politics involved in, not so much the causes of World War I, but in the stages between the commencement of hostilities and the eventual drawing of the USA into the war. Mostly he follows the events on the Lusitania and on the German sub (U-20 – U-boat is an abbreviation of Unterseeboot, or undersea boat) that would bring it down. Larson looks at events in several threads. Turns out the reality was far different.Īrtist rendering of the sinking – from
We might believe that, as with the sinking of the USS Maine in Cuba, the national response was immediate and violent.
I expect for most of us, the details of the sinking of the Lusitania are clouded by the fog of time. We all have preconceptions, notions that hardly seem worth examining. How did the sinking of the Lusitania affect American entry into The Great War? Why was the ship sunk? Had it been possible for the ship to have avoided its fate? What were the global circumstances at the time and how did those effect the disaster? Who and what was on the ship? Why? What was the big deal about the Lusitania? Other ships had been sunk by U-boats during this conflict. Erik Larson casts his perceptive eyes on the event, looking for explanations. On May 7, 1914, only a few years after that most famous of ocean-liners had had an unfortunate encounter with an iceberg on its maiden voyage, RMS Lusitania, popularly referred to as “Lucy,” having already crossed the Atlantic dozens of times, this time carrying 1,962 souls, was sunk by a German U-boat off the Irish coast.
In maritime vernacular, the trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a “dead wake.” The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar.
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