Ah, but that's a song and a half, Wolfgang.

Fiolar, where do you unearth these anniversaries you bring to our attention? You're a month out in your first post, by the way, but obviously you meant to say May.

I don't think there's much doubt that the ship was carrying munitions, but it seems not to have been carrying actual explosives in the conventional sense. For instance the cargo included 5,000 shrapnel, or air-burst, shells, but these were projectiles only, rather than full rounds - ie they were without their brass cases, explosives, and timer fuses. Similarly the ship was carrying detonator fuses, but again these were on their way to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich to have explosives added.

The famous secondary explosion, that brought such a fast sinking, is now believed to have been caused by about 40 tonnes of aluminium powder. The USA was the leading supplier of this commodity, which was a critical ingredient in many nitrate-based explosives. When heated and brought in contact with water, it releases vast amounts of hydrogen, aand is easily detonated when airborne. Whatever caused the second big bang, a side effect was that it released another cargo - thousands of fur pelts, that floated to the surface, where Cork fishermen eagerly gathered them and sold them to a local furrier company (Rohu?).

Britain (by which I mean UK, which then, in international law at any rate, included the whole of Ireland) had by then compromised the safety of civilians at sea in all kinds of ways. In particular by its illegal suspension of an international code known as Freedom of the Seas, which had applied since the 1850s. Britain unilaterally declared the whole of the north sea as a war zone in November 1914, as part of implementing the "hunger blockade" of Germany which ultimately decided why one side won and the other lost in WW1. Germany retaliated in Feb 1915 by declaring all shipping in British waters fair game, and warning that no ship could be guaranteed exemption.

By this time the UK (specifically Churchill) was well into fitting merchant and passenger ships with armour plating and heavy guns. Huge grants had been awarded for construction of ships, including the Lusitania and Mauritania, on condition that they had built-in capability to take 12 six-inch guns, could accommodate ammo magazines, and could still maintain 25 knots. Converted ships, with their armaments disguised behind lifeboats etc, were known as Q ships after Queenstown (Cobh) in Co Cork, were the conversion work was done in secrecy. In fact the Lusitania was never converted, after farcial catastrophes with some earlier Q ships, and because fuel consumption would have been astronomical.

As well as the risk of being fired at by concealed guns, U boats were also at risk of being rammed if they surfaced, and this had happened several times by May 1915, with the rammers usually being apparently innocent merchant/passenger ships. Thus the U-boat commanders had got into the habit of firing off their torpedoes first and asking questions later. Reasonable enough, in the circumstances.

President Wilson and the US port authorities seem to have aided and abetted, or at least turned a blind eye to, the practice of transporting munitions alongside unsuspecting civilian passengers. Churchill was later accused of letting the Lusitania sink, knowing that the loss of American lives (140?) would harden American opinion against Germany. It now seems more likely that the failure to warn the ship about a knwon U-boat threat, was to avoid compromising UK code-breaking, which was then done by a team known as Room 40, an early precursor of Bletchley Park. The 1198 would have seemed a mere bagatelle, given that more than 20,000 were lost in a single day at the Somme around the same time. Most likely of all is that there was no conspiracy, just a cock-up, because various warnings were issued to shipping in the vicinity of various ports, in varying degrees of detail. No-one seems to have really pinned down why detailed warnings did not go out from Queenstown, if not from British intellligence then at least from knowlede on the ground (the U-boat that sank the Lusitainia had sank a smaller ship in the same area a couple of days earlier).