MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · May 7 · 1915
ON THIS DAY · 7 MAY 1915
The Lusitania
7 May 1915 — U-20 torpedoes the liner off the Irish coast: 1,198 civilians drown, 128 of them American. The dead of the submarine war deserve their own memory — and the outrage begins the countdown on American neutrality.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
Switch to the world map, because this war’s longest front is salt water. From day one Britain does the quiet, decisive thing: it locks the exits. The Northern Patrol closes the top of the North Sea, the Channel is closed at Dover, and the German merchant flag vanishes from every ocean by Christmas 1914. No drama, few battles — just an empire of 20 million tons of shipping slowly starving an enemy of fertilizer nitrogen, fats, and food. By the “turnip winter” of 1916–17 German civilian rations are collapsing; by 1918, civilian excess deaths attributed to the blockade run in the hundreds of thousands (the postwar German figure of 763,000 is contested; the hunger was not). The blockade is the war’s slowest weapon and among its most decisive — and it is aimed, deliberately, at civilians. Hold that thought for every argument about the U-boats.
From Chapter 6 — The Slowest Weapon of The Great War, 1914–1918 (JAN 1917).
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TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — Why Germany built a fleet it couldn’t use. Tirpitz’s “risk fleet” was meant to be dangerous enough that Britain would concede colonies and neutrality rather than fight. It achieved the…
- The turn — Convoy adopted, May 1917. Within six months of the first escorted convoys, shipping losses fall by two-thirds while U-boat sinkings double: the same ocean, the same boats, a…
- What it changed — America in. Unrestricted sinking plus the Zimmermann telegram (Berlin inviting Mexico to attack the United States — intercepted by British codebreakers and…
Then ask the room: Both blockades starved civilians to force a government’s hand. Is there a defensible moral line between the British blockade and the U-boat campaign? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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