By Diana Preston (Guest Contributor)
At 2.10 pm on 7 May 1915 off the southern Irish coast the German submarine U-20 fired a single torpedo at the British Cunard liner RMS ‘Lusitania’. Eighteen minutes later the 30,000 ton vessel slid beneath the waves with as one survivor recalled ‘a long, lingering moan’. Among the 1198 killed were 128 citizens of the still neutral United States. Their deaths in an attack illegal under international maritime law and which the ‘New York Nation’ condemned as ‘a deed for which a Hun would blush and a Barbary pirate apologise’ soured already strained relations between the German and the United States governments and fueled bitter diplomatic exchanges about the German campaign of attacking merchant shipping without warning. In April 1917 these culminated in the United States’ declaration of war.