Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy | Diana Preston

Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy | Diana Preston | Excellence at Sea

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Lusitania: An Epic...

	Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy Diana Preston, 2002 - 532 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A brilliantly sunny day, and then the explosion; on what had been an ordinary weekday, there is suddenly fire, smoke, confusion, bodies, panic...

On May 7, 1915, the ocean liner Lusitania was struck by a terrifying new weapon-and became a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. This is a vivid account of the event that shocked the world; of the heyday of the luxury liner and the first days of the modern submarine; a critical chapter in the progress of World War I; and a remarkable human drama. With first-person survivor accounts and a cast of characters ranging from Winston Churchill and Alfred Vanderbilt to the crew of the German U-boat that torpedoed a ship full of civilians, this is a true tale of terror and tragedy, of heroism and miraculous survival.

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lost at sea

lusitania was a jewel in the cunard oceanliner fleet was put in the middle of two waring nation.1200 person lives were lost to get america into a war.

Excellence at Sea

Prior to reading this book, the sum total of my knowledge about the Lusitania was that it was a large passenger ship that was sunk, and that somehow this was related to America's entry into WWI. While this made me more knowledgeable than probably 80% of Americans, it was hardly sufficient.

After reading this excellent book, I feel as if I have a much better grounding in the Lusitania incident and the actions it set in motion. Just as importantly, I have a much greater understanding of numerous issues that the Lusitania incident raised: Shifting standards of war conduct; America's love-fear relationship with Germany in the early 20th Century; the state of technology at the time; and deception by all governments during wartime.

This is a superb book that provides both technical information about the Lusitania and the U-boat that tracked her down, as well as what it would have felt like to be a victim of the torpedo attack.

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AN OCEAN RED WITH BLOOD

Author Diana Preston has written the definitive history of the sinking of the liner Lusitania by the U-20 under the command of Walther Schwieger. The vessel was sunk with the loss of more than 1200 souls. The incident was considered to be an outrage and served to drive American involvement in WWI. The book provides the reader with a detailed and lively account of the sinking itself as well as the political back story necessary to understand the significance to history of this horrific event. The rumors that the ship was carrying munitions illegally is explored here with surprising conclusions. Personal stories of the survivors are written so as to bring tears to the eye of the reader. There are many stories here of death and heroism , including the brave and honorable end of Alfred Vanderbilt, one of the world's wealthiest men. The book has many photographs and sketches that add considerably to the work.

A thorough treatment of the investigations and inquiry after the sinking is quite fascinating. As a wreck diver I was pleased that she included a section on the efforts to dive this wreck by Dr. Robert Ballard, Polly Tapson, John Light and others. Well written and scholarly this book belongs on the shelf of any historian or diver.

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Well-written history of the mystery of the disaster

I was inspired to read this book after reading Max Alan Collins' "disaster mystery" novel The Lusitania Murders, and was rewarded by a well-written history of the mystery of the disaster. The author categorizes and clearly deflates the conspiracy theories with well-reasoned and -researched arguments phrased in well-written, engrossing, and entertaining prose.

A Good Retelling

Ever since the Lusitania was lost to a single German torpedo on May 7, 1915, there has been a steady stream of books about the disaster in which 120 of the 1961 on board died (128 of them Americans). There was immense outrage in the US and elsewhere over the deaths of innocent passengers, done in by the "illegal" and "barbarous" German submarine weapon which struck unseen and without warning in violation of the accepted international law of the day. Outrage in the US was immense and remained a factor in the American entry into the World War I in 1917.

A number of supposed mysteries and controversies surrounded the sinking and fueled the books for many years. These included whether Lusitania was secretly carrying contraband munitions that were the cause of the large secondary explosion that immediately followed the torpedo hit, and whether the Royal Navy had armed the Lusitania, making her a naval vessel not subject to rules of engagement for civilian ships. What caused the ship to sink so fast and why lifeboats and rafts (present in ample numbers) proved difficult or impossible to launch was also in question. So was why the ship was steering a straight course at far below her top speed in waters where submarines had been reported. The human stories always present in large maritime disasters were engrossing and so was the question of possible cover up by the separate British and American inquiries into the disaster.

A modern consensus today exists concerning the answers to most of these mysteries and controversies, and few (if any) today feel any outrage over unrestricted submarine warfare. Everyone with a significant submarine force practiced such warfare in WW II, and that war also featured "total war" against civilian populations as well. Preston's book reflects all this and is thus not fueled, as many earlier accounts were, by speculation on still unanswered questions. She spends relatively little time on the controversies but does report on the best answers that research suggests to date (and they are largely convincing). Instead she devotes most of the book to two stories: The tale of the last voyage itself and explaining why so much outrage resulted from the attack.

Most of the book tells the stories of those on the last voyage. Preston does a good job on this and conveys well the tragedy, terror and suffering experienced by those on board. The story, as Preston relates it, is still compelling and almost unbearably sad. She is less successful in her effort to explain the outrage.

Preston's work on the outrage seems fairly ambitious to me. She seems to want to recreate that outrage so that the reader can virtually experience it herself. I am not sure this is possible. Too much happened in the rest of the bloody 20th century for contemporary readers to recapture the innocence that could regard this attack as an unprecedented attack on the foundations of civilized conduct. Preston does a quite adequate job of explaining the bases for the outrage and why it was felt but in the end it remains an explanation: intellectually grasped but not viscerally re-experienced (although one is left with regret for the passing of a world innocent enough to see this as a world-shaking atrocity).

Overall the book is an able retelling of this tragic story. There is nothing really new here but the story is brought together and ably told in clear and pleasant prose. Worth reading, especially if you are new to the story.

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