Weapons on the Lusitania?

(Night students: this is a sneak preview of what we'll cover after the quiz. Day students: now you know.)

In 1982, decades after the RMS Lusitania was sunk by German u-boats in the First World War, the British government admitted that the passenger ship was carrying not only passengers but also munitions (guns and ammunition) in significant quantities--hundreds of tons.

The gunpowder-filled shells and large-caliber bullets the ship was carrying may have set off a secondary explosion when the torpedoes hit, causing eye-witnesses to wonder if an additional torpedo strike had occurred. (The secondary explosion might also have been the boiler.)

The German Empire noted that the ship was in the blockade zone around Britain and charged that it was carrying hundreds of tons of weapons, a fact denied at the time by the British who wanted to maintain good relations with the United States. Among the 1198 deaths when the Lusitania was sunk were 128 Americans.

This event helped shift public opinion in the U.S. against Germany and toward Britain although the U.S. was officially neutral and would not declare war for almost two years.

In your view, in light of these facts, was the u-boat justified in sinking the Lusitania? The answer to that question is not history but ethics, though those two subjects interact with each other constantly.

Many of the almost 1200 dead were buried in mass graves, as shown in the photo below.