RMS Lusitania: Witnesses Disagree on a Second Explosion

What happened on May 7, 1915?

On May 7, 1915, the Lusitania went down off southern Ireland, and a British inquiry counted 1,198 lives lost. Its report, signed by Lord Mersey as Wreck Commissioner on July 17, 1915, puts the attack at 2.15 in the afternoon, ten to fifteen miles off the Old Head of Kinsale. The report has her leaving New York at noon on May 1 with 1,959 people on board: 1,257 passengers and a crew of 702.

The inquiry's account of that morning is a record of speed and course changes. It has the ship slowing from 21 to 18 knots at 8 a.m. (a knot is one nautical mile an hour), so that she would reach the bar outside Liverpool at about 4 a.m. the next day, when the tide served. Fog then cut her to 15 knots for a time, and when it lifted a little before noon she went back to 18 knots, a speed the report says was “never subsequently changed.”

The report has the captain turning toward the land at 12.40 p.m. to make a better landfall; at 1.40 he sighted the Old Head of Kinsale and turned back to his old course, and at 1.50 he began a four-point bearing on it. At 2.15, according to the report, the second officer called out, “There is a torpedo coming, sir.”

Mersey's 1915 report and the 1918 opinion of a U.S. District Court in New York give the same times for the turn back at 1.40 p.m. and the start of the bearing at 1.50 p.m. They are not independent records, since the 1918 court's record included the testimony heard by Mersey. On the rest of the afternoon the sources disagree. The 1918 court puts the attack at “approximately 2:10,” says the ship sank “in about 18 minutes,” and gives the loss of life as 1,195.

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Table: compiled from the three documents under Sources; each row of the file below gives the page.

Download the table (CSV, lusitania-timeline.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Report of a Formal Investigation into the foundering of the Lusitania, Cd. 8022 (HMSO, 1915), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; The Lusitania, 251 F. 715, Federal Reporter vol. 251 (1918), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Brief on the Facts for the Petitioner, Cunard Steamship Co., U.S. District Court S.D.N.Y. (1918), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain in the US

By the inquiry's count, 413 of the crew and 785 of the passengers were lost, which makes its total of 1,198. The same pages count 761 people saved. The 1918 court's figure of 1,195 is three lower. Neither document explains the difference.

Where was she when the torpedo struck?

The inquiry places the ship “ten to fifteen miles off the Old Head of Kinsale,” and its heading says south. The ship's own distress call, as the report quotes it, gave one figure: “Come at once, big list, 10 miles south Head Old Kinsale.”

The captain had been working out that distance when the torpedo came. A four-point bearing finds how far a ship is off a landmark by timing her run between two compass bearings on it. Mersey was advised that it “would occupy 30 or 40 minutes.” By the inquiry's own clock, the ship was struck 25 minutes after the bearing began; by the 1918 court's, about 20 minutes.

By dead reckoning, the bearing was never finished, so the distance off that it was meant to measure was not known on the bridge when the ship was hit. The 1918 opinion records that it was urged in court that he should have taken a two-point bearing or a cross-bearing, “which would have occupied less time.”

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The turn at 12.40 is where the two records part slightly. Mersey gives N. 67 E. The 1918 court says the course was altered “by about 30 degrees to about N. 63° or 67° E.,” and that the captain “did not recall which.”

By dead reckoning, an hour at 18 knots on N. 67 E. put the ship about 7.9 nautical miles nearer the land than she would have been on her old course; on N. 63 E. the figure is 9.0. Each figure is worked two ways, on a flat plane and on the earth's ellipsoid, and the two agree. The courses are magnetic as printed, and no current or leeway is applied, so the result is a sketch of the turn, not a position on a chart.

How many torpedoes did the inquiry find?

Mersey's report is plain on the count. After the first hit, “A second torpedo was fired immediately afterwards, which also struck the ship on the starboard side. The two torpedoes struck the ship almost simultaneously.”

Asked by the Board of Trade whether the ship was struck by one or more torpedoes, the court answered, “By two practically simultaneously.” It added that the ship never sighted the submarine, that no warning of any kind was given, and that the firing distance was “variously estimated at from two to five hundred yards.”

The report credits Leslie Morton, an 18-year-old extra lookout on the forecastle head, with being “the first to observe the approach of the two torpedoes.” It also records a witness who heard less. Leith, the ship's wireless operator, was in the second-class dining saloon and “speaks of but one explosion,” the report notes, in answering a passenger's claim of a blast in the cargo.

The documents do not place the hits in the same spot. The inquiry says the first struck “somewhere between the third and fourth funnels.” Morton's own words, as quoted in the brief filed for Cunard in 1918, put the first “between Nos. 2 and 3 funnels” and the second “just under No. 3.” The 1918 court located the hits by boiler room instead: one abreast of No. 2, the other abreast of No. 3 or between Nos. 3 and 4.

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The inquiry also heard that a torpedo “from another submarine” was fired at the port side and missed. Mersey mentioned it only to show “that perhaps more than one submarine was taking part in the attack.” The 1918 court heard two crew members say the same and found their evidence “not sufficiently satisfactory to be convincing.”

Why did she sink in under twenty minutes?

According to the inquiry, the ship “took a heavy list to starboard and in less than twenty minutes she sank in deep water.” Its formal answer gives the cause as “the inrush of water through holes made by the torpedoes.” The engines, the inquiry found, were put out of action “almost at once,” so the ship kept moving through the water and her way could not be taken off.

Both the 1915 report and the 1918 opinion count 48 boats with room for 2,605 people, for the 1,959 on board, though their counts for the two kinds of boat differ by one seat. The boats were enough on paper.

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Table: from the boat and passenger pages of each document; each row of the file below gives the page.

Download the table (CSV, lusitania-boats.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Report of a Formal Investigation into the foundering of the Lusitania, Cd. 8022 (HMSO, 1915), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; The Lusitania, 251 F. 715, Federal Reporter vol. 251 (1918), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

The 1918 court went further into the mechanism. The ship “was built so as to float with two compartments open to the sea,” it wrote, and her side coal bunkers counted as compartments. With two boiler rooms and a bunker flooding, “the damage done by one torpedo was enough to sink the ship.”

From what was known of the German torpedoes then in use, the court thought each would rupture the outer hull for 30 to 40 feet lengthwise and 10 to 15 feet vertically. The senior third engineer testified that within a few seconds the steam pressure fell from 190 to 50 pounds.

Mersey heard complaints about the launching and about leaking boats and judged them “ill-founded.” Passengers who tried to help launch the boats did “more harm than good,” in his view, and he concluded that the launching “was carried out as well as the short time, the moving ship and the serious list would allow.”

Claimants in New York argued that open portholes had hastened the sinking. The court found that some dining-room ports on D deck were open, but they were 23 to 30 feet above the water. It held that they had “a very trifling influence, if any.”

Captain Turner's choices

William Thomas Turner had been with Cunard since 1883 and a commander since 1903, the inquiry records, and Mersey wrote that he gave his evidence “truthfully and well.” Mersey heard the Admiralty's advice to him in closed session and declined to set it out in detail. He did write, “It is certain that in some respects Captain Turner did not follow the advice given to him.”

Before she sailed, a notice from the Imperial German Embassy, dated April 22, ran in five New York papers on May 1, by the 1918 court's account, warning that travelers in the war zone on British ships “do so at their own risk.” Turner saw it, or “something of the kind,” the court found. Mersey wrote that the threats “were not regarded as serious by the people intended to be affected by them.”

The 1918 opinion prints the advice the court had. A notice of April 15, 1915, said, “Ships should give prominent headlands a wide berth.” A memo of April 16 described zigzagging, “altering the course at short and irregular intervals.” The court summed up the advice as five points: wide berth to headlands, a mid-channel course, high speed, zigzagging, and arrival in port at dawn.

On the evening of May 6 the ship received two Admiralty messages, the second ending “Submarines off Fastnet,” and the next morning she passed the Fastnet so far out that it was not in sight. The court gave the distance as about 25 miles by Cunard's figure or about 18½ by the claimants' calculation, and called either one a wide berth.

At 11.25 a.m. on May 7, by the court's account, Turner received word of submarines 20 miles south of Coningbeg light vessel, ahead of him. He chose to work in toward the shore rather than hold his distance off. Whether he was negligent in not following the advice to the letter, and in the course he took, the court called “the only debatable question of fact in the case.”

Speed was the other question. In November 1914, the inquiry records, Cunard closed six of the ship's boilers to save coal and labor, which cut her attainable speed from 24½ to 21 knots. Mersey called that reduction “of no significance,” and the 1918 court called it “quite immaterial.”

What did the two courts decide?

The 1915 inquiry, held before Lord Mersey and four assessors, sat six times in June and July, heard 36 witnesses, and answered 21 questions put by the Board of Trade. It found that the loss was due to “torpedoes fired by a submarine of German nationality,” and that the act was done with the intention of “destroying the lives of the people on board,” not merely of sinking the ship. Asked whether the submarine could be identified, it answered, “It was not identified.” No blame was put on the captain or on Cunard.

Both courts found that the ship was not armed. Mersey called the German government's claims of masked guns, trained gunners and Canadian troops on board “baseless inventions,” and the 1918 court found that “the proof is absolute that she was not and never had been armed.”

Three years later, on August 23, 1918, a federal court in New York ruled on Cunard's petition to limit its liability for the suits brought after the sinking. The judge found the captain had not been negligent and added a second ground: even if negligence were shown, it could not be the proximate cause, the cause the law holds responsible, when an independent illegal act came between. Here, he held, that act was the submarine commander's. The petition was granted and the claims dismissed.

The two courts ended in the same place. “The whole blame for the cruel destruction of life in this catastrophe must rest solely with those who plotted and with those who committed the crime,” Mersey wrote, and the 1918 opinion quoted those words near its close. Not every official inquiry leaves its central count in doubt; decades later, the Silver Bridge collapse was traced to a flaw in one eyebar.

What could the second blow have been?

The 1918 court found the evidence of a second explosion “overwhelming,” though some witnesses heard only one. What caused it is where the records stop short of a fix. Setting a court's record beside the stories told about a ship is also the method of the entry on the Mary Celeste.

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Table: the same claims as the chart, from the pages listed in the file below.

Download the table (CSV, lusitania-torpedo-accounts.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Report of a Formal Investigation into the foundering of the Lusitania, Cd. 8022 (HMSO, 1915), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; The Lusitania, 251 F. 715, Federal Reporter vol. 251 (1918), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Brief on the Facts for the Petitioner, Cunard Steamship Co., U.S. District Court S.D.N.Y. (1918), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain in the US

The cargo claim came from one passenger, who said the blast sounded “similar to the rattling of a maxim gun.” Mersey wrote, “I did not believe this gentleman,” and noted that the man had threatened Cunard with evidence that would not be “to the credit either of your Company or of the Admiralty.” The report lists about 5,000 cases of cartridges, stowed well forward and about 50 yards from where the torpedoes struck. The 1918 opinion counts 4,200 cases of safety cartridges and says none could be set off by fire or impact; the sources disagree on the number of cases.

The 1918 court reached two torpedoes by elimination. “As there were no explosives on board, it is difficult to account for the second explosion, except on the theory that it was caused by a second torpedo,” the judge wrote. One passenger, quoted in Cunard's brief, put the second hit “about thirty seconds after the first.”

By dead reckoning, the two-torpedo finding rests on testimony and on ruling out the cargo, not on a record from the submarine. Both courts saw the attack only from the ship's side, and no document here records how many torpedoes were fired from the other.