Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic

The movie was okay and the cast did a wonderful job delivering the emotional impact the movie should have. What also worked was the actual footage at the end. What was horrible was depicting Winston Churchill and the British hierarchy as actually evil. That was unnecessary and pure nonsense.

Indeed, this one is remarkably controlled, but it does include key facts that the British wanted covered up:

• that their embargo of Germany was the first and bigger war crime;
• that Churchill wanted the Lusitania sunk, and in typically murderous fashioned schemed to make it happen;
• that the explosion of illegally carried war materials, especially gun cotton, caused the second and greater explosion;
• that the Admiralty first covered up and then destroyed all materials relating to the incident;

And much more. Anybody who argues anything else has not studied the subject in depth; one need only consult THE authority on the subject, Patrick Beesley, in his authoritative Room 40 to know this. None of this is "politics": it's all facts.

The Lusitania was a passenger ship of the Cunard Line, sunk by a German submarine in 1914 with a tremendous loss of life, 1200 crew and civilians of all ages, in the frigid waters of the north Atlantic. It was a big ship -- 800 feet long, about the size of a battleship -- and at 25 knots very fast for its time.

The German government had issued warnings that all British ships were in danger of being fired on because so many were transporting supplies and arms from the US to Britain. The US hadn't yet entered the war and the arms business was booming. But almost everyone, the Royal Navy included, scoffed at the warnings as hogwash.

When the ship is at sea, a scene took place that at first startled me. I was afraid the story would be completely derailed. We're all on the bridge, the captain (Kenneth Cranham) and number one are strutting around in their gold-emblazoned blue uniforms, and the humble helmsman pipes up with, "What course shall we be sailing when we enter submarine waters, captain?" I can't count the number of hours I spent at the helm of a US Coast Guard cutter, but if I or any other helmsman had been so impolitic as to ask a question like that, we'd have been drawn and quartered like William Wallace. Fortunately, the captain at once establishes a return to reality. "And what business is that of yours?", he snaps, shutting the cheeky helmsman up.

The story is carried by the narration of a Scots professor (John Hannah),one of the few survivors. The German U-boat crew is dealt with at some length, and portrayed more as ordinary humans rather than ravening beasts. In the more simple-minded films you can often tell at a glance what view of the enemy will be taken. How mean are they to one another and, especially, how ugly are they? An exception must be made for the brains behind the beef. The leader is often charming, suave, cultivated and fond of good wine and classical music.

The film is far harder on Alfred Vanderbilt (Kevin Otto), a handsome young scion of an American family that built its fortune in the fur trade. He's arrogant and sly. Sounds like a character in the unfortunate "Titanic," as it should. The stories and characters are isomorphic, except that instead of two doomed lovers we have the Scots professor and a young girl and neither of them drowns.

There's also a kind of epilogue. The German U-boat commander, who hesitates briefly before sinking the ship with a single torpedo, is not hailed as a hero back home because it's a propaganda victory for the Allies. He's lucky to keep his rank. The British seize on the event and promote it as evidence of the Hun's barbarity, claiming there were as many as three torpedoes, and using the incident to round up more enlistees. It also influenced America's entry into the war. The US hated all things German after the Lusitania. Sauerkraut became "liberty cabbage" (cf., "freedom fries"), and prohibition was enacted in 1919, which shut down all the breweries like Anheuser-Busch, Blatz, Schlitz, Reingold,and Budweiser.

The acting and direction are competent, although the young girl isn't much of an actress yet. The CGIs are primitive but acceptable for a TV movie. It's really a kind of history lesson, and not a bad one for today's youth.

Movies about the Titanic have come and gone and many such movies, from blockbuster epics to cheap low budget movies (some were so low budgeted that the camera crews tilted their cameras instead of tilting the set!) have made their way from the movie theater and the TV, to video and later to DVD.

Yet little has been said about the Lusitania, whose sinking opened a lot of potential.

The story behind the Titanic can be summed up as follows:

Ship sets sail on its maiden voyage.

Ship hits an iceberg.

Ship sinks in the mid Atlantic.

Casualties mount.

A few survive.

End of the story.

But the Lusitania had a story far more complex. Were they bringing arms to England? Were passengers warned? Were dispatches sent to the Captain? Was the Captain innocent? Or was he guilty? These are complex questions with no real simple answers.

The movie was very well done and sure, some facts were distorted. It was war. And every historian knows that the first casualty in a war is the Truth.

Unlike TITANIC (1998), the central characters in this feature were not fictitious. They really did exist. Prof. Ian Holbourn (born November 5, 1872 and died September 15, 1935) was a passenger on the Lusitania. And he really befriended a young girl named Avis Dolphin (born 1903? and died February 5,1996).

And that "good German" on the U-boat that sank the Lusitania was not a fictitious character added to keep things politically correct, either. He also existed. Quartermaster Charles Vogele allegedly refused to relay the order to fire the torpedo and he was tried and courts-marshaled, and spend 3 years in prison for his crime. (Some accounts claimed that Voegele was an electrician, not a Quartermaster.)

It was no secret that Captain Turner later admitted that had the roles been reversed, he wouldn't had behaved any differently than Lt. Capt. Schwieger, who gave the order to fire that torpedo.

I rate this movie an 9 out of 10.

If you want the best info on it read the book Dead Wake. excellent in the details. makes you think you where on it with the detail info on passengers. used the war diary from the german sub commander and he reviewed the books and pics from the sinking. he obtained some very recent info from the British secret service who knew where the sub was but didint tell the ship. a sad bunch of unfortunate circumstances.