Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy

On May 7, 1915, toward the end of her 101st eastbound crossing, from New York to Liverpool, England, R.M.S."Lusitania"--pride of the Cunard Line and one of the greatest ocean liners afloat--became the target of a terrifying new weapon and a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. Sunk off the southern coast of Ireland by a torpedo fired from the German submarine "U-20," she exploded and sank in eighteen minutes, taking with her some twelve hundred people, more than half of the passengers and crew. Cold-blooded, deliberate, and unprecedented in the annals of war, the sinking of the "Lusitania" shocked the world. It also jolted the United States out of its neutrality and hastened the nation s entry into World War I.

In her riveting account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the "Lusitania" is a window on the maritime world of the early twentieth century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage--a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival."