Finally, we have a mysterious "lady whose family to this day forbid her name to be mentioned, possibly because one of them in due course became a President of the United States." Her letter, allegedly found in Secretary Lansing's private papers, claims that while she was having tea in London with Clementine Churchill, Admiral Fisher stopped in. She asked the Admiral for help in getting a passage to New York. Fisher told her that she should travel on LUSITANIA or OLYMPIC, because both had a concealed armament. She took LUSITANIA and inquired of a steward about the concealed guns. "The steward, realizing her connections, showed her how the decks could be lifted to reveal the gun rings and confided that it would take about twenty minutes to 'wheel the guns into position.'" While in Simpson's book this woman's story is only one of several on LUSITANIA's armament, in a letter to Life magazine, quoted by Bailey and Ryan, this becomes his accepted version: the guns "were stored in the forward part of the shelter deck, which was sealed off from the rest of the ship by the Admiralty. If the need arose, the guns could be wheeled out of their hiding place and mounted on their rings in 20 minutes.'"
The credibility of this story should speak for itself, particularly
Lord Fisher's casual revelation of this dark official secret to a
visiting American
woman. It is extremely difficult as well to imagine which female
relative of
a future President would have been moving in these social circles
in 1914-1915, except possibly Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt
Longworth.
Although Franklin Roosevelt was at this time Assistant Secretary of
the Navy,
his wife can be ruled out: FDR and Churchill did not meet face-to-face
until
the Atlantic conference of August 1941
[note 2]. There are at least three
strong points against Alice Roosevelt's authorship of this alleged
letter:
she would naturally be described as the daughter of a former
President, not
the distant cousin of a future one; she was still very much alive when
Simpson
wrote his book and--never being famous for her reticence--would not
have required her family to speak for her; and finally, both Theodore
Roosevelt and
his daughter had a well-documented dislike of Churchill, and she was
an unlikely guest at his home [see note 3
at the end of this section].
In fact the entire story of LUSITANIA's concealed battery is
absurd. Twelve
six-inch guns is heavy armament, equivalent to the main battery of a
large
World War II light cruiser. It would require at least a hundred men
to man
such a battery, and probably considerably more
[note 4]. To hide a
contingent this large, in a crew of about 700, would be impossible.
It is
equally implausible that LUSITANIA's own crew could have manned these
guns;
every account, including Simpson's, indicates that she had a largely
inexperienced crew of wartime recruits who were deficient even in basic
seamanship, and the notion that they were covertly trained in gunnery
is not
believable (nor does Simpson make such a claim; he simply does not
address
the issue of the manning of these guns).[note 5]
Beyond this point is the senselessness of such an armament.
LUSITANIA was in
commercial service, not operating offensively as an armed merchant
cruiser.
If her alleged weaponry was for defensive purposes, of what possible use
against a submarine or a raider was a battery that would take twenty
minutes
to unlimber and unmask? If LUSITANIA was so armed, why were these
guns not
manned and in position on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, when she was
sailing
into a channel known to be frequented by submarines? What earthly
reason was
there for LUSITANIA to be armed as Simpson describes?
THE MUNITIONS CARGO
There are two distinct issues pertaining to LUSITANIA's carriage of
munitions:
the cargo of rifle cartridges and shrapnel cases, whose existence is
not in
dispute; and the allegations that she was carrying a larger and much more
dangerous cargo of smokeless powder (guncotton). These are pertinent
both to
the legality of LUSITANIA's cargo and to its possible role in the second,
fatal explosion following the detonation of U-20's torpedo.
It is necessary first to return briefly to the broad question of
war trade.
Trade between a neutral and a belligerent, even in arms, was normal and
legal--both under international law and, until 1935, under U.S. law.
Colin
Simpson distorts this issue and virtually all else related to the
subject of
munitions shipments aboard LUSITANIA. Simpson states that "the American
administration was in confusion as to whether or not to allow military
materials to be shipped to belligerent powers, and eventually agreed that
individuals could ship to individuals." It seems unlikely that there
was any
such confusion in the U.S. government, which to the best of my knowledge
never seriously considered the cessation of arms trade with belligerents.
There was no need for a deliberate decision to permit commercial
transactions
of this nature, nor was the allowance of such trade a special
dispensation as
Simpson implies; on the contrary, it would have required a specific
act of
Congress, like the Neutrality Act of 1935, to stop such trade. Having
in his
way conceded that such trade was legal, Simpson then for some reason
speaks of
the need "to disguise the shipments so that they appeared to be an
innocent
transaction between one trader and another." [Simpson, p. 50, ch. 3]
Although the shipment of munitions of all kinds to the Allies was legal,
there
were restrictions on the kinds of munitions that could be transported in
passenger vessels. Federal law stated that no passenger ship could carry
explosives "likely to endanger the health or lives of the passengers
or the
safety of the vessel." Here Simpson discovers what he regards as a
subterfuge
to allow the transport of cartridges, like those carried by LUSITANIA, in
passenger ships. In 1910 Remington, desiring to transport cartridges
by fast
coastal steamers, had asked the Municipal Explosives Commission of New
York
City to witness a demonstration of the safety of such a cargo. The
cartridges
were ignited and burned, but did not explode spectacularly. The
"commissioners, who were respectively a lawyer and meat importer, were
mightily impressed by this public relations exercise and granted
permission
for cartridges to be shipped on passenger ships and trains provided they
were
stamped 'Non-explosive in bulk'." Cunard seized on this ruling
during the war
to allow the shipment of rifle cartridges on liners. [Simpson, pp.
51-52, ch. 3]
Colin Simpson leaves some pertinent facts out of this story, which
fortunately
is well covered in Bailey and Ryan. For all of Simpson's sneers, rifle
cartridges--in which a very small amount of explosive is confined in a
metal
case--are in fact "non-explosive in bulk," cooking off rather than
detonating
en masse, as numerous tests have shown (and as common sense should
indicate).
Simpson also does not tell us that in 1911 the Federal Government,
specifically the Department of Labor and Commerce, ruled that small arms
ammunition could be transported without restriction on passenger ships.
[Bailey and Ryan, pp. 101-2]
LUSITANIA sailed with 4200 cases of Remington .303 rifle cartridges, a
thousand rounds to a box, with 1250 cases of shrapnel shells, and with
eighteen cases of fuzes (which Bailey and Ryan describe as
nonexplosive, but
that does not sound right). The shrapnel cases were officially
described as
non-explosive. Simpson quotes a shipping note referring to the
shrapnel as
"1248 cases of 3 inch Shrapnel shells filled," and refers to this as
a "fairly
lethal load." Patrick Beesly, seizing on the adjective "filled,"
assumes the
official description to be a lie, and the cases to in fact be a highly
explosive and dangerous load. It is difficult to see how this
interpretation
can be made by anyone who understands what shrapnel is; it would seem
extremely obvious that a non- explosive but filled shrapnel case is by no
means an oxymoron, but refers to shells containing the metallic
fragments of
shrapnel without the fuzes and the small gunpowder charge used to
scatter the
shrapnel. [Bailey and Ryan, p. 96; Simpson, p. 106, ch. 8; Beesly, pp.
113-14]
This cargo was not included in the initial manifest filed before
LUSITANIA
sailed, resulting in another of the enduring controversies on the
incident.
The British fairly commonly filed an initial manifest before the ship
sailed,
and a fuller supplementary manifest later; among the likely reasons
for this
practice were to keep the cargo seceret from German informers on the
waterfront, and to allow for last-minute corrections of the passenger
list.
LUSITANIA's cargo of small-arms ammunition and shrapnel cases was
listed in
the second manifest.
Simpson of course sees something sinister in this, and refers to \
LUSITANIA's
initial manifest as a "false manifest." It was "standard British
practice to
obtain clearance to sail on the basis of a false manifest and false
affidavit
and some four or five days after sailing to turn in a supplementary
manifest
which gave a true picture of the ship's cargo. This subterfuge was
acquiesced
in" by Customs Collector Dudley Field Malone, a favorite and undeserving
object of Simpson's scorn. By hiding the arms shipment in the "false
manifest" LUSITANIA could obtain clearance to sail.
The sinister second manifest was hidden for years, in Simpson's
apparent view;
as Bailey and Ryan note, they dramatically end the first edition of
their book
with a memorandum to FDR in 1940, detailing the secret presentation
to him of
the supplementary manifest.
There are several serious distortions in this argument. The two
manifests
together constituted the ship's complete manifest, and were equally
legal. The first manifest was entitled "Shipper's Manifest--Part of
Cargo," and thus
did not purport to be a complete listing of the ship's cargo.
There was no particular secret about the second manifest. Bailey and
Ryan
found full descriptions of the arms cargo in New York newspapers of 8 May
1915, the day after LUSITANIA sank. Churchill mentions the cargo of
cartridges
and shrapnel in "The World Crisis," published in 1923- -seventeen
years before
the supposedly furtive delivery of the manifest to Franklin Roosevelt.
Finally, there is a fundamental contradiction in Simpson's entire
treatment of
these small-arms shipments: after first telling us of the supposedly
fraudulent "public-relations exercise" that resulted in the
legalization of
cartridge shipments on liners under the description "non-explosive
in bulk,"
he then says that the British issued a false manifest to conceal these
very
shipments to obtain clearance to sail. One is struck here and
elsewhere by
Simpson's eagerness to find duplicity not only where there is no
evidence of
it, but where there is no reason for it. [Simpson, pp. 50-52, ch. 3;
Bailey
and Ryan, pp. 102-4]
The shipment of propellants and high explosives on liners, unlike that of
rifle cartridges, certainly was illegal. Simpson spins a long and
convoluted
tale purporting to show that there was a large concealed shipment of
powder on
LUSITANIA. Much of this is based on shipping bills and other evidence
that
cannot readily be checked. But we can sample one assertion that is
open to
examination. Simpson contends that an ostensible shipment of furs was
actually concealed explosives. His primary evidence for this is that
part of
the shipment came by "barge from Rheaboat, Maryland and by railcar
from the
Hopewell freight station of the Pennsylvania Railway. Neither
Rheaboat nor
Hopewell were fur storage depots, both had branches of Dupont de
Nemours." I
can find no record of a Rheaboat, Maryland, and cannot address that
contention. Simpson tells us that a shipment of furs on the Pennsylvania
Railroad at some point appeared in a Pennsy freight depot; it is not
immediately obvious why this should be cause for surprise or suspicion.
There
is a further problem, though, that renders the point moot. Du Pont
did indeed
have a large powder factory in Hopewell, Virginia. This town lies on the
James River southeast of Richmond, or roughly 125 miles south of Union
Station, Washington--the southern terminus of the Pennsylvania
Railroad. [note 6]
Simpson alleges further hidden munitions in disguised butter and
cheese parcels. What he never does explain is why Cunard and the
British should go
to such heroic lengths to transport illegal munitions in the tiny
holds of
passenger liners (equalling about 1 percent of the enclosed volume of
such a
ship) when, as Bailey and Ryan quite correctly state, "the British
companies,
including the Cunard Line, could legally transport from America in
their own
freighters much larger shipments of munitions than the LUSITANIA was
transporting, and they were doing so. In these circumstances, why
should they
go to the trouble to camouflage explosives as cheese?" [Simpson, pp.
107-8,
ch. 8; Bailey and Ryan, pp. 99-100, 108]
In fact Simpson, by inference, would have us believe that the great
bulk of
munitions shipments from the United States to the Allies were made in the
fashion he alleges. After describing the use of the classification,
"non-explosive in bulk" for the shipment of small-arms cartridges,
Simpson states
that "from October 1914 until they entered the war, the United States
sent the
Allies over half a million tons of cordite, guncotton, nitrocellulose,
fulminate of mercury and other explosive substances, all franked with
such a
certificate, and the cooperative Malone allowed them to pass."
[Simpson, p. 52 of the Penguin edition, ch. 3]
Simpson has now made an abrupt jump from the shipment of small
quantities of
cartridges in the small holds of liners, to the large-scale bulk
shipment of
smokeless powders
[note 7], while associating both with the certification
"non-explosive in bulk"--which is correct for small-arms but obviously
preposterous for powders. This figure--which is of course
undocumented--requires examination. Precise statistics are hard to
come by: I can find no
exact figure on U.S. munitions exports to the Allies, and it is not
always
clear whether a statistic refers to all military explosives or only to
smokeless powder, the primary propellant (although the tonnage of
propellants
produced would far outweigh that of high-explosive bursting charges,
like TNT
and picric acid, in any case). The great preponderance of powder
made in the
United States was produced by Du Pont, which made an estimated 40
percent of
all military explosives used by all the Allied powers in the First World
War.
Simpson's half-million tons is equivalent to 68 percent of Du Pont's
wartime
production and about 27 percent of all military explosives used by the
Allies--all, if one follows Simpson's logic, shipped illegally in the
miniscule holds of passenger liners under the false label
"non-explosive in
bulk," when it could easily and legally have been shipped in the
vastly more
capacious holds of freighters, far more numerous than liners and
designed for
the purpose. The physical impossibility as well as the incomprehensible
irrationality of such a practice should be clear. [see
note 8 for an
explanation of the statistics in this paragraph]
Note 1: Von Paper is much better known for his role in the
downfall of the
Weimar Republic, during which he served briefly as Chancellor.
Simpson
describes him as a captain, which seems an extremely low rank for an
attache
in a major country and is probably incorrect.
(Return to text)
Note 2: FDR did give a speech at a banquet attended by
Churchill in 1918,
but was disappointed in later years that Churchill did not remember it.
[Joseph P. Lash, "Roosevelt and Churchill 1939- 1941," pp. 193 and 394;
reference courtesy of Marshall Newman]
(Return to text)
Note 3: Although Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill
would appear in
many ways to be kindred spirits, TR and his family had a dislike of
Churchill
going back to the turn of the century. In 1900, when Roosevelt was
Governor
of New York, Churchill visited his Oyster Bay home for some reason. The
Roosevelts were appalled by what they regarded as his rudeness,
particularly
his failure to rise when a lady or elderly gentleman entered the
room. Ex-President Roosevelt made an effort to avoid Churchill at the
funeral of King
Edward VII in 1910. In August 1914 Roosevelt wrote a letter to Arthur
Lee
stating that "I have never liked Winston Churchill," although he went
on to
praise Churchill's vigor in mobilizing the fleet at the outset of
war. In
March 1940 Roosevelt's son Kermit, who evidently did get on well
with Churchill, had a meeting with him in which they discussed, among other
subjects, why his father had always disliked Churchill. Kermit
suggested it
was because TR believed that while in Africa Churchill had on one
occasion
knowingly exposed his native bearers or servants to tsetse flies, a
charge
Churchill adamantly denied. Alice, for her part, was quoted late in
her very
long life still expressing her distaste for Churchill, commenting that
she had
found him "generally obnoxious"--this apparently hearkening back to
the unfortunate visit in 1900.
Sources for this are: H.W. Brands, "TR: The Last
Romantic," p. 663; Nathan Miller, "Theodore Roosevelt:
A Life," p. 541; Alice Felsenthal,
"Alice Roosevelt Longworth," p. 265; and Peter Collier and David
Horowitz,
"The Roosevelts: An American Saga," pp. 395-96. I am indebted to
Mr. Marshall
Newman for this point and for these references.
(Return to text)
Note 4: While I have been unable to find the exact
complement for a British
six-inch gun of the type allegedly fitted on LUSITANIA, a comparable
U.S. weapon of the same era, the open-mount 5in/51, required a crew
of eleven men.
(Return to text)
Note 5: Contrary to a claim made by Simpson and repeated
by others, the
1914 edition of "Jane's Fighting Ships" did not characterize LUSITANIA
as armed, but merely included silhouettes of all liners with speeds of
over 18
knots in the chapters for each navy. [Simpson, p. 72, ch. 5]
(Return to text)
Note 6: Whether Simpson has confused Hopewell, Virginia, with another
Hopewell--none of which hosted Du Pont factories--is not clear.
Hopewell,
Pennsylvania was close to the Pennsylvania Railroad, but was actually
served
by a small coal-hauling line calling the Huntington & Broad Top Mountain
(which did share some track with the Pennsy a few miles from Hopewell).
Hopewell, New Jersey and Hopewell Junction, New York were not on the
Pennsylvania Railroad.
(Return to text)
Note 7: Fulminate of mercury is not a smokeless powder, but
as an explosive
used mainly in fuzes, primers, and percussion caps the quantity would
be comparatively small in any case.
(Return to text)
Note 8: Du Pont gained a monopoly in American production of
smokeless powder
by about the turn of the century. A government antitrust action in 1912
resulted in the creation of the Hercules and Atlas companies, but Du Pont
retained its monopoly in military smokeless powders at least until the
start
of the war (after U.S. entry into the war Du Pont helped to establish
Government powder factories). Du Pont produced 733, 380 tons of military
explosives for the Allies, including the United States during the war, an
estimated 40 percent of the total used by them; this yields a total
figure
for the Allies of about 1,833, 380 tons. The United States--primarily Du
Pont-- reportedly supplied at least half of the powder used by the
French Army
and most of that used by Italy. The company also supplied much powder to
Britain; in 1916 General Hedlam, chief of the British Munitions Board,
reportedly said that "the Du Pont Company is entitled to the credit of
saving
the British Army." It also produced an unknown but probably substantial
quantity of powder for the Russians; Engelbrecht and Hanigen, in their
1934
book "Merchants of Death" (which helped to inspire the Nye Committee
hearings
on the munitions trade), tell of a check Du Pont received from the
Russian
government for $60 million, "one of the largest checks ever written."
Return to Lusitania Controversy
Main Menu
Return
to WWI The Maritime War Return
to WWI Archive main page.Notes for this Section
Sources: Du Pont Company, "A History of the Du Pont Company's
Relations
with the United States Government 1802-1927," (Wilmington, Delaware:
1928);
Grosvenor B. Clarkson, "Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy
Behind the Line 1917-1918" (Cambridge, 1923); H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C.
Hanighen, "Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament
Industry"
(New York, 1934), p. 180. Hedlam quote from Du Pont's "Du Pont: The
Autobiography of an American Enterprise" (1952), p. 76.
(Return to text)
Last Updated: 17 April, 1999.
