Only a few prescient souls seemed to grasp that the design of the submarine would force a transformation in naval strategy.
Immediately after this assertion, the author points out that one of those souls with foresight was the inventor of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle had written a short story before the outbreak of war titled “Danger!” in which his prescient mind nearly had the entire British Empire coming undone at the hands of an otherwise powerless little country that did, however, possess one very powerful secret weapon: eight submarines essentially capable of creating an impenetrable blockade around the British Isles. The German were able to ramp up momentum and get a head-start on England when war did finally break out due in no small part to their leaders being as prescient as Doyle which, it must be stated, England’s leaders were not.
Unmistakable and invulnerable, a floating village in steel, the Lusitania glided by in the night as a giant black shadow cast upon the seas.
This poetic bit of imagery is the final paragraph of a prefatory section entitled “A Word from the Captain.” Beyond the elegantly haunting imagery is the concrete significance: the Lusitania was for a short period of time the largest passenger ship on the seas and its outline on the surface was absolutely unmistakable. As for being invulnerable, however…well, there’s the crux of the tale. Barely more than three years earlier, the Titanic seemed to have definitively proven that no ship was invulnerable. And the iceberg wasn’t even gunning for that luxury liner.
“I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.”
Beesley is a naval historian who served with in the intelligence bureau for England during World War II. He had devoted years to studying all information related to the sinking of the Lusitania and over time eventually reached the point where he had actually begin to hope to find incontrovertible evidence that the whole disaster could effectively be pinned down to negligence as hopes for determining that it was just a horrendous mistake shriveled with each new fact. Even gross negligence, Beesley affirms, would be preferable to what the evidence actually points to.
“All these papers had been ardently neutral until Zimmermann shot an arrow in the air and brought down neutrality like a dead duck.”
Tuchman is another historian and she is making concrete—using a brilliant evocative metaphorical imagery—the reason why the United States decided to enter the fray in the late stages of World War I. Arthur Zimmerman was Germany’s foreign secretary and the decoding of a secret message the Mexican President with the offer of joining in an alliance had the effect of almost overnight changing the tone of American’s position on remaining neutral. A Mexican alliance with German would inevitably bring the war across the Atlantic and dump it right on America’s shores and newspapers across the country which had been supporting remaining well clear of the conflict suddenly were editorializing in favor of sending troops over there to keep from fighting German troops over here.
