Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward полностью

"Within days of the sinking, German sympathizers in New York came up with a conspiracy theory. The British Admiralty, they said, had deliberately exposed Lusitania to harm, hoping she would be attacked and thus draw the U.S. into the war."

Let's take a closer look at this conspiracy theory. Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty at that time, said: T h e r e are m a n y k i n d s o f m a n e u v e r s i n w a r . . . . T h e r e are maneuvers in time, in diplomacy, in mechanics, in psychology; all of which are removed from the battlefield, but react often decisively upon it.... The maneuver which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle. The maneuver which gains an important strategic point may be less valuable than that which placates or overawes a dangerous neutral.

The maneuver chosen by Churchill was particularly ruthless.

Under what was called the Cruiser Rules, warships of both England and Germany gave the crews of unarmed enemy merchant ships a 1. Simpson, p. 87.

2. "Riddle of the Lusitania," by Robert Ballard, National Geographic, April, 1994, p. 74.

3. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1949), p. 300.

This appears on p. 464 of the Barnes & Noble 1993 reprint.

SINK THE LUSITANIA!

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chance to take to the lifeboats before sinking them. But, in October of 1914, Churchill issued orders that British merchant ships must no longer obey a U-boat order to halt and be searched. If they had armament, they were to engage the enemy. If they did not, they were to attempt to ram the sub. The immediate result of this change was to force German U-boats to remain submerged for protection and to simply sink the ships without warning.

Why would the British want to do such a stupid thing that would cost the lives of thousands of their own seamen? The answer is that it was not an act of stupidity. It was cold blooded strategy.

Churchill boasted:

The first British countermove, made on my responsibility,... was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.1

To increase the likelihood of accidentally sinking a ship from a neutral "Great Power," Churchill ordered British ships to remove their names from their hulls and, when in port, to fly the flag of a neutral power, preferably that of the United States. As further provocation, the British navy was ordered to treat captured U-boat crew members not as prisoners of war but as felons. "Survivors,"

wrote Churchill, "should be taken prisoner or shot—whichever is the most convenient."2 Other orders, which now are an embarrassing part of official navy archives, were even more ruthless: "In all actions, white flags should be fired upon with promptitude."

The trap was carefully laid. The German navy was goaded into a position of shoot-first and ask questions later and, under those conditions, it was inevitable that American lives would be lost.

A FLOATING MUNITIONS DEPOT

After many years of investigation, it is now possible to identify the cargo that was loaded aboard the Lusitania on her last voyage. It included 600 tons of pyroxyline (commonly called gun cotton),4

I Churchill, pp. 274-75.

2. Taken from the Diaries of Admiral Sir Hubert Richmond, Feb. 27,1915, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, as quoted by Simpson, p. 37.

3. P.R.O., ADM/116/1359, Dec. 23,1914, quoted by Simpson, p. 37.

4. Gun cotton explodes with three-times the force of gunpowder in a confined space and can be ignited at a much lower flash point. See Eissler, Manuel, Modern High Explosives (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1914), pp. 110,112,372.

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THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND

six-million rounds of ammunition, 1,248 cases of shrapnel shells (which may not have included explosive charges), plus an unknown quantity of munitions that completely filled the holds on the lowest deck and the trunkways and passageways of F deck. In addition, there were many tons of "cheese," "lard," "furs" and other items which were shown later to be falsely labelled. What they were is not now known, but it is certain they were at least contraband if not outright weapons of war. They were all consigned through the /.P.

Morgan Company. But none of this was suspected by the public, least of all those hapless Americans who unknowingly booked a passage to death for themselves and their families as human decoys in a global game of high finance and low politics.

The German embassy in Washington was well aware of the

nature of the cargo being loaded aboard the Lusitania and filed a formal complaint to the United States government, because almost all of it was in direct violation of international neutrality treaties.