Lusitania, a British civilian ship and ocean liner sinks. The greatest crime of the war, the torpedoing of the Lusitania by a German submarine on 7 May 1915 with the loss of 1,200 lives, including some Americans. Its destruction helped to bring the USA into World War I A massacre of the innocents: the scene after the disappearance of the Lusitania. The scene after the Lusitania went down is thus described by one of the survivors: "Above the spot where she had been serenely afloat less than twenty minutes before was nothing but a nondescript mass of floating wreckage. Everywhere one looked one saw a sea of waving hands and arms belonging to struggling men and fr4antic women and children in agonising efforts to keep afloat." Every available boat put out from Queenstown, Kinsale and other harbours along the coast, but it was an hour before the first of them could reach the scene, and by that time two-thirds of the ship's company had disappeared, while many of the rescued died from shock and exposure before they reached land. This picture drawn by E S Hodgson from material supplied by survivors.