The question perplexed at least one prominent naval historian, the late Patrick Beesly, who, during World War II, was himself an officer in British naval intelligence. Britain’s secrecy laws prevented him from writing about the subject until the 1970s and 1980s, when he published several books, including one about Room 40, said to be a quasi-official account. There he addressed the controversy only obliquely, stating that if no deliberate plan existed to put the Lusitania in danger, “one is left only with an unforgivable cock-up as an explanation.”
However, in a later interview, housed in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, London, Beesly was less judicious. “As an Englishman and a lover of the Royal Navy,” he said, “I would prefer to attribute this failure to negligence, even gross negligence, rather [than] to a conspiracy deliberately to endanger the ship.” But, he said, “on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, 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.” So much was done for the Orion and other warships, he wrote, but nothing for the Lusitania. He struggled with this. No matter how he arranged the evidence, he came back to conspiracy. He said, “If that’s unacceptable, will someone tell me another explanation to these very very curious circumstances?”
The absence of an escort also surprised Cunard’s lawyers. In a lengthy confidential memorandum on the Mersey inquiry, written to help a New York attorney defend the company against dozens of American liability claims, Cunard’s London firm wrote, “With regard to the question of convoy, Sir Alfred Booth hoped and expected that the Admiralty would send destroyers to meet & convoy the vessel. There were destroyers at Queenstown and no explanation has been given as to why there was no convoy except Mr. Winston Churchill’s statement that it was impossible for the Admiralty to convoy Merchant ships.” The memo left unsaid the fact that the Admiralty earlier in the year had in fact made provision to escort merchant ships.
It was a question that also troubled passengers and crew and the citizens of Queenstown. Third Officer Albert Bestic wrote, later, that in light of the German warning in New York and the Admiralty’s awareness of new submarine activity, some sort of protective force should have been dispatched. “Even one destroyer encircling the liner as she entered the danger zone would have minimized the danger, if indeed have not rendered the Lusitania immune from attack with a resulting loss of lives.” One of Cunard’s most prominent captains, James Bisset, who had served under Turner and was captain of the HMS Caronia when it met the Lusitania off New York shortly after departure, wrote in a memoir, “The neglect to provide naval escort for her in the narrow waters as she approached her destination was all the more remarkable as no less than twenty-three British merchant vessels had been torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats near the coasts of Britain and Ireland in the preceding seven days.”
As to whether an escort really could have prevented the disaster, Turner himself was ambivalent. “It might,” he said, during his testimony at the Kinsale coroner’s inquest, “but it is one of those things one never knows. The submarine would have probably torpedoed both of us.”
ANOTHER MYSTERY centered on the second explosion within the Lusitania. Its cause would be debated for a century to come, with dark talk of exploding munitions and a secret cargo of explosive materials. There may indeed have been a hidden cache of explosives aboard, but if so, it did not cause the second explosion or contribute to the speed at which the ship sank. The myriad accounts left by survivors fail to describe the kind of vivid cataclysm such an explosion would produce. The rifle ammunition was not likely to have been the culprit either. Testing done several years earlier had determined that such ammunition did not explode en masse when exposed to fire, and this prompted the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor to approve the shipping of such cargoes aboard passenger vessels.