I soon found that many of these 'Graceful Ladies' met gigantic deaths ... hunted and killed by submarines. On the very stocks where I now toiled, the mighty Cunarders were built. This was the birthplace of the Lusitania,...the most consequential and controversial submarine sinking…sent to a watery grave off Southern Ireland on Friday 7 May 1915 by Lieutenant Walther Schwieger - Commander of the U20. 1,1 98 civilians lost their lives. Watching the results of his deed through his periscope, he commented, 'I could not have fired a second torpedo into this throng of humanity attempting to save itself' Nine months earlier, three armoured cruisers met the same fate at the hands of Lieutenant Otto Weddingen in U9 - Aboukir, Cressy and Hogue. In the space of little more than an hour, 1,460 human beings died and 36,000 tons of ships sank. First Officer of U9, Johannes Spiess recalled... 'as the torpedoes hit their target everyone cheered" But as they listened to the groans of the dying ships... 'Those of us in the conning tower tried, by cursing the English who had incited the Japanese and all Europe against us, to dispel the gruesome impression mode on us by the drowning men struggling in the midst of floating wreckage and clinging to upturned lifeboats ... with a sense of tragic horror for long minutes, we were lost as if in some kind of trance'. In these moments of shocked realisation, this once comical 'tin-can' had come of age ... an awesome new weapon was born. The ancient dream of warring men to strike a deathblow unseen had become a reality. It is the norm in the evolutionary design of weapons that they served some other purpose before they became instruments of war. The submarine from the beginning was designed for destruction. In the same century that William Bourne conceived the idea of a submersible vessel , Monsieur de Son built a submarine boat in Rotterdam of which he claimed. "Doeth undertake in one day to destroy a hondred ships, be immune to fire, storm and bullet unless it please God" Submarine 3 Home