The Falsification of History: Our Distorted Reality (42 page)

Three German spies attempted to confirm that the so-called ‘90 tons of unrefrigerated butter’ destined for a British naval base were weapons and ammunition.
 
 The spies were detained on the ship, but the weapons loaded onto Lusitania were seen by a group of German immigrant dock workers and reported to the German embassy.
 
In order to warn Americans about the weapons shipment, the Imperial German Embassy attempted to place an advertisement in 50 East Coast newspapers. The ads were due to be printed on the 22nd April 1915, but the US State Department blocked all the ads except one which somehow escaped the net.
 

George Viereck, the man who placed the ads for the embassy, protested to the State Department on the 26th April 1915 that the ads were blocked.
 
Viereck met with US Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan and produced copies of Lusitania's supplementary manifests.
 
Bryan, impressed by the evidence that Lusitania had carried weapons, cleared publication of the warning but someone more powerful than the Secretary of State, most likely Colonel Mandel House or President Wilson, overruled Bryan.

Nonetheless, one ad slipped past the State Department censorship. The single advertisement that slipped past the government censors appeared in the Des Moines Register (below)

The warning read:

"NOTICE!
 
Travellers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
 
IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY WASHINGTON, D.C., APRIL 22, 1915."

Captain Dow, the Lusitania’s captain immediately before the current incumbent, Captain Turner, resigned on the 8th March 1915 because he was no longer willing ‘to carry the responsibility of mixing passengers with munitions or contraband.’
 
Captain Dow had a ‘near miss’ just two days earlier and was aware that the rules of naval warfare had changed in October 1914 when Churchill issued orders that British merchant ships with munitions or contraband must ram U-boats.
 
Prior to this change by Churchill, both England and Germany adhered to Cruiser Rules. The Cruiser Rules enabled crews and passengers to escape in lifeboats before being fired on but the new Churchill ram rules meant that the German U-boats could no longer surface to issue a warning and fire while submerged.
 
Churchill explained this ruthlessness thus:

“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.”

The above combined with the next Churchill quote speaks volumes about what really happened and why.

“There are many kinds of manoeuvres in war... There are manoeuvres in time, in diplomacy, in mechanics, in psychology; all of which are removed from the battlefield, but react often decisively upon it... The manoeuvre which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle.”

On the 7th May 1915, Lusitania slowed to 75% speed hoping the English escort vessel Juno would arrive.
 
Unknown to Captain Turner, Winston Churchill had ordered Juno to return to port and so Churchill’s order left Lusitania alone and unprotected in an area known to be swarming with U boats.
 
To put this in perspective, Britain had deciphered the German communications code in December 1914 and therefore the level of detail known by the British Admiralty was so precise that even U boat numbers and general locations were known.
 
For example, the British Admiralty knew U-30 left the area for Germany on the 4th May and the U-27 left the area because of jammed bow planes.

In a 1981 book, ‘Seven Days to Disaster: The Sinking of the Lusitania’, by Des Hickey and Gus Smith, they reported that one of the crewmen on the U-20 responsible for passing the order to fire to the torpedo room was Charles Voegele.
 
Voegele refused to kill civilians of a neutral country, and upon returning to Germany was court-martialled and imprisoned for three years.
 
One torpedo was fired on the 7th May and the warhead's 300 pounds of explosives detonated upon contact with Lusitania.
 
The Lusitania’s Captain Turner reported the first explosion sounded ‘like a heavy door being slammed shut’ and was followed by a much larger explosion that rocked the ship.
 
Turner wrote in the log ‘an unusually heavy detonation’.
 
Lusitania sank 15-18 minutes later with a huge loss of life.

On the 28th May 1915, Germany's official response to the U.S. government's protest states the German government has no intention of attacking US vessels which are not guilty of hostile acts.
 
The Imperial German government wrote that Lusitania...

“...was one of the largest and fastest English commerce steamers, constructed with government funds as auxiliary cruisers, and is expressly included in the navy list published by the British Admiralty. It is, moreover, known to the Imperial government from reliable information furnished by its officials and neutral passengers that for some time practically all the more valuable English merchant vessels have been provided with guns, ammunition and other weapons, and reinforced with a crew specially practiced in manning guns. According to reports at hand here, the Lusitania when she left New York undoubtedly had guns on board which were mounted under decks and masked.”

The official letter from the German government also spells out that Lusitania had 5,400 cases of ammunition that would be used to kill German soldiers.
 
An exceptionally noteworthy section of the letter states that the British merchant marine ships received secret instruction in February by the British Admiralty to seek protection behind neutral flags and when so disguised, attack German submarines by ramming them.
 
The German official response that war contraband was on board explains the second explosion.

The Elite banking families involved and Britain's leaders, even a century later, still fear the negative repercussions from Americans when they learn they were tricked into World War I.

For decades, the British and American governments have denied that there were weapons on Lusitania and the site was declared a protected wreck site, denying diver access.
 
To further frustrate the ability to determine what Lusitania had really carried, since 1946 the Royal Navy has repeatedly dropped depth charges on top of Lusitania, using the site for target practice.
 
In 1968, in further attempts to keep the truth hidden, the British Secret Service unsuccessfully attempted to buy the salvage rights to Lusitania.

In 2003 the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a deliberate act of deceit and treachery designed to protect the version of history promoted by his puppet masters, ordered the destruction of government documents containing absolute proof that Lusitania was a covert munitions carrier.
 
This is a classic example of one small attempt to re-write history or more accurately, to protect a false version of history.

While the British government aggressively worked to distort the truth, weapons were confirmed in July 2006 when Victor Quirke of the Cork Sub Aqua Club found 15,000 rounds of .303 bullets in the bow section of the ship.
 
And on the 2nd April 2007, Cyber Diver News Network reported that the American owner of the Lusitania wreck, F. Gregg Bemis, Jr., had won the case to conduct salvage operations almost a century after the sinking.
 
The British Arts and Heritage Ministry did not protest the use of the Lusitania as target practice for British depth charges but did help ‘respect the sanctity of the site’ by opposing salvage operations.

Authors have written for many years that 1,201 people were sacrificed on Lusitania to create a reason for the US to enter World War I.
 
Historian Howard Zinn wrote in ‘A People's History of the United States’, that Lusitania carried 1,248 cases of 3-inch shells, 4,927 boxes of cartridges (1,000 rounds in each box), and 2,000 more cases of small-arms ammunition.
 
Colin Simpson claims that ‘Churchill conspired to put the Lusitania in danger with the hope of sparking an incident to bring America into World War I’ and historian Patrick Beesley supports Simpson's assertion.
 
Christopher Hitchens' book, ‘Blood Class and Nostalgia’, further implicates First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill in a deliberate action to pull America into World War I. 
 
History professor Ralph Raico and senior scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute notes that Churchill wrote the week prior to Lusitania sinking, that it was ‘most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany’.

Winston Churchill did indeed say and do many things to drag America into World War I.
 
He attempted to mislead both the British and American public that the sinking of Lusitania was premeditated.
 
Churchill did this for several reasons including to distract people from the reports that the Juno destroyer protection had been deliberately removed.
 
He attributed the lack of destroyer protection as being confused with internal disputes within the Admiralty about a bumbled Gallipoli campaign in the Ottoman Empire.
 
His Lusitania war propaganda also included misinforming the public that multiple torpedoes were fired to explain how the ship sunk in 18 minutes and further fuel hatred for the German people.

Berlin announced on the 31st January, 1917 that its submarines would sink all ships aiding Britain.
 
This announcement, combined with the Lusitania sinking and the British Intelligence service manufactured bombshell in the form of a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to the German Minister to offering Mexico money to attack the U.S. ultimately proved successful and on 6th April 1917 the U.S. did finally declare war on Germany.

“If people really knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know.”
 
David Lloyd George, Britain's Prime Minister during the First World War, to C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, December 1917

The treaty that officially ended WWI was the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
 
This is the reason why the dates of this war are sometimes recorded as 1914-19.
 
Although it has to be said that it has now been recently surreptitiously announced (2009) that WWI has now ‘officially’ ended due to Germany’s final reparation payment having been made, 90 years after the event.

Several interesting personalities attended these meetings.
 
In the British delegation was the British economist John Maynard Keynes and representing the American banking interests was Paul Warburg, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
 
His brother Max, the head of the German banking firm of M.M. Warburg and Company, of Hamburg, Germany and who was not only in charge of Germany's finances but was a leader of the German espionage network, was there as a representative of the German government.
 
Do we need any more proof of collusion between the two sides to achieve maximum impact on the welfare of ordinary Germans?

The Treaty was written to end the war, but another delegate to the conference, Lord Curzon of England, the British Foreign Secretary, saw through what the actual intent was and said: "This is no peace; this is only a truce for twenty years."
 
Lord Curzon felt that the terms of the Treaty were setting the stage for a second world war and what is even more interesting; he had correctly predicted the year it would start as 1939.