Word: athenia
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...destiny was as kind to the tycoon as it was cruel to 1,450 Canadian and U. S. travelers who sought last week to get home from thunderous Europe. In the 13,581-ton S. S. Athenia of the Donaldson Atlantic Line (affiliate of Cunard-White Star) they embarked at Glasgow, Belfast and Liverpool for Montreal. At 8:59 p. m. Sunday, about 200 mi. west of the Hebrides, a mortal explosion suddenly rocked and ripped the Athenia's, hull, killed perhaps 100 passengers & crew, started her sinking fast. All hands got safely into lifeboats. One of the first...
Atrocity No. 1 of World War II came just ten hours after Great Britain entered her state of War with Germany.* In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill celebrated his return as First Lord of the Admiralty with a speech in which he said: "It [the Athenia] was certainly torpedoed without the slightest warning and in circumstances which the opinion of the world after the late War-in which Germany concurred-had stigmatized as inhumane. . . .The ship was not armed as an auxiliary cruiser...
Berlin officials announced: "All German naval forces have the strictest instructions to act in accordance with the rules established by international law." They suggested the Athenia might have run into a British mine. To this the British Admiralty retorted there were no British mines 200 miles west of Ireland. Retorted Berlin: "It is likely that a British submarine fired the torpedo as a propaganda measure to influence United States neutrality...
Smashing this barbed-wire entanglement of reactions came headlines like an artillery barrage-planes over Warsaw, French soldiers assaulting the West Wall, the Athenia torpedoed...
What would have happened if the Athenia had gone down with losses like those of the Lusitania? How would U. S. neutrality be affected by such incidents? What was the meaning of the search of the Bremen...