Patrick - Oh what a tangled Webb you weave! ;D

Yours is a rising tide that sinks all boats.

You're not neutral when ferrying munitions- Lusitania deserved to be sunk. Oh boo-hoo, the German Wilhelm Gustloff was ferrying civilians and wounded in the Baltic in 1945 when a Soviet sub caught it and scored with 3 torpedos, killing 6000+ people. War is hell. Anyway 555 for a good song...

A German whining about a war crime? What next, Republicans whining about Democrats out-fundraising them? Red Sox fans accusing the Yankees of steroid use? Stoke City fans singing "Same old Arsenal, always cheating"? Oh, wait, those things already happen. The truth is, America should have taught the Kaiser a lesson starting right then and there. It would have shut up the corporal with the stupid mustache as well.

The Germans issued a medal to commemorate the sinking. It featured a skeletal ticket agent selling tickets to passengers ignoring the Embassy warning. The deck of the ship was filled with cannon and airplanes. "Gesellschaft über alles" (Business before all else) was the motto. The designer of the medal put the date of the sinking at May 5, two days before the Lusitania was actually torpedoed. This was later corrected, but by then the British were already producing exact copies of the medal with leaflets explaining how the Germans had stalked the ship and planned to sink it, and even had medals made up in advance. I've seen a number of these medals over the years, including one with a Spanish language leaflet, indicating widespread distribution. The Lusitania was not carrying aircraft or cannon, of which the US Army was woefully short. It was carrying some type of artillery shells. This may have been the cause of a secondary explosion after the torpedo hit. The purpose of the German medal was to justify the sinking. "Rules of Warfare" is one of those terms that has always struck me as a grim oxymoron. But in 1915, some people still paid lip service to the idea.