Lies and half-truths about the war

In a wartime history of Hyde in Cheshire, there are a number of anecdotes about the experiences of local inhabitants. When the Lusitania was torpedoed, two local people were drowned. Vernon Livermore, a ship's bugler from Hyde, survived. Nothing particularly remarkable about that, except that it turns out that he had also been a ship's bugler on the Titanic. The history doesn't record whether ‘Jonah’ Livermore went to sea again, or indeed whether any shipping line would employ him.

Livermore wasn't the only link between the two doomed ships. The sinking of the Lusitania evoked memories of the Titanic, barely three years earlier. But whereas the latter was generally seen as an act, perhaps even a judgement, of God; the Lusitania sinking was understood as the work of the devil.

The torpedoing of the liner was the final evidence required to complete the ‘demonising’ of the enemy in the public mind. But it was also an act of war that involved the deliberate killing of over a thousand civilians. Every step on the way to the demonisation of Germany was prompted by real events, albeit events interpreted in a highly partisan framework. Any discussion of atrocity propaganda must bear in mind the reality of atrocities. That there was exaggeration and invention is undeniable, but the inhabitants of Hyde knew civilians who had died on the Lusitania, the inhabitants of West Hartlepool knew civilians killed by the German navy and the inhabitants of Folkestone knew civilians killed by bombing.