As far as I can surmise it was the message Turner received telling him there were "submarines" plural that had Turner confused, resulting in his decisions that then put the Lusitania into the path of the U-20.
pg. 336 reading on my ipad Air.....On THE BRIDGE, Turner received a new message from the Admiralty that confused things further: "Submarines 5 miles south of Cape Clear, proceeding west when sighted at 10 a.m."
The Lusitania had already passed Cape Clear. If correct, this message indicated the threat might also be past__the submarines, plural again, were behind and heading out to sea. Captain Turner congratulated himself on apparently missing these in the fog. He knew that even if their commanders now spotted the smoke from the ship's funnels and turned around, they would have no hope of catching up. While this offered some comfort, there was still the matter of the earlier report of submarines active in St. George's Channel, south of the Coningberg Light Vessel, dead ahead.
On the Lusitania's bridge, Captain Turner faced a dilemma that nothing in his long experience at sea had prepared him to manage. If the morning's wireless messages, were correct, there were U-boats directly ahead of him, and behind. On top of this, he faced a timing problem. Liverpool at this point still lay about 250 nautical miles ahead. At the entrance to the city's harbor bay the notorious Mersey Bar, which he could pass only at high tide. If Turner accelerated and proceeded at the highest speed he could achieve with only three boiler rooms in operation, or 21 knots, he would arrive far too early. With stopping out of the question, he would be forced to circle in the Irish Sea, smoke billowing from the ship's three operating funnels in open invitation to any submarine within a radius of twenty miles.
There was another dimension to the problem. The time was now just past noon. No matter what speed Turner traveled, he would end up having to pass through the St. George's Channel at night, with fog an every-present danger. As it was, the fog that had enclosed the ship all morning had left Turner with a less precise sense of his location than he would have liked. Compounding this imprecision was the fact that he was farther from the coast than usual__about 20 miles, when in fine weather he might come as close as 1 mile. He called his two most senior officers to the bridge, Staff Captain Anderson and First Officer John Preston Piper, to ask their advice, and at length reached a decision. First he would pinpoint his location. Once Turner knew his precise position, he planned to maintain a speed of 18 knots so that he would arrive at the Mersey Bay early the next morning, at just the right time to enter the harbor without pause.
Turner planned as well to alter his course later in the day to bring the Lusitania closer to shore, so that he would pass near the Coningbeg Light Vessel before entering the narrowest portion of the St. George's Channel. He understood that his contravened the Admiralty's advisory that captains pass lightships and other navigational markers at "mid-channel." But the Admiralty had reported submarines 20 miles south of the lightship, a location that any mariner traversing that 45-mile-wide stretch would have described as midchannel. To follow the Admiralty's advisory would have meant sailing directly toward the waiting submarines.
Then of course we can't forget the fact....... Alfred Allen Booth, chairman of Cunard, learned of the attacks of the Centurion, the Candidate, and the schooner Earl Of Lathom while reading his morning paper. He knew his company's flagship was due to travel the same waters that very day. He met with the senior naval officer at Liverpool, Capt. Harry Stileman, and pleaded with him to take measures to protect the Lusitania. Booth urged that a message be sent to Turner, notifying him that the two Harrison Line ships had been torpedoed and sunk. Under war rules, Booth was not himself empowered to send a warning, or an other command, directly to Turner. Booth came away believing that a detailed message would be sent and that the Admiralty would order the Lusitania to divert to Queenstown, well short of Liverpool, until immediate U-boat threat was past.
The message was apparently the product of Chairman Booth's plea, but it fell short of what he had asked for. Only eighteen words long, it conveyed no details about what had occurred over the previous twenty-four hours. Captain Turner, the one man at that moment who needed details the most, never learned of the loss of the two Harrison Line vessels and the Earl of Lathom.
So even though there were no escorts for the Lusitania, and there was intent to drag the United States into the war by sinking ships with Americans on them, and all the other prior actions factoring in......the fact that Turner did NOT receive accurate, clear information in that last message was what I would consider the major factor in the sinking of the ship. He could have taken a different course, with the correct information. One letter "S" making submarine plural rather than single made all the difference, along with him not knowing what had occurred just 24 hrs. prior.
Can we call it human error? An accident of typing an "S", where there should not have been one?
