Unfortunetly the germans probably had good reason to sink it. Just saying!
The Germans actually advertised in the shipping pages of the New York papers that they could not guarantee the safety of passengers embarking on the Lusitania. This was routine during the Great War.
The Lustitania was operating in war zone. Ireland was then part of the United Kingdom. Further, she was carrying Canadian Army officers, bound for Flanders, as well as some of their wives. She was also laden with cargo, including cotton. Any cargo had military signifigance. She also had a Royal Navy contingent and two deck mounted six inch guns which would have precluded any possibility for a U-Boat to have issued a challenge or a warning. (The Lusitania had a great speed advantage over any U-Boat. The U-Boats depended on passenger ships running into their path.)
The Brits had for some time been flying AMERICAN flags on British ships sailing into u-boat infested waters around Britain.
Wilson, an avowed Anglophile, allowed British agents to patrol U.S. ports while the U.S. was ostensibly a “neutral” in the war, to try and stop legal shipments of goods to Germany.
The Brits wanted to drag the U.S. into the war they unfortunately and stupidly blundered into to save the FRENCH and Czarist Russians.
WW1 was one of the dumbest adventures a Democrat Administration ever got the U.S. into. It set the stage for Hitler, and WW2 - besides getting thousands of brave Americans killed for a bunch of damn Frenchmen, and the doltist British government.
I believe Wilson, FDR (the U.S. Naval Secretry) and the British Government deliberately contrived the Lusitania incident in a further attempt to involve us in WW1.