The same day, the U-boat sunk the Lusitania, killing 1, 200 civilians on their way from America.

ECONOMIST: The Fastnet Lighthouse: Light on a lonely rock | The

Torpedoed by a U-boat in May, 1915, the Cunard liner sank in eighteen minutes too short an interval, in other words, to generate stories.

NEWYORKER: Unsinkable

"Piggy-backing on a large U-boat, the Seehund had the capability of reaching the Foyle where there was intense naval and merchant navy activity, " he said.

BBC: Experts to examine River Foyle, Derry, wreck

The minister was told about the HMS Royal Oak which was torpedoed by a German U-boat with the loss of 833 lives at Scapa Flow, off the Orkney coast, on 14 October 1939.

BBC: poppy memorial wreath

The stated reason was the pressure of the tense international situation - a German U-boat's torpedoing of the RMS Lusitania in May of that year cost 139 American lives - but many reporters suspected Wilson had simply got tired of them.

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In 1916 Chaim Weizmann, who later became Israel's first president, worked out how to use chestnuts to solve the lack of acetone, a component of the cordite needed by the British navy to repel German U-boat attacks in the first world war.

ECONOMIST: The Atlantic Ocean

The straightness of his back came from something else: that on his third attempt at escape from prison camp he was beaten senseless, and his skull and neck broken, by two Breton peasants with pitchforks, and was invalided out in exchange for a U-boat commander.

ECONOMIST: M.R.D. Foot

Roth expands it into a rich Louisiana picaresque, ranging far and wide as Benjamin tastes romance in Russia with the wife of an English diplomat (a beguiling Tilda Swinton), comes off second-best in an encounter with a German U-boat, and pursues Daisy, the love of his life, first to New York and then to Paris.

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Washington (CNN) -- A U.S. military supply ship fired at a small boat in the Persian Gulf on Monday after it came too close, killing one person onboard and wounding three, Defense Department officials said.

CNN: U.S. Navy ship fires at small boat in Persian Gulf