The RMS Falaba was carrying 13 tons of high explosive cargo
which detonated when she was struck by the U-28‘s torpedo .

On March 28, 1915, the first American citizen is killed in the eight-month-old
European conflict that would become known as the First World War, Leon
Thrasher (below), a 31-year-old mining engineer from Massachusetts,
drowned when a German submarine, the U-28, torpedoed the cargo-
passenger ship RMS Falaba (above), on its way from Liverpool. 

Leon Chester Thrasher