Karl Donitz Quotes
Our losses have reached an intolerable level. The enemy air force played a decisive role in inflicting these high losses.
Dönitz, Karl. Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days. Translated by R. H. Stevens, Naval Institute Press, 1990, p. 341.
All deceased American troops who were killed in the Middle East were returned to the mortuary unit at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, In previous wars the press had access to the mortuary and showed pictures of the flag draped caskets returning. However in the Iraq War, the administration, trying to deemphasize the high American death toll of troops, made Dover off limits to the press and made all the processes secret. However, the exact number of casualties and their identities became known through other sources and the media ran photo of the deceased.
Prior to whites settling in America, various Indian tribes had a long history of fierce fighting for control of Kentucky. The Transylvania Land company negotiated for the “rights” to Kentucky. Dragging Canoe, who opposed the treaty, argued that the land had a bad history and would be very difficult to settle. Poet Theodore O’Hara described Kentuckians as “Sons of the Dark and Bloody Ground” in his poem, The Bivouac of the Dead.
At Potsdam the Allies had called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese and reiterated what had been allied policy that the surrender must be unconditional. Even after the Hiroshima bombing, the Japanese military cabinet voted not to surrender. After the second atomic bomb, the Emperor decided to surrender, but even then there was an attempted military coup to prevent that. Fortunately, the coup failed. We did not have any more atomic bombs immediately ready and it would have taken months to construct more.
Karl Dönitz was a German admiral during the Nazi era who briefly succeeded Adolf Hitler as the German head of state in 1945. As Supreme Commander of the Navy beginning in 1943, he played a major role in the naval history of World War II. He was convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.
