Submarine Warfare Quotes

The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.

… the war which began on August 1st, 1914, was the greatest crime against humanity and the freedom of peoples that any nation, calling itself civilized, has ever consciously committed. For many years the rulers of Germany, true to the Prussian tradition, strove for a position of dominance in Europe. They were not satisfied with that growing prosperity and influence to which Germany was entitled, and which all other nations were willing to accord her, in the society of free and equal peoples. They required that they should be able to dictate and tyrannize to a subservient Europe, as they dictated and tyrannised over a subservient Germany. Germany's responsibility, however, is not confined to having planned and started the war. She is no less responsible for the savage and inhuman manner in which it was conducted. The Germans they deliberately carried out a series of promiscuous shootings and burnings with the sole object of terrifying the inhabitants into submission by the very frightfulness of their action. They were the first to use poisonous gas, notwithstanding the appalling suffering it entailed. They began the bombing and long distance shelling of towns for no military object, but solely for the purpose of reducing the morale of their opponents by striking at their women and children. They commenced the submarine campaign with its piratical challenge to international law, and its destruction of great numbers of innocent passengers and sailors, in mid ocean, far from succour, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, and the yet more ruthless submarine crews. They drove thousands of men and women and children with brutal savagery into slavery in foreign lands. They allowed barbarities to be practiced against their prisoners of war from which the most uncivilized people would have recoiled.

I think a submarine is a very worthwhile weapon. I believe we can defend ourselves with submarines and all our troops back at home. This whole idea that we have to be in 130 countries and 900 bases... is an old-fashioned idea.

If the British Fleet were lost or captured, the Atlantic might be dominated by Germany, a power hostile to our way of life, controlling in that event most of the ships and shipbuilding facilities of Europe.

We shall never forget that it was our submarines that held the lines against the enemy while our fleets replaced losses and repaired wounds.

The reason given by the President in asking Congress to declare war against Germany is that the German government has declared certain war zones, within which, by the use of submarines, she sinks, without notice, American ships and destroys American lives.

Execute Unrestricted Air and Submarine Warfare Against Japan

Our duty was to try and find the Japanese fleet. We never did find the Japanese fleet and I am awfully glad, because they had attacked us there with six carriers, three battleships, 10 or 15 cruisers, and about 20 destroyers.

I didn't know anything about the Lusitania. I started reading because I had nothing else in my plate. And as soon as I start reading, I thought now this is interesting, you know, the hows of what happened, the actual - the actual sinking of the ship.

In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before. Man used to be content to slaughter his fellow men on a single plane---the earth's surface. Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times a bloody as it was before

Like the destroyer, the submarine has created its own type of officer and man with language and traditions apart from the rest of the service, and yet at the heart unchangingly of the Service

The sinking of the Lusitania wasn't the proximal cause for the U.S. entering WWI. It was almost two years between the sinking and the war declaration, and President Wilson's request for war never mentions the Lusitania.

One of the really amazing things about the Lusitania saga was that, at the time, there existed in the admiralty a super-secret spy entity known as 'Room 40'.

I don't know where you're reading all this stuff, but it's pretty accurate, yes. It was in 1942. I was on a ship called the Accelo(ph) coming back from the Red Sea and we were sunk off the coast of Africa by a German submarine. And I was in a lifeboat for 14 days and landed and lived with the Pondos in South Africa while - who took care of us and took care of me. I had some wound in my left leg.

My grandad was a submariner; my mum's dad was in the navy.

I was fascinated by the [operation] of a U-boat ... where every single man was an indispensable part of the whole. Every submariner, I am sure, has experienced in his heart [the joy of] the task entrusted to him [and] felt as rich as a king.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

At first glance, the story of the Lusitania doesn't seem like the sort of thing I would take on. I usually like ideas that are a little bit more complex, things that people don't know about - or maybe they once did, but now you bring it to life for them for the first time.

The battle of the North Atlantic is a grim business, and it isn't going to be won by charm and personality.

I would say that during my lifetime, one of the worst political scandals in Sweden was absolutely what happened surrounding the affair of the submarines in Swedish waters in 1982, where there were supposed to be Russian submarines close to Stockholm. And the military of Sweden never got one up.

When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was 'Hunt for Red October' by Tom Clancy.

I catch myself judging myself as that 13-year-old boy, who, of course, rightfully points out that he is only a child. And my membership - well, I was drafted into the Waffen-SS and didn't exactly volunteer, which was just as idiotic. I wanted to be on the submarines and then ended up with the Waffen-SS.

My father-in-law was a nuclear-submarine captain. My father was in the military.

Captain William Thomas Turner, hero; villain, Schwieger. As I started doing research into him and into the submarine and so forth, I found that I was growing increasingly sympathetic to him. He's a young guy, 30, handsome, well-liked by his crew, humane.

I do think hubris played a role here as well, the belief that the Lusitania was too big and too fast to ever be caught by any submarine, and that, in any case, no U-boat commander would think to attack the ship because to do so would violate the long-held rules governing naval warfare against merchant shipping.