Quotes About U-boats

merchantman sunk in the Atlantic, the 500th U.S. ship lost to U-boats since Pearl Harbor. The domestic news was also war-related, if less febrile: the first meatless Tuesday had gone well in New York; penitentiary inmates with only one felony conviction were urged to apply for parole so they could serve in the Army; and a survey of department stores in Washington revealed that "there aren't any nylon stockings to be had for love or money.

If U-boats torpedoed a transport during the Atlantic passage, how many destroyers should be left behind to pick up survivors? Hewitt was not certain he could spare any without jeopardizing the task force, and the prospect of abandoning men in the water gnawed at him. Had word of the expedition leaked? Every day he received reports that someone, somewhere had been talking too much.

In May of that year, forty-one U-boats were destroyed by Allied forces, a disaster that came to be known as "Black May" and which Dönitz described as "unimaginable, even in my wildest dreams." The "Happy Time" had yielded to Sauregurkenzeit, or "Sour-Pickle Time.

Where in May 1915 the navy had only thirty U-boats, by 1917 it had more than one hundred, many larger and more powerful than Schwieger's U-20 and carrying more torpedoes.

U-boats in fact traveled underwater as little as possible, typically only in extreme weather or when attacking ships or dodging destroyers.

German U-boats were poised to impose a blockade of the British Isles that threatened that island nation with starvation as well as defeat.

Enigma decipherments gave the locations of numerous U-boats, but it would have been unwise to attack every single one of them, because a sudden, unexplained increase in successful British attacks would suggest to Germany that its communications were being deciphered.

Enemy submarines are to be called U-Boats. The term submarine is to be reserved for Allied under water vessels. U-Boats are those dastardly villains who sink our ships, while submarines are those gallant and noble craft which sink theirs.

The backdrop of their bright lights, visible up to ten miles from shore, created a neon shooting gallery in which the U-boats nightly lay in wait on the seaward side of the shipping lanes and picked off their sharply silhouetted victims at will. A single U-boat prowling off New York harbor in January sank eight ships, including three tankers, in just twelve hours. On February 28 a German

the women used these Enigma messages—along with files on individual U-boats and their commanders—to track, with pins, every U-boat and convoy whose location was known. At another desk, several other Goucher women, including Jacqueline Jenkins (later the mother of Bill Nye, aka Bill Nye the Science Guy), tracked "neutral shipping" based on daily position reports.

Let me see a complete reorganization of the North Atlantic fleet's defensive strategy against Nazi U-boats. And if it won't go on one side of one sheet of paper, it hasn't been properly thought out—Winston Churchill.