Quotes About U-boat

Raeder and Dönitz had objected on the practical grounds that such an order would undermine U-boat morale: officers and men would react against shooting defenceless people in the water and would assume that the enemy would mete out the same treatment to them in reprisal if the positions were reversed.

The Germany Navy immediately launched a tremendous U-boat building program which by the end of the war produced a total of 1102 new boats. Production rose from two boats per month in 1939, to over thirty a month in the middle of the war.

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.

U-boat commanders called this their `Happy Time'. Between January and July 1942 they sank 495 merchant ships and 142 tankers, a total of 2,500,000 tons. Why did it take America so long to respond to such an obvious threat?

In this day before sonar, a submarine traveled utterly blind, trusting entirely in the accuracy of sea charts. One great fear of all U-boat men was that a half-sunk derelict or an uncharted rock might lie in their path.

The disaster had an important secondary effect: because two of the cruisers had stopped to help survivors of the initial attack and thus made themselves easy targets, the Admiralty issued orders forbidding large British warships from going to the aid of U-boat victims.

were the U-boat pens and other naval facilities at a number of locations in France, as well as V-weapon sites. However, the Atlantic Wall formed a major part of the Organization Todt's construction work and probably amounted to about 65 per cent of the work it carried out in the West. It was, indeed, a monumental project, both literally and figuratively. Nevertheless, describing

The Red Baron and his eighty combat victories in the sky pale in comparison to legendary U-boat captain Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière and his 194 sunken ships.

No more than five minutes later, the U-boat goes away. Shaftoe imagines it tumbling end-over-end down the side of the reef, headed for an undersea canyon, scattering gold bars and mercury globules into the black water like fairy dust. Shaftoe's back on the corvette and everyone is pounding him on the back and toasting him. He just wants to find a private place to open up that purple bottle.

By June 1943 King became cautiously optimistic. In a letter to Vice Admiral Andrews he wrote, "The U-boat situation looks very encouraging for the time being. In these matters I am afraid I am a hard-boiled skeptic — but I am always glad to be disappointed in my pessimism!

BERLIN, June 18 It's in the bag, signed today in London. The Wilhelmstrasse quite elated. Germany gets a U-boat tonnage equal to Britain's. Why the British have agreed to this is beyond me. German submarines almost beat them in the last war, and may in the next.

Room 40 knew a U-boat was heading south to Liverpool - knew the boat's history; knew that it was now somewhere in the North Atlantic under orders to sink troop transports and any other British vessel it encountered; and knew as well that the submarine was armed with enough shells and torpedoes to sink a dozen ships.

On Abraham Lincoln's 106th birthday, February 12, 1915, as fighting raged in Europe and Germany prepared to begin its U-boat counter-blockade, workers in Washington, D.C., laid a cornerstone of the Lincoln Memorial. Fifty thousand people would attend the completed memorial's dedication on May 30, 1922.