Joseph Goebbels Quotes
In the long run sea power will be no match for air power.
There were few military thinkers at that time who would agree with Goebbels on this point.
Joseph Goebbels, 1897-1945, Nazi Germany Minister of Propaganda, 1939
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Military men tend to rely so much on military history that they are almost always fighting the last war. Soon air power would supplant sea power as the critical factor. Then nuclear power, and then nuclear weapons became too severe for actual use and yet wars still continued with no consensus as to that will be in the future.
Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.
He didn’t succeed until Mahan wrote his marvelous treatise.
Xerxes ignored her advice and attacked the Greek fleet at the Battle of Salamis. As Artemisia had predicted, the outnumbered Greeks routed the forces of Xerxes’ coalition preserving “The West” from dominance by “The East.” Artemisia’s fleet was the only one in the coalition to enjoy military success in the battle. See Xerxes {45633}. Artemisia is one of the first female military leaders and the only female naval commander until the end of the 20th century. She was 2500 years before her time.
This quotation illustrates several historical differences of the past with today. To be a world superpower, one had to have a dominant navy. Yet that navy was, in Churchill’s concept, a defensive system. It could protect the nation from invasion, and its merchant ships on the seas, but a navy provided no threat to invade towns and villages in Europe or elsewhere. Germany and France in contrast, with their large armies could invade other nations and menace Europe and Asia. It also illustrates why the navy and the army were considered completely separate departments of government in that they had different functions. The early American government had a Navy Department and Secretary but no Secretary of the Army or standing army.
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. One of Adolf Hitler's close associates and most devoted followers, he was known for his skills in public speaking and his deep and virulent antisemitism, which led to his supporting the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
