Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes
It was in the days when France's power was already broken upon the seas, and when more of her three-deckers lay rotting in the Medway than were to be found in Brest harbour. But her frigates and corvettes still scoured the ocean, closely followed ever by those of her rival. At the uttermost ends of the earth these dainty vessels, with sweet names of girls or of flowers, mangled and shattered each other for the honour of the four yards of bunting which flapped from the end of their gaffs.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. "The Slapping Sal." McClure's Magazine, vol. 1, no. 3, Aug. 1893, p. 206.
There were few military thinkers at that time who would agree with Goebbels on this point.
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.
Koxinga had an overwhelmingly superior force, and wanted the Dutch to surrender and avoid bloodshed. The Dutch with their typical European colonial attitude, had great difficulty surrendering to “natives” even if outnumbered. Finally, the Dutch Commander agreed to surrender. Koxinga then established a Chinese Government on the Island and became a great hero of the Ming Dynasty. Note the graphic of the statue to him which is one of the very few Chinese memorial statues to a military hero showing him in action—very similar to European statues. Already Koxinga’s massed wooden junks with small cannon and fire torches had sunk one of the Dutch warships (they were not iron but had some iron plates on the deck to protect the gunners) and there were so many junks that the other Dutch ships sailed out to sea to avoid the Chinese huge number of junks.
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.
Months after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the President complained about the reliability of the information he had gotten from the navy, The escalaton of the Vietnam War was the result of Johnson acting on this information.
This article reached America where the insult proved a patriotic rallying point.
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.
As in modern times the Navy encouraged the media and leading writers to promote their latest weaponry. Hawthorne however shortly after the Monitor and the Merrimac battle saw the future in terms even more dramatic than most of the military.
This document was used at the trials of the Japanese War Criminal at the end of WWII. However, MacArthur would not allow the prosecution of all who were guilty of murdering helpless crews of Allied ships after they were disabled. He just wanted a few examples and even would not try the Emperor whom he felt was more useful in his position than as a criminal.
Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle KStJ DL was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are considered milestones in the field of crime fiction.
