Sea Battle Quotes
In 1930, Japan, Britain, and the United States had signed an agreement that submarines would not sink merchant vessels without having first placed passengers and crew in a place of safety. However, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and bombed civilians as well as military and had a pattern of bombing and shelling civilians in China, the U. S. took the position that Japan had abrogated all treaties and therefore abrogated the 1930 treaty. It was more of a symbolic gesture as at the time the American forces were in no shape to attack Japanese merchant shipping though later in the war, it became material. By that time, the Japanese had murdered American prisoners of war on the Bataan Death March and elsewhere and had slaughtered civilians in the Philippines and all the other territories that they invaded. The niceties of the 1930 treaty was one of the first casualties of Japanese aggression.
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.
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.
The sloop Margaretta was escorting 2 small merchant vessels came into the port of Machias, Massachusetts to purchase some lumber and firewood. However the commanding officer of Margaretta did not like the terms of the negotiations and threatened the town. An aroused and angry group of patriots then boarded and attacked the two merchant ships. The commander of Margaretta then maneuvered out of the port having lost the two small ships. But the Patriots were angry with the commander of the sloop and being excellent seamen who knew the local waters, used one of the merchant ships and a small local vessel to chase down the Naval sloop. They then boarded and captured Margaretta and fatally wounded the commander, James Moore. While Lexington was the first land victory for the patriots, this was the first sea victory and the Margaretta was the first British warship that was captured by the Patriots.
Epic Historical Poet. The king had to share the booty with the crew in order to get a crew. When Olaf Haraldson went on his first boat raid as a teen, he was crowned king on the boat, but had to row and fight with the others for at that point he had no land or property except the boat. He died controlling almost all of Norway.
1st Earl of Oxford. Churchill was then First Lord of the Admiralty, and an enthusiastic proponent of entering the First World War.
