Why Was The German Use Of The Unterseeboot Considered To Defy International Law?

Why Was The German Use Of The Unterseeboot Considered To Defy International Law
1, In order to pursue his goal of using American influence overseas only when it was a moral imperative, Wilson put which man in the position of Secretary of State?

Charles Hughes Theodore Roosevelt William Jennings Bryan John Pershing

2, Why was the German use of the unterseeboot considered to defy international law?

because other countries did not have similar technology because they refused to warn their targets before firing because they constituted cruel and unusual methods because no international consensus existed to employ submarine technology

3, To what extent were Woodrow Wilson’s actual foreign policy decisions consistent with his foreign policy philosophy or vision? 4, Which of the following was not enacted in order to secure men and materials for the war effort?

the Food Administration the Selective Service Act the War Industries Board the Sedition Act

5, What of the following was not used to control American dissent against the war effort?

propaganda campaigns repressive legislation National Civil Liberties Bureau loyalty leagues

6, How did the government work to ensure unity on the home front, and why did Wilson feel that this was so important? 7, Why did the war not increase overall prosperity?

because inflation made the cost of living higher because wages were lowered due to the war effort because workers had no bargaining power due to the “no-strike pledge” because women and African American men were paid less for the same work

8, Which of the following did not influence the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment?

women’s contributions to the war effort the dramatic tactics and harsh treatment of radical suffragists the passage of the Volstead Act the arguments of President Wilson’s daughter

9, Why was prohibition’s success short-lived? 10, What was Article X in the Treaty of Versailles?

the “war guilt clause” that France required the agreement that all nations in the League of Nations would be rendered equal the Allies’ division of Germany’s holdings in Asia the refusal to allow Bolshevik Russia membership in the League of Nations

11, Which of the following was not included in the Treaty of Versailles?

extensive German reparations to be paid to the Allies a curtailment of German immigration to Allied nations France’s acquisition of disputed territory along the French-German border a mandate for Germany to accept responsibility for the war publicly

12, What barriers did Wilson face in his efforts to ratify the Treaty of Versailles? What objections did those opposed to the treaty voice? 13, Which of the following was not a destabilizing factor immediately following the end of the war?

a flu pandemic a women’s liberation movement high inflation and economic uncertainty political paranoia

14, What was the inciting event that led to the Chicago Race Riot of 1919?

a strike at a local factory a protest march of Black activists the murder of a Black boy who swam too close to a White beach the assault of a White man on a streetcar by Black youths

15, How did postwar conditions explain Warren Harding’s landslide victory in the 1920 presidential election?

Why was the German use of the Unterseeboot considered?

Why was the German use of the unterseeboot considered to defy international law? They were not consistent. He went into countries just to make sure America’s interests were in line.

What was used to control American dissent against the war effort?

At War with ‘Disloyal’ Speech – Why Was The German Use Of The Unterseeboot Considered To Defy International Law A propaganda poster from the US intelligence office during WWI, depicting Kaiser Wilhelm II as a spider. Photo12/Universal Images Group/Getty Images The Wilson administration knew that many Americans were conflicted about the U.S. entry into World War I, so it launched a sweeping propaganda campaign to instill hatred of both the German enemy abroad and disloyalty at home.

Wilson publicly stated that disloyalty to the war effort “must be crushed out” and that disloyal individuals had “sacrificed their right to civil liberties” like free speech and expression. READ MORE: When the US Used Propaganda to Sell Americans on WWI The Espionage Act of 1917 was passed just two months after America entered World War I and was primarily intended by Congress to combat actual espionage on behalf of America’s enemies, like publishing secret U.S.

military plans. But federal prosecutors and judges, following Wilson’s lead, fixated on Section 3 of the Espionage Act, which targeted individuals who “willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty” in the military.

The law gave the U.S. Postmaster General the authority to block the mailing of any letter, pamphlet or book seen as opposing or questioning America’s military involvement in World War I. That led to investigations and prosecutions of everyone from unknown street pamphleteers to Eugene Debs, America’s most prominent socialist and labor organizer.

As the war rolled on and more American soldiers died, Congress doubled down on disloyal speech and passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which amended and expanded on the Espionage Act to target any speech that could be interpreted as criticizing the war effort, the draft, the U.S.

government or the flag, “The whole reason behind the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act was the fact that the government understood that words matter, words had influence,” says Lon Strauss, an assistant professor of military history and war studies at the Marine Corps Command and Staff College. “They were definitely concerned that folks who were against American participation in the war could influence drafted men.

They didn’t want the fighting will of the American soldier to be sapped.”

What barriers did Wilson face in his efforts to ratify the Treaty of Versailles what objections did those opposed to the Treaty voice?

What objections did those opposed to the treaty voice? In order to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, Wilson needed to ensure a two-thirds approval by the U.S. Senate, which meant overcoming the objections of a majority of Senate Republicans.

What influenced the eventual passage of the Nineteenth Amendment?

National Suffrage Groups Established – With the onset of the Civil War, the suffrage movement lost some momentum, as many women turned their attention to assisting in efforts related to the conflict between the states. After the war, women’s suffrage endured another setback, when the women’s rights movement found itself divided over the issue of voting rights for Black men.

Stanton and some other suffrage leaders objected to the proposed 15th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, which would give Black men the right to vote, but failed to extend the same privilege to American women of any skin color.
In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) with their eyes on a federal constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote.

That same year, abolitionists Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA); the group’s leaders supported the 15th Amendment and feared it would not pass if it included voting rights for women. ( The 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870.) The AWSA believed women’s enfranchisement could best be gained through amendments to individual state constitutions.

Despite the divisions between the two organizations, there was a victory for voting rights in 1869 when the Wyoming Territory granted all-female residents age 21 and older the right to vote.
When Wyoming was admitted to the Union in 1890, women’s suffrage remained part of the state constitution.) By 1878, the NWSA and the collective suffrage movement had gathered enough influence to lobby the U.S.

Congress for a constitutional amendment. Congress responded by forming committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate to study and debate the issue. However, when the proposal finally reached the Senate floor in 1886, it was defeated. In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

How did German U-boats violate international law?

The Silence of the Law

By ERIC A. POSNER Review of SCRAP OF PAPER: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War, by Isabel V. HullCornell University Press, 2014

Russia’s military incursions in Ukraine earlier this year violated international law. So did China’s implementation of an air defense identification zone above Japanese islands in the East China Sea. The United States violated international law by sending military forces into Iraq in 2003 and Serbia in 1999—as did a number of European countries, like Great Britain, which joined these interventions.

Russia and the United States have also violated the laws of war in recent conflicts—Russia in Chechnya, the United States in Iraq. Russia and China routinely violate human rights law. The West imposed modest sanctions on a handful of Russian officials and firms after the Ukraine violations, but otherwise none of these countries faced sanctions for their legal violations.

And yet it is rare for countries to admit that they violate international law, or to argue that they are free to violate international law. Vladimir Putin justified the Ukraine incursion in a speech that elaborately weaved in themes of international law and political morality.

The U.S. government tried to justify the 2003 Iraq War based on old Security Council resolutions and human rights considerations. China has argued that its claims in the East China sea are based on historical title. We are left with questions. Do countries care about international law, or do they comply with it only when it happens to coincide with their interests? If they don’t care about international law, then why do they try to justify their actions under it? But if they do care about international law, how do we explain the violations? What role does international law play, anyway? Isabel Hull tries to answer these questions in her new book about the role of international law in World War I.

The title of the book comes from the notorious statement of Germany’s Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who said that a treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium was only a “scrap of paper,” and so Germany’s violation of it did not justify entry into the war by Great Britain (p.42).

That statement, along with the unprecedented savagery of that war, has contributed to a historical memory of World War I as a war that was completely ungoverned by law. It was the “bad war” to World War II’s “good war,” one in which all combatants behaved lawlessly, and where fault for the barbarity could not be clearly attributed to any one country.

Hull seeks to set the record straight. First, she tries to show, through a meticulous examination of the voluminous archival records, that governments on all sides did take law seriously even if they did not always follow it. Second, she argues that Germany bears primary responsibility for the war because it took law less seriously than the Allies did.

The claim that everyone committed law violations so no one was at fault for the war does not hold water. World War I seems like an unpromising place to look for the influence of international law. While the German invasion of France was probably not a violation of international law at the time—there were no clear rules that prohibited countries from invading the territory of each other—Germany did violate numerous other laws.

In addition to violating the treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality, Germany executed Belgian civilians; starved POWs and used them as human shields; authorized U-Boats to blow up merchant ships and allow survivors to drown; deployed poison gas, flame-throwers, and dum-dum bullets; and bombed civilians from Zeppelins.

All of these activities either violated international law or the humanitarian spirit of many international norms. The allied countries were not blameless either. Britain launched a blockade against Germany which led to the starvation of thousands of civilians. It disregarded other rules that constrained military operations at sea.

The Allies also used poison gas, and mistreated POWs, although not as badly as Germany did. Hull’s key point is that for all that, governments—or officials within the governments—spent countless hours debating the minutiae of international law. Even the Germans did.

Indeed, Hollweg himself acknowledged that Germany had committed an injustice by invading Belgium and announced that Germany would “seek to make good as soon as our military goal is reached.” (p.44). That these debates frequently occurred in confidential meetings inside governments suggest that officials took the law seriously, and didn’t just trot out arguments to rationalize actions that they had decided on for military reasons.

However, for all the internal debate, Germany officially argued that none of its actions violated international law. In some cases, the law was genuinely ambiguous, and a reasonable claim could be made. For example, Germany could reasonably argue that its U-Boats had no duty to rescue survivors of ships it sank if they thereby exposed themselves to an enemy attack.

But in the harder cases, Germany relied on three sweeping arguments. First, Germany argued that “military necessity” justified actions that otherwise violated the letter of the law. The invasion of Belgium was justified because unless Germany preemptively attacked France, it would be strangled by its enemies, and the only practical way to invade France was through Belgium because of defenses along the border with France.

Second, Germany appealed to the doctrine of changed circumstances, arguing that laws and customary norms that arose for nineteenth-century conditions did not make sense in the twentieth century. The purpose of the treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality was to block territorial aggrandizement by post-Napoleonic France, not to block Germany from countering the military ambitions of France.

Third, Germany argued that many of its putative violations were justified as reprisals. Under international law at the time, a country could violate the letter of the law in order to retaliate against an enemy who violated it first. Germany argued that its mistreatment of POWs was justified retaliation against the Allies for their mistreatment of German POWs.

As Hull explains, these arguments were all based on valid doctrines of international law, but Germany took them much farther than any other country had, with the effect of virtually wiping out all international law. Most international lawyers believed that military necessity could justify narrow, tactical violations of international law in extreme circumstances; that’s a far cry from invading Belgium so as to avoid French border defenses.

Hull argues that while the Allies also violated international law, their violations were not nearly as rife.
Allied treatment of German POWs was relatively humane.
Violations occurred but they were sporadic and rarely the consequence of official policy, unlike in Germany.
Britain’s law violations like use of poison gas was based on a more reasonable view of reprisal than Germany’s as the UK claimed the right to use poison gas only as long as Germany did.

Germany believed that Great Britain violated international law by imposing a blockade that killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians as a result of starvation or malnutrition. Hull argues that a blockade that killed civilians was lawful (or at least not clearly unlawful) at the time, so long as civilians were not “targeted”; that the British started out their blockade within a legal framework; and that the British thought long and hard about the legal ramifications of the blockade.

Still, she admits that the British blocked lawful forms of trade between neutrals and Germany by stretching the definition of contraband, declaring a war zone in areas where military operations did not exist, and deploying other subterfuges.
Her bottom line is that the Allies did not violate international law as flagrantly and cynically as Germany did.

Why not? Hull points to a number of factors. Civilian authorities exerted greater control over the military in the UK and France than in Germany, where the military operated almost autonomously. The UK and France also benefited from better organized governments, whose parts coordinated with each other effectively.

Thus, the military could be forced to heed the foreign ministry’s judgment that law violations would antagonize neutrals.
And the UK and France had more legalistic cultures than Germany did.
So while the militaries in all countries were less concerned about international law than civilian authorities were, the German military enjoyed greater freedom to act on its views.

But a probably more important reason is that the UK and France believed that international law served their interests; Germany did not. This was due to some fundamental asymmetries. The UK was the major sea power; and it used that power to strangle the Germany economy.

The laws governing sea power greatly favored the UK.
Under international law a country could intercept and block neutral shipping to an enemy country only if it could maintain a “real” as opposed to “paper” blockade.
The UK, with its many ships, could do that; Germany, whose navy was inferior to the British navy, could not.

Germany possessed U-Boats but not in numbers sufficient to maintain a blockade, so the destruction of shipping with those U-Boats was illegal. And international law obligated warships to stop and inspect neutral vessels in order to check for illegal contraband—they could not just blow them up based on suspicion.

This was possible for warships but not (according to Germany) for submarines, which became vulnerable to attack if they surfaced. From Germany’s perspective, the international legal regime exposed it to threats from all sides, and the only way it could protect itself was by launching a preemptive attack on land.

The protections for POWs turned out to burden Germany more than the Allies because Germany captured many more enemy soldiers, and so providing care for them imposed greater costs on Germany. Belgian neutrality also blocked Germany from taking its rightful place in Europe.

Why did international law favor the Allies? The reason is that most of the relevant international law had emerged over the previous century, a period of British dominance and German weakness.
Britain was able to scuttle efforts to legally regulate military operations on the sea, and thus was able during World War I to rely on older customary norms that were vague and harsh.

The efforts to regulate military operations on land were more successful; Germany consented to them while maintaining an extremely narrow interpretation of them, possibly because it was trying to avoid international isolation. But, in fact, Germany was isolated in law just as it was politically.

International law always favors status quo powers because those are the countries that make it. Newly powerful countries and revolutionary countries are the usual lawbreakers—Germany, the Soviet Union, and, today, China. It’s harder to tell whether legal culture played an important role in the countries’ attitudes toward international law.

Hull quotes a great many officials in all three governments, and a pattern emerges. Some officials—typically lawyers in the foreign office—adopted a legalistic stance and argued that their governments should obey international law as a matter of national honor.

Other officials—typically in the military—argued that international law was all nonsense. But most officials in all the countries adopted a pragmatic or instrumental attitude. For them, international law should be obeyed when it advanced the government’s interest; otherwise, it should be ignored, evaded, or interpreted narrowly.

How exactly to tell whether obeying international law advanced the government interest could be tricky. In some cases, international law clearly favored one country over another—so, for example, the British argued that unrestricted submarine warfare violated international law while the Germans argued that it did not.

In more complicated cases, international law depended on reciprocity.
Both sides thought that some of the POW rules advanced their interests only so long as the other side obeyed them.
But each side found certain rules excessively burdensome and ignored them.
As we saw, the British could not accept some of the rules that constrained blockade; the Germans disregarded many of the rules that protected POWs.

The governments also cared about the attitudes of neutral countries and world opinion. Neutral countries mattered because they traded with the belligerents, and because they might at any time enter the war on one side or the other. And world opinion could influence the decisions of the neutral governments.

But the implications for international law were complicated. The neutrals did not try to serve as impartial enforcers of international law. They, too, took an instrumental approach, demanding compliance with international law that benefited them, above all laws that permitted neutrals to trade with enemies and protected neutral shipping.

World opinion similarly was not really legalistic. Foreign populations were outraged at German atrocities at the time, but ordinary people reacted to the horrors of war, not legal violations. As Hull notes, opinion turned against the Allies and Germans alike after World War I.

After the war, people did not give credit to the Allies for their greater level of law-abidingness during the war. The safest conclusion from all this is that countries agreed to laws of war in order to limit war but only when doing so did not put them at a disadvantage. But where it turned out that they had miscalculated, or circumstances changed, they disregarded those rules that put them at a disadvantage.

Germany violated the law more than the Allies did because the laws hurt them more—either because Germany miscalculated when it negotiated the laws, failing to see how those laws would interfere with their interests in the future; or because circumstances turned against Germany more than they did against the other countries.

*** Hull seems open to this view at various places in her narrative. She agrees that countries supported international rules that advanced their interests. But in her concluding chapter her argument takes a turn. She takes aim at “realists”—commentators who believe that international relations are characterized by an anarchic security competition where states struggle for power.

She attributes to realists the view that no one was at fault for starting World War I—it was the result of billiard-ball like states rationally maximizing power and prestige—and that law had nothing to do with it. Hull argues that while Germany was “realist,” it was also an outlier.

The other countries did not act as realists say they should—they took international law seriously—and they won the war.
An immediate problem with this argument is that Hull does not look at all the belligerents.
She focuses on France, Great Britain, and Germany.
She doesn’t discuss abuse of POWs by the Ottoman Empire, or even the Armenian genocide, or the Ottoman Empire’s various breaches of its obligations as a neutral before it entered the war.

Nor does she discuss Austria-Hungary or Russia, which held millions of POWs under brutal conditions, or lesser belligerents like Japan, Italy, and Serbia. Hull cannot be faulted for limiting the scope of her research to a manageable number of countries, but it is doubtful that the others shared the legalistic outlook of the UK.

To be sure, Hull is right that if realists believe that international law doesn’t matter, then it’s hard to understand a lot of the behavior of officials during World War I—or now, for that matter. As she shrewdly points out, if international law were a ploy, then while one might expect phony public arguments about international law, the secret debates about international law that took place within governments would be hard to explain.

Why would officials make elaborate legal arguments if the law doesn’t matter? But not all realists believe that law doesn’t matter. Many realists believe that law affects decisions on the margin, and Hull doesn’t refute this view. In Hull’s telling, even the Allies disregarded the law when it stood in their way.

An even more perplexing problem for Hull is that public opinion in the 1920s placed the same amount of blame for the war and its destruction on the Allies as on Germany; many historians would also take this view.
Why didn’t the public give allied governments credit for complying with international law, or at least trying to? Hull attributes this to Britain’s failure to comply with the unrealistically high legal standards it espoused to the public and to Germany’s successful post-war propaganda campaign.

Maybe, but doesn’t this mean that the Germans were right that in the long term they would not be blamed for their legal violations? Indeed, the attempt to place all the legal blame on them in the war guilt clause in the Versailles Treaty backfired badly.

As Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory, for many Europeans World War I was the end of civilization—”a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which dominated the public consciousness for a century.” International law played a central role in this myth, and thus stood condemned for its contribution to the slaughter in the trenches.

That slaughter—or 99 percent of it—was, after all, legally unassailable. It was, moreover, the system of alliances under international law that turned a localized dispute in the Balkans into a World War. The extinction of the Meliorist myth may explain why efforts by the Allies to prosecute German and Ottoman leaders collapsed and the war guilt clause and reparations were seen as victor’s justice.

If the whole system was corrupt, the question of which country acted most consistently with it—the topic of Hull’s book, and the basis of her condemnation of Germany—was idle.
And what country was the greatest champion of this failed system of international law?—Great Britain.
But if Hull’s final conclusions are open to question, her book is well worth reading.

Her exhaustive research will benefit historians and international lawyers alike. And there are interesting parallels between the debates about international law in the governments she surveys and the debates about international law that have taken place in the Bush and Obama administrations.

There, too, one sees a range of opinion with most official decisions based on instrumental considerations, rather than a legalistic or “realist” attitude toward international law.
And internationally, it is hard to avoid seeing parallels between Great Britain and the United States, and Germany and China—the legalists who benefit from the status quo and the rising powers that chafe at it.

International law is more intricate than it was one hundred years ago, but otherwise not much has changed. is Kirkland and Ellis Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago. His most recent book is The Twilight of Human Rights Law (Oxford, 2014).

What was the role of the German unterseeboot U-boats in the Atlantic?

Unrestricted U-boat Warfare Britain’s blockade across the North Sea and the English Channel cut the flow of war supplies, food, and fuel to Germany during World War I. Germany retaliated by using its submarines to destroy neutral ships that were supplying the Allies.

The formidable U-boats ( unterseeboots ) prowled the Atlantic armed with torpedoes. They were Germany’s only weapon of advantage as Britain effectively blocked German ports to supplies. The goal was to starve Britain before the British blockade defeated Germany. On May 7, 1915, German submarine U-20 torpedoed the Lusitania, a Cunard passenger liner, off the coast of Ireland.

Nearly 1,200 men, women, and children, including 128 Americans, lost their lives. The Allies and Americans considered the sinking an act of indiscriminate warfare. The Germans asserted the Lusitania was carrying war matériel and was therefore a legitimate target.

Faced with the possibility that the U.S.
Might go to war over the incident, Germany backed down and ordered its U-boat fleet to spare passenger vessels.
The order, however, was temporary.
Germany built new and larger U-boats to punch holes in the British blockade, which was threatening to starve Germany out of the war.

In 1914, Germany had just 20 U-boats. By 1917, it had 140 and the U-boats had destroyed about 30 percent of the world’s merchant ships. At the dawn of 1917, the German high command forced a return to the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, engineering the dismissal of opponents of the policy that aimed to sink more than 600,000 tons of shipping a month.

Germany was already experiencing food shortages and had imposed unpopular compulsory service either in armed forces or war industries.
They hoped to break the British stranglehold blockade of crucial German supply ports and knock Britain out of the war within the year.
U-boats resumed unrestricted attacks against all ships in the Atlantic, including civilian passenger carriers.

Although concerned the U.S. might react with intervention, German military leaders calculated they could defeat the allies before the U.S. could mobilize and arm troops to land in Europe. Although President Wilson formally broke diplomatic relations in February 1917 when the unrestricted submarine warfare resumed, he was still unsure how far public support had moved.

What were the reasons some Americans did not support the war?

Skip to Main Content of WWII – From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all. Top Image Courtesy of the Associated Press From our 21st-century point of view, it is hard to imagine World War II without the United States as a major participant. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, however, Americans were seriously divided over what the role of the United States in the war should be, or if it should even have a role at all.

Even as the war consumed large portions of Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was no clear consensus on how the United States should respond.
The US ambivalence about the war grew out of the isolationist sentiment that had long been a part of the American political landscape and had pervaded the nation since World War I.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans were either killed or wounded during that conflict, and President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic plan to ensure permanent peace through international cooperation and American leadership failed to become a reality. Many Americans were disillusioned by how little their efforts had accomplished and felt that getting so deeply involved on the global stage in 1917 had been a mistake.

Neither the rise of Adolf Hitler to power nor the escalation of Japanese expansionism did much to change the nation’s isolationist mood in the 1930s. Most Americans still believed the nation’s interests were best served by staying out of foreign conflicts and focusing on problems at home, especially the devastating effects of the Great Depression.

Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts in the late 1930s, aiming to prevent future involvement in foreign wars by banning American citizens from trading with nations at war, loaning them money, or traveling on their ships. But by 1940, the deteriorating global situation was impossible to ignore.

Nazi Germany had annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia and had conquered Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Great Britain was the only major European power left standing against Hitler’s war machine. The urgency of the situation intensified the debate in the United States over whether American interests were better served by staying out or getting involved.

Isolationists believed that World War II was ultimately a dispute between foreign nations and that the United States had no good reason to get involved. The best policy, they claimed, was for the United States to build up its own defenses and avoid antagonizing either side.

Neutrality, combined with the power of the US military and the protection of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, would keep Americans safe while the Europeans sorted out their own problems.
Isolationist organizations like the America First Committee sought to influence public opinion through print, radio, and mass rallies.

Aviator Charles Lindbergh and popular radio priest Father Charles Coughlin were the Committee’s most powerful spokesmen. Speaking in 1941 of an “independent American destiny,” Lindbergh asserted that the United States ought to fight any nation that attempted to meddle in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere.

However, he argued, American soldiers ought not to have to “fight everybody in the world who prefers some other system of life to ours.” Interventionists believed the United States did have good reasons to get involved in World War II, particularly in Europe. The democracies of Western Europe, they argued, were a critical line of defense against Hitler’s fast-growing strength.

If no European power remained as a check against Nazi Germany, the United States could become isolated in a world where the seas and a significant amount of territory and resources were controlled by a single powerful dictator. It would be, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it, like “living at the point of a gun,” and the buffer provided by the Pacific and Atlantic would be useless.

Some interventionists believed US military action was inevitable, but many others believed the United States could still avoid sending troops to fight on foreign soil, if only the Neutrality Acts could be relaxed to allow the federal government to send military equipment and supplies to Great Britain.

William Allen White, Chairman of an interventionist organization called the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, reassured his listeners that the point of helping Britain was to keep the United States out of the war. “If I were making a motto for Committee,” he said, “it would be ‘The Yanks Are Not Coming.'” Female isolationists from the America First Committee, Keep America Out of War, and the Mothers’ Crusade picket British Ambassador Lord Halifax in Chicago, May 8, 1941. (Image: Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo, F2AWAM.) “We well know that we cannot escape danger, or the fear of danger, by crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our heads.” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Public opinion polling was still in its infancy as World War II approached, but surveys suggested the force of events in Europe in 1940 had a powerful impact on American ideas about the war.

In January of that year, one poll found that 88% of Americans opposed the idea of declaring war against the Axis powers in Europe. As late as June, only 35% of Americans believed their government should risk war to help the British. Soon after, however, France fell, and in August the German Luftwaffe began an all-out bombing campaign against Great Britain.

The British Royal Air Force valiantly repelled the German onslaught, showing that Hitler was not invincible. A September 1940 poll found that 52% of Americans now believed the United States ought to risk war to help the British. That number only increased as Britain continued its standoff with the Germans; by April 1941 polls showed that 68% of Americans favored war against the Axis powers if that was the only way to defeat them.

What does dissent mean in ww1?

False, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress. or the President. with intent to defame. or to bring them. into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them. the hatred of the good people of the United States

Which were key arguments for and against government suppression of dissent during World War I quizlet?

Which were key arguments for and against government suppression of dissent during World War I? For: Dissent is unpatriotic and dangerous and must be suppressed. Against: Dissent is part of free speech and is healthy in a democracy.

What was the Germany’s main objection to the Treaty of Versailles?

During the second week of May 1919, the recently arrived German delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference, convened in Paris after the end of the First World War, pore over their copies of the Treaty of Versailles, drawn up in the months preceding by representatives of their victorious enemies, and prepare to lodge their objections to what they considered to be unfairly harsh treatment.

Presented with the treaty on May 7, 1919, the German delegation was given two weeks to examine the terms and submit their official comments in writing.
The Germans, who had put great faith in U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson ‘s notion of a so-called peace without victory and had pointed to his famous Fourteen Points as the basis upon which they sought peace in November 1918, were greatly angered and disillusioned by the treaty.

As Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s foreign minister, put it: This fat volume was quite unnecessary. They could have expressed the whole thing more simply in one clause—Germany renounces its existence. Driven by French and British desires to make Germany pay for the role it had played in the most devastating conflict the world had yet seen, Wilson and the other Allied representatives at the peace conference had indeed moved away from a pure peace without victory.

Germany was to lose 13 percent of its territory and 10 percent of its population. It was denied initial membership in the League of Nations, the international peace-keeping organization established by the treaty. The treaty also required Germany to pay reparations, though the actual amount ended up being less than what France had paid after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.

The real German objection to the Treaty of Versailles, however, was to the infamous Article 231, which forced Germany to accept sole blame for the war in order to justify the reparations. Despite much debate among the Allies themselves and over strenuous German protests—including by Brockdorff-Rantzau, who wrote to the Allies on May 13 that the German people did not will the war and would never have undertaken a war of aggression—Article 231 remained in the treaty.

The Germans were given a deadline of June 16 to accept their terms; this was later extended to June 23. Pressured by the Allies and thrown into confusion by crisis within the Weimar government at home, the Germans gave in and accepted the terms at 5:40 p.m. on May 23. The Versailles Treaty was signed on June 28, 1919.

Meanwhile, opposition to the treaty and its Article 231, seen as a symbol of the injustice and harshness of the whole document, festered within Germany. As the years passed, full-blown hatred slowly settled into a smoldering resentment of the treaty and its authors, a resentment that would, two decades later, be counted—to an arguable extent—among the causes of the Second World War.

READ MORE: How the Treaty of Versailles and German Guilt Led to World War II Minnesota enters the Union as the 32nd state on May 11, 1858.
Nown as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” Minnesota is the northern terminus of the Mississippi River’s traffic and the westernmost point of the inland waterway that extends through the Great Lakes and the St.

Lawrence,read more Klaus Barbie, the former Nazi Gestapo chief of German-occupied Lyon, France, goes on trial in Lyon more than four decades after the end of World War II. He was charged with 177 crimes against humanity. As chief of Nazi Germany’s secret police in Lyon, Barbie sent 7,500 French,read more In London, Spencer Perceval, prime minister of Britain since 1809, is shot to death by deranged businessman John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons.

Bellingham, who was inflamed by his failure to obtain government compensation for war debts incurred in Russia, gave,read more On May 11, 1934, a massive storm sends millions of tons of topsoil flying from across the parched Great Plains region of the United States as far east as New York, Boston and Atlanta.

At the time the Great Plains were settled in the mid-1800s, the land was covered by prairie,read more President Kennedy approves sending 400 Special Forces troops and 100 other U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam. On the same day, he orders the start of clandestine warfare against North Vietnam to be conducted by South Vietnamese agents under the direction and training of the,read more Hamburger Hill was the scene of an intense and controversial battle during the Vietnam War.

Known to military planners as Hill 937 (a reference to its height in meters), the solitary peak is located in the dense jungles of the A Shau Valley of Vietnam, about a mile from the,read more On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM.

This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws. Kasparov, a,read more In what would prove to be the next to the last concert of his tragically short life, Bob Marley shared the bill at Madison Square Garden with the hugely popular American funk band The Commodores.

With no costumes, no choreography and no set design to speak of, “The reggae star,read more Fifty people die in a fire in the grandstand at a soccer stadium in Bradford, England, on May 11, 1985. The wooden roof that burned was scheduled to be replaced by a steel roof later that same week. Bradford was playing Lincoln City on the afternoon of May 11.

Many fans were,read more The body of Leon Besnard is exhumed in Loudun, France, by authorities searching for evidence of poison. For years, local residents had been suspicious of his wife Marie, as they watched nearly her entire family die untimely and mysterious deaths.

Law enforcement officials finally,read more A dismounted Union trooper fatally wounds J.E.B. Stuart, one of the most well-known generals of the South, at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, just six miles north of Richmond, Virginia. The 31-year-old Stuart died the next day. During the 1864 spring campaign in Virginia, Union,read more On May 11, 1947, the B.F.

Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio, announces it has developed a tubeless tire, a technological innovation that would make automobiles safer and more efficient. The culmination of more than three years of engineering, Goodrich’s tubeless tire effectively,read more

Why were the Germans outraged by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles?

Germany loses the war: Protests against the Treaty of Versailles When the First World War ended in 1918, peace negotiations began in Paris. Germany was considered mainly to blame for the devastating war. The conclusions were laid down in the Treaty of Versailles, named after the palace where the countries signed the treaty. In addition, Germany had to cede parts of its territory. France gained Alsace-Lorraine and the coal mines in the Saar region. Germany was allowed to keep the Rhineland, but without an army. The German government in the Rhineland was replaced by a government made up by Great Britain and France – Germany’s old enemies.

In the east, Germany lost another part of its territory. This became part of Poland, which also gained land from Russia and Austria-Hungary. Finally, Germany lost its colonies in Africa and Asia. The Germans felt that they should not have been blamed for the war. The loss of territory was considered extremely humiliating.

Moreover, the sky-high reparations caused great poverty throughout the country. : Germany loses the war: Protests against the Treaty of Versailles

What did Wilson really want out of the Versailles conference?

Treaty of Versailles (1919) The Treaty of Versailles officially ended World War I. The treaty dealt specifically with Germany, and the other defeated powers had to negotiate their own separate treaties. Once the armistice was signed in November 1918, which provided for a cease fire so that peace could be negotiated, a peace conference began in Paris at the Palace of Versailles.

In addition to the British and French delegations, the United States also had representation at the peace conference.
President Woodrow Wilson personally led the United States delegation at Versailles.
It soon became apparent that Wilson had a different view of the treaty than did the British and the French.

These two countries had fought a long, bitter war against Germany. Both Great Britain and France had suffered tremendous casualties during the war and faced serious economic problems because of the war’s costs. The two countries’ leaders wanted to see Germany pay reparations for the cost of the war and accept the blame for causing the war.

Wilson’s intentions were very different. Wilson desired to create a system that would keep future wars from happening, as well as promoting a U.S. vision of democracy and peace. He believed that the best way to accomplish this goal was through the creation of an international organization called the League of Nations.

Countries that belonged to the League would work together to stop potential wars in the future. Ultimately, the Treaty of Versailles (1919) required Germany to accept responsibility for World War I and imposed reparations. It also called for the establishment of the League of Nations, as Wilson had envisioned.

The treaty failed to create a long-term environment favorable to peace.
Germans resented the treaty’s provisions, and that resentment helped to fuel support for the Nazis in the 1930s and a return to war in World War II.
Although people in the U.S.
Were happy to see an end to World War I, the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.

Republicans in the Senate were unhappy that Wilson had not included them in the negotiations and refused to vote in favor of the treaty. The United States never joined the League of Nations, and that organization failed to be successful in its attempts to prevent future wars.

Who was most influential in getting the 19th Amendment to pass?

While women were not always united in their goals, and the fight for women’s suffrage was complex and interwoven with issues of civil and political rights for all Americans, the efforts of women like Ida B. Wells and Alice Paul led to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

How did the passage of the 19th Amendment change American culture?

Voting ensures women’s reproductive and economic progress – The 19th Amendment helped millions of women move closer to equality in all aspects of American life. Women advocated for job opportunities, fairer wages, education, sex education, and birth control.

After women were enfranchised, candidates catered to women in an effort to get elected, and women took advantage, advocating for laws that would allow them to have individual economic security, such as inheritance and divorce laws.
Women voted and eventually ran for office to improve not only government but also their individual lives.

Within 20 years of the amendment’s passage, federal courts had undermined the contraception provision of the Comstock Law of 1873 —a federal amendment to the Post Office Act of 1872 that made it illegal to send contraception, or information about it, through the mail—and the American Medical Association adopted birth control as a normal medical option.

In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, approved the pill, allowing women and couples to effectively plan when they would have children.
By the early 1970s the second wave of the women’s movement was driving reproductive health policy.
The Comstock laws excluded contraception for married couples and individuals based on Supreme Court rulings in 1965 and 1975, respectively, the Roe v.

Wade decision in 1973 legalized abortion, and virtually every state has passed laws allowing women 17 and 18 years of age to access birth control. The FDA approved the pill in 1960, and governmental policies such as Title X made it affordable for more women.

In fact, in 1972 Congress required each state’s Medicaid program to include family-planning services and supplies. The increasing availability of family-planning services and supplies resulted in more women delaying marriage, graduating from higher education at higher rates, and entering into more professional occupations,

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the 1960s and 1970s, contraception was a pivotal factor in women investing in their education. The report also details how the pill helped increase the proportion of women in skilled careers from 1970 to 1990 by more than 30 percent.

What tactics did the suffragettes use to try to gain the right to vote?

Tactics and Techniques of the National Womans Party Suffrage Campaign | Articles and Essays | Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party | Digital Collections | Library of Congress Founded in 1913 as the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU), the National Woman’s Party (NWP) was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women’s suffrage campaign.

Using a variety of tactics, the party successfully pressured President Woodrow Wilson, members of Congress, and state legislators to support passage of a 19th Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution guaranteeing women nationwide the right to vote.
In so doing, the NWP established a legacy defending the exercise of free speech, free assembly, and the right to dissent.

NWP members picket outside the International Amphitheater in Chicago, where Woodrow Wilson delivers a speech. October 20, 1916. The NWP effectively commanded the attention of politicians and the public through its aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, clever publicity stunts, and creative examples of civil disobedience and nonviolent confrontation.

Its tactics were versatile and imaginative, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources–including the British suffrage campaign, the American labor movement, and the temperance, antislavery, and early women’s rights campaigns in the United States.
Traditional lobbying and petitioning were a mainstay of NWP members, but these activities were supplemented by other more public actions–including parades, pageants, street speaking, and demonstrations.

The party eventually realized that it needed to escalate its pressure and adopt even more aggressive tactics. Most important among these was picketing the White House over many months, leading to the arrest and imprisonment of many suffragists. The willingness of NWP pickets to be arrested, their campaign for recognition as political prisoners rather than as criminals, and their acts of civil disobedience in jail shocked the nation and brought attention and support to their cause.

Why did Germany stop using unrestricted U-boat warfare?

On May 4, 1916, Germany responds to a demand by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson by agreeing to limit its submarine warfare in order to avert a diplomatic break with the United States. Unrestricted submarine warfare was first introduced in World War I in early 1915, when Germany declared the area around the British Isles a war zone, in which all merchant ships, including those from neutral countries, would be attacked by the German navy.

A string of German attacks on merchant ships—culminating in the sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania on May 7, 1915—led President Wilson to put pressure on the Germans to curb their navy. Fearful of antagonizing the Americans, the German government agreed to put restrictions on the submarine policy going forward, incurring the anger and frustration of many naval leaders, including the naval commander in chief, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who resigned in March 1916.

On March 24, 1916, soon after Tirpitz’s resignation, a German U-boat submarine attacked the French passenger steamer Sussex, in the English Channel, thinking it was a British ship equipped to lay explosive mines. Although the ship did not sink, 50 people were killed, and many more injured, including several Americans.

On April 19, in an address to the U.S. Congress, President Wilson took a firm stance, stating that unless the Imperial German Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and freight carrying vessels this Government can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the Government of the German Empire altogether.

WATCH: Underwater Killers on HISTORY Vault To follow up on Wilson’s speech, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, spoke directly to Kaiser Wilhelm on May 1 at the German army headquarters at Charleville in eastern France. After Gerard protested the continued German submarine attacks on merchant ships, the kaiser in turn denounced the American government’s compliance with the Allied naval blockade of Germany, in place since late 1914.

Germany could not risk American entry into the war against them, however, and when Gerard urged the kaiser to provide assurances of a change in the submarine policy, the latter agreed. On May 6, the German government signed the so-called Sussex Pledge, promising to stop the indiscriminate sinking of non-military ships.

According to the pledge, merchant ships would be searched, and sunk only if they were found to be carrying contraband materials. Furthermore, no ship would be sunk before safe passage had been provided for the ship’s crew and its passengers. Gerard was skeptical, writing in a letter to the U.S.

State Department that German leaders, forced by public opinion, and by the von Tirpitz and Conservative parties would take up ruthless submarine warfare again, possibly in the autumn, but at any rate about February or March, 1917. Gerard’s words proved accurate, as on February 1, 1917, Germany announced the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Two days later, Wilson announced a break in diplomatic relations with the German government, and on April 6, 1917, the United States formally entered World War I on the side of the Allies. READ MORE: How the Sinking of Lusitania Changed World War I Margaret Thatcher, leader of the Conservative Party, becomes Britain’s first female prime minister on May 4, 1979.

The Oxford-educated chemist and lawyer took office the day after the Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in general parliamentary elections.
Margaret Hilda Roberts,read more On May 4, 1966, San Francisco Giants outfielder Willie Mays hits his 512th career home run to break Mel Ott’s National League record for home runs.

Mays would finish his career with 660 home runs, good for third on the all-time list at the time of his retirement. Willie Howard,read more On May 4, 1961, a group of thirteen young people departs Washington, D.C.’s Greyhound Bus terminal, bound for the South.

Their journey is peaceful at first, but the riders will meet with shocking violence on their way to New Orleans, eventually being forced to evacuate from,read more On May 4, 1994, in a groan-inducing moment on the floor of U.K.
Parliament, a lawmaker uses a pun that will spawn its own holiday far, far away from the halls of government.

“May the 4th is an appropriate date for a defense debate. My researcher, who is a bit of a wit, said that,read more A ceremony on May 4, 1905 marks the official beginning of the second attempt to build the Panama Canal. This second attempt to bridge the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans will succeed, dramatically altering world trade as well as the physical and geopolitical landscape of Central,read more When a music critic wants to indicate that a song lacks lyrical sophistication, he or she will often refer to its lyrics as being of the “moon in June” sort.

It’s a label left over from the Tin Pan Alley era, when even great composers like Irving Berlin churned out a hundred,read more At Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, a bomb is thrown at a squad of policemen attempting to break up what had begun as a peaceful labor rally.
The police responded with wild gunfire, killing several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more.

The demonstration, which drew,read more On May 4, 1970, in Kent, Ohio, 28 National Guardsmen fire their weapons at a group of anti-war demonstrators on the Kent State University campus, killing four students, wounding eight, and permanently paralyzing another.

The tragedy was a watershed moment for a nation divided by,read more On May 4, 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reach an agreement in Cairo on the first stage of Palestinian self-rule.
The agreement was made in accordance with the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington, D.C.

on September 13, 1993. This was the,read more On May 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln is laid to rest in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. His funeral train had traveled through 180 cities and seven states before reaching Springfield. At each stop, mourners paid their respects to Lincoln, who had been assassinated on April 14.read more Twenty-five-year-old Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead, is published on May 4, 1948.

The book is critically acclaimed and widely considered one of the best novels to come out of World War II.
Mailer was born in New Jersey in 1923 and raised in Brooklyn.
He,read more On May 4, 1929, Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston—who will one day be better known to legions of film fans as Audrey Hepburn—is born near Brussels, Belgium.

The daughter of an English banker and a Dutch baroness, Hepburn was attending school in London when World War II erupted in,read more On May 4, 2002, an EAS Airline plane crashes into the town of Kano, Nigeria, killing 149 people. The Nigerian BAC 1-11-500 aircraft exploded in a densely populated section of the northern Nigerian city.

The Executive Airline Services twin-engine plane took off from Kano at,read more Jesse Tafero is executed in Florida after his electric chair malfunctions three times, causing flames to leap from his head. Tafero’s death led to a new debate on humane methods of execution. Several states ceased use of the electric chair and adopted lethal injection as their,read more On May 4, 1776, Rhode Island, the colony founded by the most radical religious dissenters from the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony, becomes the first North American colony to renounce its allegiance to King George III.

Ironically, Rhode Island would be the last state to,read more On May 4, 1945, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov informs U.S. Secretary of State Stettinius that the Red Army has arrested 16 Polish peace negotiators who had met with a Soviet army colonel near Warsaw back in March.

Why did the German U-boat campaign fail?

The Final U-Boat Campaign ↑ – The Germans faced a continuing stalemate on land and at sea in late 1916, causing naval leaders to develop a proposal for resuming unrestricted submarine warfare. Basing their calculations on existing British high seas trade, the Germans estimated that by sinking 600,000 tons of British merchant vessels per month for six months, they would paralyze the British economy, scare neutrals away from the British Isles, and force a surrender before the Americans could substantively intervene on the Western Front.

Month	German Figures (Gross tons)	British Figures (Gross tons)
Feb 1917	520,412	497,095
Mar 1917	564,497	553,189
Apr 1917	860,334	867,834
May 1917	616,316	589,603
Jun 1917	696,725	674,458
Jul 1917	555,514	545,021
Aug 1917	472,372	509,142

Table 1: Entente and Neutral Shipping Losses to U-boats, February to August 1917 Entente and neutral shipping losses were severe from February through June 1917, with peak losses from submarines reaching 860,334 tons in April. The US declared war against Germany on 6 April.

In late April the British adopted a convoy system for shipping inbound to the British Isles.
With more escort vessels available from the US Navy, including improved anti-submarine weaponry employing depth charges, mines, and aircraft patrols, and expanded the use of convoys, the final U-boat campaign became less and less effective.

Convoys made it difficult for U-boats to locate their targets; instead of numerous independent vessels plying the seas, ships would now be grouped in larger but fewer formations. Convoys also forced German U-boats to attack well-defended groups of merchant vessels, an extremely dangerous endeavor.

In early 1918, the Germans shifted their attacks to the coastal waters around Britain, in an attempt to sink vessels as the convoys dispersed to their intended ports of call.
An initial spike in losses in January and February 1918 caused the British some concern, but the introduction of coastal convoys with heavy escorts soon neutralized this new threat.

Between May and November 1918, the Germans sent six long-range U-boats to operate in American coastal waters. These U-boats sank ninety-three ships but most were sailing vessels or small steamers. As a strategy of economic warfare, the U-boat campaigns of the First World War were a failure, largely due to diplomatic pressure from neutrals and eventual British and Allied countermeasures.

When did Germany stop using U-boats?

World War II – The Armistice terms of 1918 required Germany to surrender all its U-boats, and the Treaty of Versailles forbade it to possess them in the future. In 1935, however, Adolf Hitler ‘s Germany repudiated the treaty and forcefully negotiated the right to build U-boats.

Britain was ill-prepared in 1939 for a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and during the early months of World War II the U-boats, which at that time numbered only 57, again achieved great successes. The first phase, during which the U-boats generally operated singly, ended in March 1941, by which time many merchant ships were sailing in convoy, trained escort groups were becoming available, and aircraft were proving their effectiveness as anti-U-boat weapons.

In the next phase the Germans, having acquired air and U-boat bases in Norway and western France, were able to reach much farther out into the Atlantic, and their U-boats began to operate in groups (called wolf packs by the British). One U-boat would shadow a convoy and summon others by radio, and then the group would attack, generally on the surface at night.

These tactics succeeded until radar came to the aid of the escorts and until convoys could be given continuous sea and air escort all the way across the Atlantic in both directions. In March 1943, as in April 1917, the Germans nearly succeeded in cutting Britain’s Atlantic lifeline, but by May escort carriers and very-long-range reconnaissance bombers became available.

After the U-boats lost 41 of their number during that month, they withdrew temporarily from the Atlantic. In the next phase, U-boats were sent to remote waters where unescorted targets could still be found. Although at first they achieved considerable successes, especially in the Indian Ocean, the Allied strategy of striking at the U-boats’ supply vessels and putting all possible shipping into convoys again proved successful.

In the final phase the U-boats—then fitted with the snorkel ( schnorkel ) ventilating tube, which permitted extended underwater travel and greatly reduced the effectiveness of radar—returned to the coastal waters around the British Isles, but they sank few ships and themselves suffered heavy losses.

In World War II Germany built 1,162 U-boats, of which 785 were destroyed and the remainder surrendered (or were scuttled to avoid surrender) at the capitulation. Of the 632 U-boats sunk at sea, Allied surface ships and shore-based aircraft accounted for the great majority (246 and 245 respectively).

Why were German submarines called U-boats?

News Why were German submarines in WWII called ‘U-boats’?

This story is from February 8, 2003 U-boat is an abbreviation of the German word ”Unterseeboot” (meaning ”submarine” or ”under the sea boat”). The German navy launched large-scale submarine offensives in both World Wars. The letter ”U” inU-boats is from the German ”unter”, meaning ”under”. Geetha Balachandran, Chennai FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook Twitter Instagram KOO APP YOUTUBE

What was special about German U-boats?

The most formidable naval weapons in both world wars, German submarines devastated trans-Atlantic shipping while sinking 8,000 merchant vessels and warships and killing tens of thousands. These U-boats (an abbreviation of Unterseeboot, the German word for “undersea boat”) prowled the oceans in search of prey and could attack ships 20 times their size from both above and below the surface with their deck guns and torpedoes.

Inside the dimly lit, claustrophobic submarines, sailors couldn’t shower or even change their clothes during patrols that could last two months at sea.
Fifty men shared two toilets—one of which doubled as a food locker at the start of patrols—that couldn’t function when 80 feet or more below the surface because of the outside water pressure, according to The U-Boats by Douglas Botting.

U-boat crews inhaled a foul cocktail of bilge water, sweat and diesel fumes. Mildew blossomed on their shoes, and charts even rotted from the oppressive heat and dampness. “I feel like Jonah inside some huge shellfish whose vulnerable parts are sheathed in armor,” wrote German war correspondent Lothar-Günther Buchheim on patrol in 1941.

Submarines were still primitive naval weapons when Germany became the last major naval power to build one in 1906. By the start of World War I in 1914, however, Germany had caught the competition. Its 20 combat-ready U-boats were more sophisticated that other countries’ submarines and could travel 5,000 miles without refueling, allowing them to operate along the entire British coast.

WATCH: WWI: The First Modern War on HISTORY Vault

What was special about the U-boat?

On January 31, 1917, Germany announces the renewal of unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic as German torpedo-armed submarines prepare to attack any and all ships, including civilian passenger carriers, said to be sighted in war-zone waters.

When World War I erupted in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored.
Britain, however, was one of America’s closest trading partners and tension soon arose between the United States and Germany over the latter’s attempted blockade of the British isles.

Several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines and, in February 1915, Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P.

Frye, a private American merchant vessel that was transporting grain to England when it disappeared. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized, calling the attack an unfortunate mistake. READ MORE: History Faceoff: Should the U.S. Have Entered World War I? The Germans’ most formidable naval weapon was the U-boat, a submarine far more sophisticated than those built by other nations at the time.

The typical U-boat was 214 feet long, carried 35 men and 12 torpedoes, and could travel underwater for two hours at a time. In the first few years of World War I, the U-boats took a terrible toll on Allied shipping. In early May 1915, several New York newspapers published a warning by the German embassy in Washington that Americans traveling on British or Allied ships in war zones did so at their own risk.

The announcement was placed on the same page as an advertisement for the imminent sailing of the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner from New York to Liverpool. On May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning just off the coast of Ireland. Of the 1,959 passengers, 1,198 were killed, including 128 Americans.

The German government maintained that the Lusitania was carrying munitions, but the U.S. demanded reparations and an end to German attacks on unarmed passenger and merchant ships. In August 1915, Germany pledged to see to the safety of passengers before sinking unarmed vessels, but in November sank an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans.

Public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.
At the end of January 1917, Germany, determined to win its war of attrition against the Allies, announced the resumption of unrestricted warfare.
Three days later, the United States broke off diplomatic relations with Germany; just hours after that, the American liner Housatonic was sunk by a German U-boat.

None of the 25 Americans on board were killed and they were picked up later by a British steamer. On February 22, Congress passed a $250 million arms-appropriations bill intended to ready the United States for war. Two days later, British authorities gave the U.S.

ambassador to Britain a copy of what has become known as the “Zimmermann Note,” a coded message from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to Mexico, In the telegram, intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence, Zimmermann stated that, in the event of war with the United States, Mexico should be asked to enter the conflict as a German ally.

In return, Germany would promise to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, On March 1, the U.S. State Department published the note and America was galvanized against Germany once and for all. In late March, Germany sank four more U.S.

Merchant ships and, on April 2, President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.
On April 4, the Senate voted 82 to six to declare war against Germany.
Two days later, the House of Representatives endorsed the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50 and America formally entered World War I.

June 6, 1944 is considered one of the most pivotal moments in modern history. Better known by its codename, D-Day, the Allied assault on five beaches in Nazi-occupied France was the result of over a year of planning and jockeying amongst various military and political leaders.

On,read more At Westminster in London, Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the plot to blow up the British Parliament building, jumps to his death moments before his execution for treason.
On the eve of a general parliamentary session scheduled for November 5, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a,read more On January 31, 1950, U.S.

President Harry S. Truman publicly announces his decision to support the development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Five months earlier, the,read more Apollo 14, piloted by astronauts Alan B.

Shepard Jr., Edgar D. Mitchell and Stuart A. Roosa, is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a manned mission to the moon. On February 5, after suffering some initial problems in docking the lunar and command modules,,read more On this day in 1968, as part of the Tet Offensive, a squad of Viet Cong guerillas attacks the U.S.

Embassy in Saigon. The soldiers seized the embassy and held it for six hours until an assault force of U.S. paratroopers landed by helicopter on the building’s roof and routed the,read more On this day, Pvt. Eddie Slovik becomes the first American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion-and the only one who suffered such a fate during World War II.

Pvt. Eddie Slovik was a draftee.
Originally classified 4-F because of a prison record (grand theft,read more On January 31, 1988, in San Diego, California, Doug Williams of the Washington Redskins—now known as the Washington Football Team—becomes the first African American quarterback to play in a Super Bowl, scoring four of Washington’s five touchdowns in an upset 42-10 victory over,read more Los Angeles prosecutors announce that they will retry teacher Raymond Buckey, who was accused of molesting children at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California.

The McMartin trials had already taken over six years and cost more than $13.5 million without a single,read more The Soviet Union’s first McDonald’s fast food restaurant opens in Moscow. Throngs of people line up to pay the equivalent of several days’ wages for Big Macs, shakes and french fries.

Why was the threat from German U-boats important?

Unrestricted Submarine Warfare – With no end to the war in early 1917, Germany returned to unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, where its primary aim was to sink all vessels supplying the Allies, regardless of whether the country in question was at war with Germany.

This new unrestricted submarine warfare campaign was partially responsible for bringing the United States into the war on the Allied side in April 1917. The Germans had gambled that unrestricted submarine warfare would win the war by strangling Britain before the full might of the United States would turn the tide.

It almost succeeded. With hundreds of ships sunk over the first half of the year, the British Admiralty predicted the possible loss of the war on 20 June unless the U-Boat campaign was stopped.

What was special about German U-boats?

Inside the dimly lit, claustrophobic submarines, sailors couldn’t shower or even change their clothes during patrols that could last two months at sea.
Fifty men shared two toilets—one of which doubled as a food locker at the start of patrols—that couldn’t function when 80 feet or more below the surface because of the outside water pressure, according to The U-Boats by Douglas Botting.

WATCH: WWI: The First Modern War on HISTORY Vault

What was the impact of German U-boats?

By Casey MacLean May 2018 One hundred years ago, German U-boats lurked beneath the waves off the coast of North Carolina, bringing World War I home to the United States. Few Americans believed that German Unterseeboots would be able to traverse the Atlantic to reach our shores – but they were wrong. This illustration from 1916 depicts a German submarine attacking an American merchant ship. Image: Willy Stower/Library of Congress Since World War I, nautical technology has evolved at a rapid rate, but in 1914 U-boats were considered quite advanced.

These vessels could reach maximum depths of 50 meters or 165 feet, achieve speeds of 16 knots at the surface and eight knots underwater, and had a range of up to 25,000 miles. They were armed with deck-mounted guns and up to 16 self-propelled torpedoes. Since torpedoes of this period could be unreliable, surface attacks were quite common; this tactic also allowed U-boat crews to seize supplies and valuables from merchant ships before they sunk.

Furthermore, some U-boats were equipped to transport and deploy naval mines. Submarine warfare played an integral role in the mounting international pressures of World War I. After the war broke out in 1914, Great Britain used its powerful navy to blockade German ports to limit food, supplies, and war materials from reaching the German military and people. This poster from 1915 calls on men to enlist in the Navy following the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, Image courtesy of Library of Congress On May 7, 1915, the German U- 20 sank the passenger liner RMS Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, horrifically killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 Americans.

This tragedy heightened tensions between the United States and Germany, causing the Germans to temporarily back down on their use of unrestricted submarine warfare. However, in an attempt to quickly end the war by cutting off British supplies, the aggressive U-boat attacks resumed at the beginning of 1917, sinking both military and civilian vessels.

In response to this threat, the United States joined the Allies (France, Great Britain, Italy, and Japan) and entered the war on April 6, 1917. After this declaration of war, the United States devoted manpower, supplies, and naval forces to help the Allies in Europe.

This left merchant and naval shipping along the East Coast exposed to German U-boats.
From April 1917 until November 1918, four German U-boats visited the East Coast of the United States and sank 10 vessels off North Carolina’s coast and 200 U.S.
Vessels in total.
One of these U-boats, U- 140, was particularly notable for sinking the Diamond Shoals Lightship, LV- 71, in August 1918.

LV- 71 was one of only two U.S. government ships to be sunk by a U-boat during World War I. This wreck is now managed by Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and the U.S. Coast Guard. During the same event, U- 140 also sunk the USS Merak, Another U-boat, U- 117, sank the British tanker SS Mirlo in a well-known attack off the coast of North Carolina, but this shipwreck remains undiscovered. U- 140 was one of four German U-boats that patrolled the East Coast of the United States. Photo: Naval History and Heritage Command The damage inflicted by U-boats during World War I was powerful. Their ability to submerge and to surprise enemies led to massive casualties: Germany and Austria-Hungary sank almost 5,000 merchant ships during World War I, killing approximately 15,000 Allied sailors.

The Treaty of Versailles required the Germans to surrender and break up their U-boat fleet, but German naval commanders had learned the value of submarine warfare and continued to improve this technology in peacetime years. German U-boats returned to North Carolina during World War II with a vengeance, leaving even more wrecks off the coast.

Although most of World War I took place in Europe, German U-boats brought the war home to the United States. Many shipwrecks of U-boat victims can be found off the coast of North Carolina in the popular shipping area that known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, Archaeologists from Monitor National Marine Sanctuary and partners located and explored the German U- 576 in 2016. Photo: John McCord, UNC Coastal Studies Institute – Battle of the Atlantic Expedition Monitor National Marine Sanctuary, first established in 1975, protects and honors the wreck of the USS Monitor, which sank in 1862 during the Civil War after battling the Confederate CSS Virginia,

In addition to the USS Monitor, Monitor National Marine Sanctuary has researched and documented many shipwreck sites and seeks to honor World War I’s history off the coast of North Carolina. The proposed boundary expansion of Monitor National Marine Sanctuary could encompass shipwrecks of World War I and World War II, which would ensure the preservation of our nation’s maritime heritage for years to come.

Casey MacLean is a constituent and legislative affairs volunteer intern at NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.

What was Germany’s purpose of using U-boats quizlet?

U-boats were used primarily to destroy enemy surface commerce/cargo shipping in order to undermine the ability to make war. The submarines were used to sink some civilian transport ships such as the Lusitania in 1915, although the Germans claimed that the ships they sunk also carried war materiel.