We are both in the same boat! What a time we’ve been colleagues, old boy! However, we did you in the eye over thebattle cruisers, and I know you’ve said you’ll never forgive me for it when bang went the Blucher and von Spee and all his host!
Cheer up, old chap! Say “Resurgam!” You’re the one German sailor who understands war! Kill your enemy without being killed yourself. I don’t blame you for the submarine business. I’d have done the same myself, only our idiots in England wouldn’t believe it when I told ‘em.
Well! So long!
Yours till hell freezes,
FISHER.
29/3/16.
An interview with the former German Ambassador, Count Bernstorff, which Hayden Talbot had in Berlin, as printed in the New York “American” of October 26, 1919, casts an interesting sidelight on the question. Count Bernstorff is quoted as follows:
Do you know what Col. House told me one day? We had been discussing the submarine issue. This was early in the war. I had defended the German use of submarines on the ground that it was our only possible method against the British blockade, illegal and inhuman as it was. I had pointed out that Great Britain had given the United States repeatedly greater cause for declaring war than in 1812.
“But we can’t declare war on England,” Col. House said. “A war with England would be too unpopular in this country.”
American vessels in the War of 1812 sank and destroyed 74 English merchant ships under instructions to the commanders of our squadrons “to destroy all or capture, unless in some extraordinary cases that shall clearly warrant an exception.... Unless your prize should be very valuable and near a friendly port it will be imprudent and worse than useless to attempt to send them in.... A single cruiser destroying every captured vessel has the capacity of continuing in full vigor her destructive power.” This, we think, disposes of the question involved whether a submarine should be required to abstain from sinking a captured vessel of the enemy.
Admiral Sir Perry Scott in the London “Times” of July 16, 1914, justified the work of destruction of the submarines, and quoting reports on the treatment of vessels which tried to break the blockade of Charleston during the Civil War, said: “The blockading cruisers seldom scrupled to fire on the ships which they were chasing or to drive them aground and then overwhelm them with shell and shot after they were ashore.”