World War I
By the start of the First World War, the German Imperial Navy possessed 22 pre-Dreadnoughts, 19 dreadnought battleships and 7 battle-cruisers.
Admiral von Tirpitz became the commander of the Navy. The main fighting forces of the navy were to become the High Seas Fleet, and the U-boat fleet. Smaller fleets were deployed to the German overseas protectorates, the most prominent being assigned to the East Asia Station at Tsingtao.
The German Navy's U-boats were also instrumental in the sinking of the civilian passenger liner, the RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915, which was one of the main events that led to the USA joining the war two years later in 1917.
Read more about this topic: Kaiserliche Marine
Famous quotes containing the words war i, world and/or war:
“Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos.”
—Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in war the two Cardinal virtues.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)