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Originally Posted by iLney
The outcome would've been very different without his intervention.
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Yes it would have, no league of nations for sure, perhaps harsher sanctions on Germany, possible continuing bloody stalemate further saping the resources of Britain, France, and Germany.
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Germany never seeked war with the US in both WWI and WWII. I think you misunderstood something regarding to my point....
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You point was that Wilson ordered US merchant ships in harms way deliberatly. However, Germany could have quite easily avoided attacking US ships, and in fact did take great measures in doing so from 1915 to 1917, only pressure on the Kaiser to resume unrestricted submarine warfare by Germany's top navel commanders reversed that.
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Aye, a normal merchant ship wouldn't sink if hit by just a torpedo, unless it carried weapons.German captains knew the former but didn't expect the latter, which was a pretty absurd to them, no rational civilian without 1/2 of his brain would engage in that activity. And how could Woodrow Wilson not know about U-Boat's weakness?
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No, torpedos can sink an unarmored merchant ship just fine whether it's carrying weapons or not. I'm not even sure what you're talking about here.
One of the problems you seem to be forgetting is Germany sank passanger liners, not just pure cargo ships.
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Originally Posted by ganbaru
About the early U-boat, didn't they have a canon ?
They used it for easier target( like cargo), or am I miistaken?
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Yes, they most certainly did. However, they tended to be small, meaning they'd take a while to sink a merchant ship. Some U-boat captains did in fact conform with the "rules of war" and announce themselves before sinking a ship, but it was rare, as if that ship happened to be armed, it would likely outgun the U boat while be able to take more hits than the U boat, and that's not even getting into the possibility of it being a Q ship. A U-boat's main weapon was it's stealth, remaining undetected by it's target then firing torpedos. This is true of modern subs as well, though they can be armed with quite a bit more than just torpedos.