Charles Stephenson > Quotes

“The attitude of mind of the politicians about this question is astonishing. They are obviously frightened of the Americans laying down the law as to what is to happen when Japan is defeated to the various islands, ports and other territories. This appears to be quite likely if the Americans are left to fight Japan by themselves. But they will not lift a finger to get a force into the Pacific; they prefer to hang about outside and recapture our own rubber trees.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“The Jaws of the Sahara’ (Le fauci del Sahara)

But around me is a silence of death: a word seems to spring from the horizon: – Back! – Back to all of you who want to violate my secret, you who were not born in my restless dunes, you were not burned by my fire, taught not to wait, against the earth, the passage of my rage … Back! – And these words of challenge rose as knights armed with a deadly struggle, only a few men, naked, implacable as the expanse of sand and the scorching sun … and launched by the jaws of the great desert […]

Domenico Tumiati, ‘Le fauci del Saara’ in Tripolitania, 1911”
― Charles Stephenson, A Box Of Sand: The Italo-Ottoman War 1911-1912

“I am completely opposed to this proposition … The British have contributed nothing to this campaign … They now propose to enter this theatre at the moment when victory clearly lies before us in order to reap the benefit of our successes. … Let the British operate in their own area against Burma, Malaya, Sumatra, and the east coast of Asia!”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“the fall of Singapore foreshadowed nothing less than the ‘end of the British Empire’.9 More immediately though it left the British Admiralty and Government with the strategic conundrum of actually defending the rest of its ‘Two-Hemisphere Empire’ with a ‘One-Hemisphere Navy’.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“Regardless of the scale of their deployment, the British simply did not have the requisite capabilities to withstand Japanese air-naval superiority; extra resources could not have offset the gap between the Royal and the Imperial Japanese Navies.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“Somerville had also opined that whilst the British could lose the war in the Indian Ocean, it could not win it there.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“The whole notion was of course famously, if retrospectively, condemned by Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond as the ‘… illusion that a Two-Hemisphere empire can be defended by a One-Hemisphere Navy’.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“Equally distasteful was that it would both have to learn from, and play second fiddle to, the United States Navy. These though were facts and, as the second President of the Republic had put it in 1770, ‘facts are stubborn things’.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“There was, too, the supreme confidence engendered by the British naval tradition. How could officers brought up on Drake, Blake, Hawke, Howe, St. Vincent and Nelson believe that little chaps in the Far East who ate rice could ever hope to be a match at sea for honest, beef-eating Englishmen who had had salt water running through their veins for the past 400 years?”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“whilst discretion may well be the better part of valour, it rarely brings victory,”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“In the league table of offensive naval power the British now came a definite second, and that only because the new holder of the top spot had destroyed the only other contender.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide

“It has been claimed that, once assimilated, the Corsair ‘made the single biggest impact on Royal Navy aviation in the Second World War’.47 This was undoubtedly so, particularly given that over 2,000 of the type were delivered to the Fleet Air Arm between 1943 and 1945, with the first arriving in November of the former year.”
― Charles Stephenson, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, 1942–1944: The Fleet that Had to Hide