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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9f2c2d5 | Distinctions were being drawn between officers who were battle-minded and those whose savage instincts were reserved for advancing their own careers. Qualities that got you ahead in peacetime were yielding to skills equally ageless, but prized only in desperate times: a glint in the eye, a forward-leaning, balls-of-the-feet bearing, a constitutional aspect of professionalized aggression. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| c631777 | Lee knew that the key to victory lay not only in terms of engineering or mathematics, but in a crew's ability to adjust psychologically to the unexpected. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 08da15a | Lieutenant Pat McEntee in the Atlanta witnessed it: a Wildcat closing fast on a Betty from behind. The fighter was evidently out of ammunition, for its driver resorted to an unusual tactic. Down came his landing gear. Down went his airspeed. It looked to McEntee as if he was trying "to set his ship down on the bomber's broad back. And he did--again and again, and again, with sledgehammer impact. He literally was pounding the enemy into the .. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 10cc500 | sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 6da6404 | The pressures of command were clearly weighing on him. He had insufficient authority, but he was no longer sure he wanted more of it. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 7855140 | When transports carrying survivors of the Battle of Savo Island finally returned home, the men were sent to quarantine, removed from public circulation. They had stories to tell that Admiral King would be quite happy not to see in the newspapers. Some five hundred survivors of the Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy were held under virtual house arrest in a barracks that had been constructed on Treasure Island for the 1939 World's Fair. Marines .. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 741ab9c | Ten days before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a plan circulated briefly, never to be executed, providing for the creation of a "surface attack group" under Fletcher's cruiser boss, Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, drawing the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruisers Minneapolis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Salt Lake City, the Atlanta, and four destroyers into a single fighting force should the Japanese fleet come wi.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| c85bff2 | Halsey was neither a genius nor even a working scholar in any academic or technical field, but he had a quality of brilliance that may have been even more important in a combat capacity. He was, it was said, "brilliant in common sense." He knew that battles and wars were won not principally with well-drafted paperwork or subtle diplomacy or high materials and engineering ratings aboard ship, but by something quite simple and direct: placing.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| ffe2aa2 | Admiral King saw the need to relearn his trade from the ground up. He understood that in the art of war, amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 1e48ba0 | One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a "fist-banging argument" between two of the ship's up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marin.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 05f4e57 | One thing Scott's tactical instructions didn't adequately clarify was how his destroyer captains would bring their torpedoes to bear. Torpedoes were the killing weapons of naval war, and much easier to aim than guns were. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| a401bb0 | Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 6accf83 | On his visit to Henderson Field, Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times had sniffed out the latter story, as well as the torpedoing of the North Carolina. Though he itched to file stories, he saw a larger need. American readers certainly deserved to know the truth about Savo. The question was whether it put sailors at risk in the continuing fight. Baldwin wrote a series of stories, including an account of Savo as he had learned it on the beac.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 6b2c404 | The leading navies of the world were situated in a challenging period between the age of fighting sail and the age of nuclear propulsion when fuel was consumable and therefore a critical limit on their reach. Once the term steaming replaced sailing in the naval lexicon, the concept of an operating radius took root. "If an enemy lay beyond that radius, the fleet might as well be chained to a post," a maritime historian wrote." | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 05a31f5 | Distance was a cleansing agent for everything. "The pervasive mud, and jungle gloom and tropical sun, when they are not all around you smothering you, can have a haunting beauty at a far remove," wrote an infantryman who would arrive at Guadalcanal later, James Jones. "When you are not straining and gasping to save your life, the act of doing so can seem adventurous and exciting from a distance. The greater the distance, the greater the adv.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| a9cb73d | Neither triumphalism, condemnation, nor apology does intellectual or emotional justice to the brute reality of this savage war, the outcome of which could not have been known in the moment. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 64040fe | The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack "sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency." | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 33eb5ec | When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches | saipan ww2 | James D. Hornfischer | |
| 242b6c8 | who gave of their time: Joe Files, MD, Rod Givens, MD, | Greg Iles | ||
| de9289f | The way America handled its "first team" differed markedly from Japan's. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated s.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 92a960e | The first thing I told them was to try to do their part in making the ship's company a fighting team. If you can do that, you've got half the battle won. That means that everybody feels a responsibility for everybody else. Everybody has a job to do and his task is to do his job correctly and well. Talk to the shipmates in your division as much as you can, not only to learn your job but to build up a sense of confidence, little by little, th.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 8cfc1f4 | Kurita knew that heavenly influences could be counted upon to trump human planning. In war, events seldom cooperate with expectation. Given | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 413aed8 | Wildcats could carry a light bomb load too. Their pilots, however, found to their dismay that the bombs could be difficult to drop: a pilot had not only to pull the bomb release but also to jerk the plane's rudder back and forth, shaking the plane in midflight to dislodge the bombs from their notoriously sticky mountings. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 9dc3862 | property of the U.S. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| b1c084c | Inbound now at twenty thousand feet, moving swifly toward the island, came a wave of twin-engine Betty bombers and thirty Zeros, fuel burning fast on half-empty tanks. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 2532eb7 | The first time the South Dakota's main battery was tested with a full nine-gun broadside, the wave of blast pressure pushed through the passageway where Captain Thomas Gatch was standing, tearing his pants right off him. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 18fc20d | it was probably more dangerous to remain aboard the fuel- and explosive-laden jeep carrier than to take off and glide-bomb a Japanese capital ship. As Leonard Moser, a plane captain on the Fanshaw Bay, was changing a carburetor on a VC-68 aircraft, half a dozen pilots hovered nearby, coveting a chance to climb into that cockpit and get their tails off the ship. The aviation machinist's mate finished the job, then climbed up into the cockpit.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 6fe756c | Though distrust of the Japanese was widespread in the Navy, Sprague was among the first to appreciate exactly what the Japanese might do. In June 1928 the Lexington participated in a mock surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 326a5b6 | Graff's shipmate Jim Shaw wrote to his wife, Jane, of the new perspective on life the experience of battle had given them. "We hate the petty bickering of politics.... We hate the disunity between labor and capital. We look with a sort of contemptuous tolerance on such organizations as the USO. We eye askance and critically the opinions aired by the press. As for the 'military commentators' who learn their strategy out of books, we writhe i.. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 9a082ea | For reasons of electoral calculation--to preserve his Democratic majorities in a congressional midterm election--Roosevelt wanted American troops fighting Germans before the end of the year. "We failed to see," Marshall would write, "that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action." | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| cade204 | When great men blunder, they count their losses in pride and reputation and glory. The underlings count their losses in blood. --Theodore C. Mason, Battleship Sailor (1982) | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 634afc8 | The lack of a consensus within American ranks effectively left Germany-first to exist only in the minds of politicians. The numbers spoke for themselves: At the end of 1942, the United States would field nearly 25 percent more combat troops in the Pacific than it did in England and North Africa, 464,000 to 378,000. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| f453305 | Dethlefs | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| f13b4aa | The after turret, with no such restraints, kept firing, however, and as it trained straight aft the wash of fire from her barrels set fire to her two floatplanes, fantail-mounted on catapults. The small bonfires raged briefly before the next salvo blew them right off the ship. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| b8aaf32 | An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship's hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| f61b2f0 | Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser's shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| d9d85c1 | It was downright harrowing to be airborne while battleships offshore were bombarding targets ashore. Pilots flying gunnery spotting missions became sandwiched in an invisible corridor between salvos from the big ships offshore. While they spotted shell bursts and called in corrections, fourteen-hundred-pound battleship shells flew overhead in trios, plainly visible to the eye. Below, the smaller warheads of the cruisers whizzed past. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| bccb520 | Ghormley wary about the threat of espionage. No doubt mindful of the role that spies played in the surprise attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Ghormley wrote his staff, "Loose talk is a stupid habit.... Some would risk the lives of their friends by a silly effort to impress others in public places." | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 8e611fc | Burdens grew heavier the higher one ascended in rank. Captains concerned themselves with ships and crews, commodores with squadrons, task force commanders with objectives, and theater commanders with campaigns. The burdens of sailors weighed mostly on the muscles. The weight of leadership was subtler and heavier. It could test the conscience. | James D. Hornfischer | ||
| 964c24d |
Si ahora volviese atras... lo cambiaria todo. Reconstruiria los cimientos, diria mil < |
Alice Kellen | ||
| 315f8d7 | Soy incapaz de fingir que no estoy deseando ponerme en pie y rodear esta puta mesa y besarte hasta que me obligues a parar. | Alice Kellen | ||
| 190afb0 | Tu y yo lo somos todo. Siempre lo hemos sido. | Alice Kellen | ||
| 1487095 | Solo somos un cumulo de matices que sacamos a relucir en segun que momentos. | Alice Kellen | ||
| f9c10ba | si me diesen a elegir que deseo para el resto de mi vida, lo unico que tengo claro es que quiero que sea contigo. | Alice Kellen |