...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.
When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches
It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone's genius contracts itself to a precious few hours.
Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it.
Property of the U.S.
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 yie...
Dethlefs
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...
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 stupi...
Sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch
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 p...
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. T...
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 wa...
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 s...
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 att...
I have to tell you, Major, if we don't get these bombs and stop this Jap fleet, they're gonna come in here and bomb the hell out of this place and maybe recapture it. Then their planes will be droppin...
Captain Copeland picked up the intercom mike and addressed the Roberts’s crew. That he was speaking for himself struck Ens. Jack Moore as unusual and urgent. Normally seaman Jack Roberts was the publi...
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 t...
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 woul...
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 larg...