Quotes from Joseph Wheelan

Author says the ineffectual U.S. Navy of two centuries ago lost two thirds as many men to duelist bullets as to sea hazards.

Author describes that a failed sea captain, "vacillated miserably between self-recrimination and defensiveness.

Second Lieutenant Yasuo Ko'o, devised a morbid system that estimated a man's life expectancy by his ability to stand or sit. If a man could stand, he might live thirty days; if he could sit up, three weeks; if he could only lie down, one week. If he urinated lying down, he had three days to live; if he stopped speaking, two days; and if he stopped blinking, just one day.18

Crutchley made no excuses. "The fact must be faced that we had an adequate force placed with the very purpose of repelling surface attack and when the surface attack was made, it destroyed our force.

His grandfather, Carson Vandegrift, a Baptist deacon, was wounded during Pickett's Charge, and young Vandegrift grew up hearing war stories from him and other Confederate veterans in Charlottesville.

We can punish South Carolina as she deserves, and as thousands of people in Georgia hoped we would do," Sherman wrote. "I do sincerely believe that the whole United States, North and South, would rejoice to have this Army turned loose in South Carolina, to devastate that State in the manner we have done in Georgia.

After crushing the Marines, Kawaguchi planned to don his tailored white dress uniform and receive Vandegrift's sword in a surrender ceremony at the mouth of the Lunga River. Afterward his Marine prisoners would be flown to Tokyo and paraded through the streets.

A shocking five thousand US sailors and naval officers were killed during the Guadalcanal campaign

During duty tours in China during the 1930s Carlson accompanied Mao Tse-tung and his army on the Long March and into combat against the Japanese. Carlson deeply admired Mao.

The good leaders seem to get killed; the poor leaders get the men killed.

Guadalcanal, wrote General Kawaguchi, was "no longer merely a name of an island in Japanese military history. It is the name of the graveyard of the Japanese Army.

and Bill Clinton broke with this archetype to devote their post-presidencies to humanitarian and other public causes. Previously, William Howard Taft, president