Quotes from Ian W. Toll

others, the story losing

All the ships flew huge American battle flags from mastheads," he said. "Ships knifing through huge breaking blue swells, boiling wakes from high-speed ships, flags flying. . . . It was a scene I will never forget.

consciously modeled himself after them. His specialty, if he could be said to have one, was in nurturing and managing the navy's human capital. His real genius was as a leader, a manager, a judge, and a motivator of men.

A man isn't a god. Committing errors is part of his attraction as a human being; it inspires a feeling of warmth toward him, and so admiration and devotion are aroused.

Between 1940 and 1943, Britain tripled its war production; Germany and Russia doubled theirs; and Japan increased its war production fourfold. In that three-year period, the United States multiplied its war production by twenty-five times.

Both men had remarkable success in holding a tenuous grasp on the loyalty of native villages. Though their presence was known by hundreds of people in dozens of villages, none betrayed them to the Japanese.

and I have been unwillingly forced to the conclusion that Rochefort committed the one unforgivable sin. To certain individuals of small mind and overweening ambition, there is no greater insult than to be proved wrong.

However ghostly it seems, you sense solidity through the soles of your shoes and know yourself to be a part of something big and strong;" wrote Dickinson; "a thousand other men and more, great guns, a powder magazine, an electric power plant that could run a city, a machine shop, beds and kitchens; all of this is compactly organized inside a vast steel hull, your planet.

It was an organization of freethinkers, in which a spirit of teamwork blended with an ethic of informality and an esprit de corps. It was built around a handful of talented

Freewheeling intuition was respected, but so was the plodding line of attack they called "siege tactics.

Operation hotfoot

Rochefort would put up with any method or style so long as it got results.

Possessing foreknowledge of Japanese intentions, Nimitz had been dealt a very strong hand. It is also true that he played that hand skillfully, indeed flawlessly. In arranging his forces, Nimitz had concentrated on one overriding objective to the exclusion of all others: to ambush and destroy the Japanese carriers. Whereas Yamamoto's plan was vast and fatally complex, Nimitz's was straightforward, and aimed at the enemy's most vulnerable point.

Men who got the best results were obsessive, preoccupied, and single-minded—"on the verge between brilliance and being crazy.

Though he knew the Japanese would attack the Aleutians, he had refused to divert the bulk of his forces from the main event north of Midway. He had been content to concede the loss of the westernmost islands in the Aleutians archipelago, knowing they offered little value as military assets and could be recaptured in good time.

That attitude was consistent with the teachings of Miyamoto Musashi, the renowned samurai swordsman of the sixteenth century. "As far as attacks made on you are concerned," Musashi had advised, "let opponents go ahead and do anything useless, while stopping them from doing anything useful. This is essential to the art of war.

Even so, the Americans had needed more than a few strokes of good luck. The battle had been a near-run thing, and easily might have gone the other way.

Velocity was paramount.

All that I can claim credit for, myself, is a very keen sense of the urgent need for surprise and a strong desire to hit the enemy carriers with our full strength as early as we could reach them.

Admiral King echoed those points, calling the naval campaign in the Java Sea "a magnificent display of very bad strategy," but the judgment is probably a little unfair. The Allied

Men up the chain of command were too swamped to answer every request for instructions, so officers and enlisted men of every rank had to assume a wider scope of authority.

On the qualities required of naval officers, Roosevelt was outspoken: "They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.

The Japanese people were rapidly succumbing to what would later be called shoribyo, or "victory disease"—a faith that Japan was invincible, and could afford to treat its enemies with contempt. Its symptoms were overconfidence, a failure to weigh risks properly, and a basic misunderstanding of the enemy.

It was decided to leave her where she lay. She lies there