Quotes from Ian W. Toll

keep faith in "the advantages to be expected from perseverance…so long as any chance for success may remain.

Throughout the Pacific, one could find an illicit trade in "torpedo juice," the high-proof fuel used in torpedoes. Beer was usually rationed at two cans a week. When a larger quantity of beer was obtained by backhanded means, it could be chilled by taking it to high altitude for thirty minutes. Pilots would provide that service in exchange for a share of the spoils.

As is almost always the case with the Army, and often with the Marines, it was very difficult to get enough men to unload boats, even slowly," he told Spruance on November 30. "As soon as the troops debarked from the LSTs and APs, they simply evaporated. Boats would lie at the pier for hours on end without a pound moving, while those garrison troops were out sightseeing.

Marine Captain Bankson T. Holcomb, Jr., a Japanese-language officer detached from Pearl Harbor's codebreaking unit, picked up a transmission by a Japanese patrol pilot (probably the same one that had been picked up by the carrier's radar). The aircraft had reached the end of its patrol route and the pilot had "nothing to report.

A jolt, a white flash, a thunderclap, and the Hayate was torn apart—her bow floated one way, her stern the other, each section bobbing pitifully on the sea, and then both quickly sank, taking 168 men down with them. The battery's crew let out a full-throated cheer. "Knock it off, you bastards, and get back on the guns!" bellowed Platoon Sergeant Henry Bedell. "What do you think this is, a ball game?

Jesus Christ and General Jackson, this is the hottest potato they've ever handed me!" - Admiral "Bull" Halsey upon receiving instructions to take the Pacific Fleet and defend Guadalcanal at all costs.

The french Captain tells me, I have caused a War with France," Truxtun wrote Stoddert. "If so I am glad of it, for I detest Things being done by Halves." The

He thought reporters a nuisance and at first refused to deal with them at all. It was said, half-jokingly, that King would have liked to say nothing until the end of the war, and then release a two-word communiqué: "We won

They were learning that they needed more of everything: more training, more gunnery practice, more antiaircraft guns of every caliber, more ammunition, more supplies, more spare parts.

In Rochefort's view, Washington's analytic work was shoddy and its conclusions too often flew in the face of common sense.

Nor did he trouble to disguise his contempt for the Redmans. In his eyes, they were empire builders, in the game for their "own personal purposes, not for what they could offer.

PROLOGUE Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth! —RUDYARD KIPLING, The Ballad of East and West

That was the tribute written to twenty-year-old Chester W. Nimitz by the editors of the Lucky Bag, the Naval Academy yearbook of 1905. The quote, from Wordsworth's Excursion, was apt: it got at Nimitz's qualities of serenity, humility, and good-fellowship. He had a pleasant face and an easy manner. He was comfortable in his own skin. He was one of those rare souls who managed to be both supremely confident and genuinely modest.

It appeared that OP-20-G analysts were nourishing King's anxieties by sending him cherry-picked data that could be interpreted as pointing to such attacks. The men who had King's ear were unduly alarmist, and their impulsive theories might incite the fleet to chase its own tail.

esprit de corps

At no point did I break down," Mrs. Nimitz later recalled. "I was brought up by my mother to take what's coming, and you don't weep over it. You have to go through things.

Things were so bad at Pearl Harbor," Seaman Mason recalled, "that even the chiefs were working.