Quotes from James D. Hornfischer

The story, the history, of Navy men in extremis animates the idea that Americans can do anything when it is necessary and when it counts.

Legend, tradition, history can drive a commitment to excellence that raises people and has them perform at a level above anything they ever dreamed they could do. And it makes all of us realize the potential that everybody has who serves for you and goes to sea on ships.

Although he had a directing hand in everything, he always remained a student at heart.

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.

Communism has no greater ally in this country than the half-baked hysterical charges against leaders of this country by political opponents.

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.

To give advice to a tyrant was to suggest his fallibility and offer oneself as a scapegoat should things go wrong.

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.

sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch

property of the U.S.

The pressures of command were clearly weighing on him. He had insufficient authority, but he was no longer sure he wanted more of it.

The United States was an empire not for the purpose of subjugation or exploitation, but for the aspiration of advancing the expressly articulated ideals of the United Nations, the Atlantic Charter, and NATO: namely, the right of nations to stand free from outside coercion or subversion of peoples to chart their own destiny.

On the evening of November 1, at a campaign rally in Philadelphia, Eisenhower addressed the tensions in the Mediterranean by letting fly a salvo of antitribal idealism, declaring, "We cannot and will not condone armed aggression—no matter who the attacker, and no matter who the victim. We cannot—in the world, any more than in our own nation—subscribe to one law for the weak, another law for the strong; one law of those opposing us, another for those allied with us.

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.

accepting a cease-fire, threatening to cause a run on the British pound or drive its value to zero if Eden didn't require his withdrawing commanders to step lively. France had no choice but to go along, and the two nations ended their military operations that night at midnight and effected their withdrawal the first week of December, whereupon the International Monetary Fund disbursed $1.3 billion to the British Exchequer.

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.

In an unpublished 1945 dispatch sent shortly before he was killed by machine-gun fire on Okinawa, Ernie Pyle evoked the precarious seaworthiness of the tiny vessels: "They are rough and tumble little ships. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and they fall through space. They are in the air half the time, under water half the time. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and submarine pay both.

It was sometimes said that the only difference between Omaha and the North Pole was all the barbed wire.

As Marine Corps aviator Samuel Hynes would observe, "They go to war because it's impossible not to. Because a current is established in society, so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.

One morning in early 1943, before a speech at the Cadillac plant in Cadillac, Michigan, he was escorted to a railroad siding behind a large building and asked to paint his name on a large piece of steel on a flatcar. Then he was invited to follow it through every manufacturing phase on the assembly line, until, three hours later, it was driven off the end of the line, part of a finished Sherman tank.

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.

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.

There's a lot to be done," he told them. "Look around, see what it is, and do it.

Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it.