86
" Paperwork management was provisional and makeshift. Rochefort and his principal analysts knew they ought to devise a proper filing system, with cross-indexing of archived messages, but they never found the time for that. Somehow, through the blizzard of decrypts and IBM cards, order prevailed over chaos. “This is one reason why these people are mostly crazy,” Rochefort later recalled. “We’d have no problem at all.” You’d mention something and you’d say, “Now wait a minute. Back here when they were around Halmahera on their way down to a landing at Port Something-or-other, there was a message like this. Let’s have it.” And they’d look in this pile of junk and they were able to locate it. . . . And then of course, you’d get a new one here and this leads to another thing over here and this leads to another thing and this is how you fill the whole works up. One letter leads to another and that leads to a third one and so on. Then that’s when your memory comes in very handy. Holmes added that a cryptanalyst “needs only time, patience, an infinite capacity for work, a mind that can focus on one problem to the exclusion of everything else, a photographic memory, the inability to drop an unsolved problem, and a large volume of traffic. "
― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942
89
" Bushido meant stoicism, self-discipline, and dignity in one’s personal bearing; it emphasized mastery of the martial arts through long training and practice; it lauded sacrifice in service to duty, without the slightest fear of death; it demanded asceticism and simplicity in daily life, without regard to comforts, appetites, or luxuries. The samurai was “to live as if already dead,” an outlook consonant with Buddhism; he was to regard death with fatalistic indifference, rather than cling to a life that was essentially illusory. Shame or dishonor might require suicide as atonement—and when a samurai killed himself, he did so by carving out his own viscera with a short steel blade. But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless, and the old-time samurai who had done his duty in a losing cause could lay down his arms with honor intact. "
― Ian W. Toll , Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
93
" The welter of major policy decisions taken by American leaders between May and August 1945 were among the most complex in the nation’s history. Purely military strategy was amalgamated into high considerations of foreign policy; all minds, including those of senior generals and admirals, were turning toward the postwar order. The president’s men were absorbed in the day-in, day-out skirmishes with Stalin over the Yalta accords, the occupation and reconstruction of Germany, the political claims of Charles de Gaulle in France, and the charter of the United Nations. They were just beginning to think about the future of Asia, the status of former Japanese territories, the fate of British colonies, the red insurgency in China, the future of Japan under Allied occupation, and the still-uncertain matter of whether Japan’s overseas armies would lay down arms if ordered to do so by Tokyo, or if they would have to be beaten in the field even after the home islands were subjugated. "
― Ian W. Toll , Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945
94
" Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion. "
― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942