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Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 QUOTES

Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 QUOTES

41 " Rear Admiral J. S. McCain, an officer who had earned his wings at age fifty-one, was named commander of air forces in the South Pacific. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

42 " The stricken vessel started getting deeper in the water, slowly going down, as if she too were reluctant to give up the battle. With her colors proudly flying and the last signal flags, reading ‘I am abandoning ship,’ still waving at the yardarm, she went under on an even keel, like the lady she always was. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

43 " Japan had donated $ 246,000 in disaster relief for the stricken city, exceeding the combined relief pledges of every other nation in the world. When a prominent Japanese seismologist arrived from Tokyo to lend his expertise to the rebuilding effort, he was waylaid in the streets and beaten by a mob. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

44 " The court and jury convened in the mess hall, two decks below the flight deck. A “Grand Inquisitor” interrogated the pollywogs with the help of “scribes” and “kibitzers.” The accused were asked preposterous and insulting questions, and no matter how they answered, they were likely to be held in “contempt of court. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

45 " An officer who testified that he had served in naval intelligence was convicted of perjury, on the grounds that no such thing had ever existed. Rookie pilots were required to spend the day in fur-lined winter flight suits with helmets and gloves, scanning the horizon for icebergs using “binoculars” fashioned from a pair of Coke bottles. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

46 " Correct thoughts and beliefs were hammered into the minds of the Japanese through official slogans: “I won’t desire anything until the war is won "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

47 " 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. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

48 " 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

49 " 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. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

50 " 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. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

51 " They advanced on a zigzagging track as a measure against enemy submarines, but that required mass-choreographed maneuvers that could easily go awry. When one of the cruisers missed a turn and dropped out of position, her captain received a sarcastic message by blinker light from Admiral Halsey: “May I suggest that if at all convenient you get where you belong?” Shortly afterward, he received another: “Have you any officer aboard able to judge distance accurately within 6,000 yards? "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

52 " 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. "

― Ian W. Toll , Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

53 " 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