Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

by Ian W. Toll

After Pearl Harbor, Rochefort and his key lieutenants worked around the clock. Rochefort went home once every third or fourth night. Most nights he slept on a cot in his office, fueled by coffee and sandwiches. Twenty- or twenty-two-hour days were routine. Dyer sometimes worked two or three days straight, keeping his eyes open by swallowing handfuls of benzedrine tablets that he kept in a bucket on his desk and offered freely to his colleagues. (Asked about this later, Dyer explained: “I figured there were people out there getting shot at. If it should happen that it turned out to inflict some injury on my health in the long run, so what?”) Most of the enlisted men and clerks worked in twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, or what Holmes called a “normal” eighty-four-hour week.