Neptune's Inferno Quotes

“To give advice to a tyrant was to suggest his fallibility and offer oneself as a scapegoat should things go wrong.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“When it was all said and done at Guadalcanal, three sailors would die at sea for every infantryman who fell ashore.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“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.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“There’s a lot to be done,” he told them. “Look around, see what it is, and do it.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“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.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“War is unlike life,” he said. “It’s a denial of everything you learn life is. And that’s why when you get finished with it, you see that it offers no lessons that can’t be better learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget. A disconnect needs to be made to get yourself cleansed.” His children were after him for thirty-five years to talk about it. “I refused. I said ‘Read it in the history books. I can’t do it justice.’ We were closed up tight as a clam.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Even Admiral Raymond Spruance, Nimitz’s chief of staff and widely considered one of the Navy’s most capacious minds, had taken lumps for what some critics deemed his excessive caution in the Battle of Midway. The experience soured him on second-guessing: “I have always hesitated to sit in judgment of the responsible man on the spot, unless it was obvious to me at the time he was making a grave error in judgment. Even in that case I wanted to hear his side of the matter before I made any final judgment.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The first thing I told them was to try to do their part in making the ship’s company a fighting team. If you can do that, you’ve got half the battle won. That means that everybody feels a responsibility for everybody else. Everybody has a job to do and his task is to do his job correctly and well. Talk to the shipmates in your division as much as you can, not only to learn your job but to build up a sense of confidence, little by little, that if you get hurt, another guy’s going to know how to help you. If you do those two things, you’re a long way along.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Distinctions were being drawn between officers who were battle-minded and those whose savage instincts were reserved for advancing their own careers. Qualities that got you ahead in peacetime were yielding to skills equally ageless, but prized only in desperate times: a glint in the eye, a forward-leaning, balls-of-the-feet bearing, a constitutional aspect of professionalized aggression.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Greater cause for insomnia lay in not knowing the proficiency of one’s crew. Admiral Ghormley had been hampered by this uncertainty. He didn’t know what his ships and commanders were capable of. He hadn’t spent time with them, or among them; hadn’t been physically present to assess critical variables, from their intangible esprit to the physical soundness of their machinery. He was candid about this. “I did not know, from actual contact, the ability of the officers, nor the material condition of the ships nor their readiness for battle, nor did I know their degree of training for warfare such as was soon to develop in this area. Improvement was acquired while carrying out combat missions,” he would write. This was a startling admission of a leadership failure.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Having tasted defeat, the Navy was starting to come back to appreciating the unpolished strengths of the Georgia farm boys who found themselves under gentle persecution on board Commander Wylie’s Fletcher. A rebel yell and a blast of powder. That and a little planning and technical proficiency would carry the day.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The awareness that one was in the presence of such an insurgent came at a pheromonal level. He didn’t have to be brash or intimidating. If he had the right qualities, they carried through the air around him despite his quietude. Some men were fiery and motivational, leading with a barely restrained recklessness and a demeanor of perpetually fresh anger. Others were intellectual warriors, brains in circuit with the matrix in space where vectors flew toward other vectors and the results of battle followed from the nature of their intersections. The fighter’s way was elemental. It was not possible to cultivate it reliably in an academic meritocracy, or to gauge it by class rank. The woodsmen with their squirrel guns who beat the British at New Orleans rallied to Andrew Jackson’s readiness to fury, a scent that inspired fear, his instinct to abandon prudence and seize a sudden opening to kill.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Criticism of basic concepts in the Imperial Navy would have impugned the top-level admirals, and brought instant dismissal of the critic,” Hara wrote.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“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.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“One winter in Manila in the mid-1930s, Wylie walked into the wardroom of his ship, the heavy cruiser Augusta (Captain Chester W. Nimitz commanding), and encountered a “fist-banging argument” between two of the ship’s up-and-coming young officers. At issue was what it took to become skilled at rifle or pistol marksmanship. One officer, Lloyd Mustin, said that only someone born with a special gift could learn to do it well. The other, a marine named Lewis B. Puller, said, “I can take any dumb son of a bitch and teach him to shoot.” Mustin would go on to become one of the Navy’s pioneers in radar-controlled gunnery. Puller would ascend to general, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history. Gesturing to Wylie standing in the doorway, Chesty Puller declared, “I can even teach him.” A ten-dollar bet ensued. The next time the Augusta’s marine detachment found time to do their annual qualifications at the rifle range, Wylie was Puller’s special guest. And by the end of the experiment, he was the proud owner of a Marine medal designating him an expert rifleman. The experience helped Wylie understand both native gifts and teachable skills and predisposed him to work with the rural kids under him. Now he could smile when the sighting of an aircraft approaching at a distant but undetermined range came through the Fletcher’s bridge phones as, “Hey, Cap’n, here’s another one of them thar aero-planes, but don’t you fret none. She’s a fur piece yet.” Wylie was a good enough leader to appreciate what the recruits from the countryside brought to the game. “They were highly motivated,” he said. “They just came to fight.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Distance was a cleansing agent for everything. “The pervasive mud, and jungle gloom and tropical sun, when they are not all around you smothering you, can have a haunting beauty at a far remove,” wrote an infantryman who would arrive at Guadalcanal later, James Jones. “When you are not straining and gasping to save your life, the act of doing so can seem adventurous and exciting from a distance. The greater the distance, the greater the adventure. But, God help me, it was beautiful.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The leading navies of the world were situated in a challenging period between the age of fighting sail and the age of nuclear propulsion when fuel was consumable and therefore a critical limit on their reach. Once the term steaming replaced sailing in the naval lexicon, the concept of an operating radius took root. “If an enemy lay beyond that radius, the fleet might as well be chained to a post,” a maritime historian wrote.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“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.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Halsey was neither a genius nor even a working scholar in any academic or technical field, but he had a quality of brilliance that may have been even more important in a combat capacity. He was, it was said, “brilliant in common sense.” He knew that battles and wars were won not principally with well-drafted paperwork or subtle diplomacy or high materials and engineering ratings aboard ship, but by something quite simple and direct: placing ordnance on target. He knew, working backward from there, that the quality of the mind and spirit of the men distributing that ordnance was at least as important as the mechanical state of the weapons themselves. And he knew that small and simple acts, trivial in themselves but intangibly powerful, raised and perfected that quality; sometimes those things were as prosaic as showing up and listening to people.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The pressures of command were clearly weighing on him. He had insufficient authority, but he was no longer sure he wanted more of it.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Ten days before the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, a plan circulated briefly, never to be executed, providing for the creation of a “surface attack group” under Fletcher’s cruiser boss, Rear Admiral Carleton H. Wright, drawing the battleship North Carolina, the heavy cruisers Minneapolis, San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, and Salt Lake City, the Atlanta, and four destroyers into a single fighting force should the Japanese fleet come within gun range. Those ships were finally reckoned too valuable to spare in missions other than antiaircraft defense.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“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.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Burdens grew heavier the higher one ascended in rank. Captains concerned themselves with ships and crews, commodores with squadrons, task force commanders with objectives, and theater commanders with campaigns. The burdens of sailors weighed mostly on the muscles. The weight of leadership was subtler and heavier. It could test the conscience.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Ghormley wary about the threat of espionage. No doubt mindful of the role that spies played in the surprise attacks at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, Ghormley wrote his staff, “Loose talk is a stupid habit.… Some would risk the lives of their friends by a silly effort to impress others in public places.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“Graff’s shipmate Jim Shaw wrote to his wife, Jane, of the new perspective on life the experience of battle had given them. “We hate the petty bickering of politics.… We hate the disunity between labor and capital. We look with a sort of contemptuous tolerance on such organizations as the USO. We eye askance and critically the opinions aired by the press. As for the ‘military commentators’ who learn their strategy out of books, we writhe in disgust at their positive statements as to how the actual combat should be carried on.… After the war is over the fighting man is going to demand a kind of peace and a kind of government that will be some slight remuneration for the blood and toil and anguish of the war.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The way America handled its “first team” differed markedly from Japan’s. The Americans brought them home after their inaugural experience under sustained fire and employed them to train the next wave. The Japanese left them on the front to fight until the inevitable happened, and saw their human assets waste away. It was a gilded luxury that the Marine Corps could send home its first fighter ace, the commander of one of the most decorated squadrons in the Solomons, Captain John L. Smith, give him his Medal of Honor, and refuse his requests to return to combat, “not until you have trained 150 John L. Smiths.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack “sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

“The lack of a consensus within American ranks effectively left Germany-first to exist only in the minds of politicians. The numbers spoke for themselves: At the end of 1942, the United States would field nearly 25 percent more combat troops in the Pacific than it did in England and North Africa, 464,000 to 378,000.”
― James D. Hornfischer, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal