Pacific Crucible Quotes

“On the qualities required of naval officers, Roosevelt was outspoken: “They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Yoshihito, who became the Taisho emperor in 1912, had once at a public function, rolled an official parchment into a tube and held it up to his eye as a telescope; he was thereafter shut away in monastic seclusion where his behavior could not distress the public.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

“The ships themselves were extremely vulnerable, but they could inflict heavy punishment on an enemy from long range, if they could find him and strike him first. The tactical imperatives were to keep moving; to keep your scouts in the air, flying wide search patterns; and to hide your flight decks in weather fronts while pinning your enemy down in zones of clear visibility. “If they can’t find you they can’t hit you,” said Captain Sherman of the Lexington. “The carrier is a weapon that can dash in, hit hard and disappear.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“A bedrock tenet of communications intelligence was that the enemy must always be encouraged to “feel safe,” and never given cause to suspect that his radio transmissions were less than impenetrable.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Hiroyuki Agawa describes a meeting in which an army officer seated next to the admiral rose to his feet “and began to harangue those assembled at interminable length.” Yamamoto stealthily edged the man’s chair back several feet. When he had finished speaking and tried to sit down, the officer missed the chair and fell sprawling on the floor. The admiral kept a straight face, looked straight ahead, and continued the meeting as if nothing had happened.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR are often explained in terms of tatemae and honne. Tatemae, meaning “front” or “facade,” refers to the face one shows the world, the opinions one expresses in public, or the role one is obligated to play based on one’s rank or position. Honne describes “the truth” or “honest feelings,” shared only within a trusted circle of family and friends. To let slip the mask, revealing honne to another, is a signal of intimacy or trust; it is tantamount to an offer of friendship. These ideas are hardly unique to Japan, and versions of tatemae and honne are alive and well in the West. But in the Japanese way of thinking, it is perfectly natural that tatemae and honne should be at odds, and no one need agonize over the discrepancy, or go out of his way to put them to rights.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“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

“The Japanese people were rapidly succumbing to what would later be called shoribyo, or “victory disease”—a faith that Japan was invincible, and could afford to treat its enemies with contempt. Its symptoms were overconfidence, a failure to weigh risks properly, and a basic misunderstanding of the enemy.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Roosevelt, according to a story told by Hopkins, was once wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom just as the prime minister was emerging from his bath, stark naked. The president, flustered, told his attendant to back him out of the room, but Churchill theatrically declared, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“That attitude was consistent with the teachings of Miyamoto Musashi, the renowned samurai swordsman of the sixteenth century. “As far as attacks made on you are concerned,” Musashi had advised, “let opponents go ahead and do anything useless, while stopping them from doing anything useful. This is essential to the art of war.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Though he knew the Japanese would attack the Aleutians, he had refused to divert the bulk of his forces from the main event north of Midway. He had been content to concede the loss of the westernmost islands in the Aleutians archipelago, knowing they offered little value as military assets and could be recaptured in good time.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Possessing foreknowledge of Japanese intentions, Nimitz had been dealt a very strong hand. It is also true that he played that hand skillfully, indeed flawlessly. In arranging his forces, Nimitz had concentrated on one overriding objective to the exclusion of all others: to ambush and destroy the Japanese carriers. Whereas Yamamoto’s plan was vast and fatally complex, Nimitz’s was straightforward, and aimed at the enemy’s most vulnerable point.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“The truth was that no one, not even Admirals Fletcher or Spruance, knew precisely how the battle was unfolding. It was too big, too spread out; too much was happening at once, and what little data could be pieced together may or may not be reliable. They were all feeling their way through the fog of war.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Many of Torpedo Eight’s pilots were raw ensigns, barely out of flight school. When Ensign George Gay and his fellow newcomers joined the squadron shortly before the Battle of Midway, none had ever carried a torpedo on a plane before, let alone dropped one on a target. They were ludicrously unprepared, and they knew it. “Quite a few of us were a little bit skeptical and leery,” Gay later said, “but we’d seen Doolittle and his boys, when they hadn’t even seen a carrier before, and they took the B-25s off, [and] we figured by golly if they could do it, well we could too.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“In four months, Nagumo’s carriers had traveled more than 50,000 miles, spreading terror and devastation a full third of the way around the earth, from Hawaii in the east to Ceylon in the west. But the mileage was beginning to wear. The ships and crews had been sent on too many missions in too many directions; they had traveled too many miles with too little rest; they had been pushed to the limits of endurance by commanders who were loath to accept that such limits even existed.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“It appeared that OP-20-G analysts were nourishing King’s anxieties by sending him cherry-picked data that could be interpreted as pointing to such attacks. The men who had King’s ear were unduly alarmist, and their impulsive theories might incite the fleet to chase its own tail.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Nimitz paid close attention to all the intelligence products that crossed his desk. On his first day as CINCPAC, he told Layton, “I want you to be the Admiral Nagumo of my staff. I want your every thought, every instinct as you believe Admiral Nagumo might have them. You are to see the war, their operations, their aims, from the Japanese viewpoint and keep me advised what you are thinking about, what you are doing, and what purpose, what strategy, motivates your operations. If you can do this, you will give me the kind of information needed to win this war.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“The day’s action was far from finished—there were more strikes to be flown, and there was the constant danger that Japanese planes not yet destroyed on the ground would find the Enterprise and pounce on her.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“I am convinced that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships,” he said. “We can not manage by cooperation. Human frailties are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service. If we make a plan for unified command now, it will solve nine-tenths of our troubles.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Mahan’s dictum that good men and bad ships make a better navy than bad men and good ships was always near Nimitz’s thoughts.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“That was the tribute written to twenty-year-old Chester W. Nimitz by the editors of the Lucky Bag, the Naval Academy yearbook of 1905. The quote, from Wordsworth’s Excursion, was apt: it got at Nimitz’s qualities of serenity, humility, and good-fellowship. He had a pleasant face and an easy manner. He was comfortable in his own skin. He was one of those rare souls who managed to be both supremely confident and genuinely modest.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“At no point did I break down,” Mrs. Nimitz later recalled. “I was brought up by my mother to take what’s coming, and you don’t weep over it. You have to go through things.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“again and again, throughout the pages of history, a united fleet had hunted down and destroyed the scattered elements of a divided fleet.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“PROLOGUE Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth! —RUDYARD KIPLING, The Ballad of East and West”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“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

“Reaching California, many of the Pacific-bound servicemen were caught in limbo, waiting for a ship, and that suited them fine. No one doubted that the route to Tokyo would be long and bloody, and they were in no hurry to travel it. The sweating malarial jungles of the South Pacific, the infinitesimal atolls of the central Pacific, all those obscure islands with their alien names—Efate, Espiritu Santo, Malaita, Guadalcanal, Emirau, Tarawa, Majuro, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Ulithi, Palau, Saipan, Morotai, Mindanao, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—they would see them soon enough. “Golden Gate in ’48, bread line in ’49.” That pessimistic slogan, which began circulating in 1942, revealed a great deal about the attitudes of the American servicemen who fought in the Pacific. They fully expected that the war would last twice as long as it eventually did, and they assumed, as a matter of course, that the long effort would exhaust and bankrupt the nation. But the words also indicated a gritty, persevering determination. The Japanese had fatally misjudged them. They were not cowed by the prospect of a long war and a destitute homecoming. They would go on fighting, killing, and dying, overcoming fear, fatigue, and sorrow, until they reached the beaches of the detested empire itself. There, in 1945, the irresistible force of the Yankee war machine would meet the immovable object of the “Yamato spirit,” until two mushroom clouds and an emperor’s decision brought the whole execrable business to an end.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“CBS broadcaster Elmer Davis famously quipped: “There are some patriotic citizens who sincerely hope that America will win the war—but they also hope that Russia will lose it; and there are some who hope that America will win the war, but that England will lose it; and there are some who hope that America will win the war, but that Roosevelt will lose it!”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Ensign Buell, the Yorktown SBD pilot, was so exhausted that he crawled into a bunk in a room full of dead shipmates. He was awakened in the small hours of the morning by “hands grasping me and lifting me from the bunk. It was still dark, and I had no idea what was happening so I asked in a rather loud voice what the hell was going on. At the sound of my voice I was immediately dropped halfway out of the cubicle, and a rather startled voice said: ‘My God, Doc, this one ain’t dead!”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“The captain and executive officer were the last to go. They had paced the flight deck one last time, looking for stragglers. Finding none, they stood above one of the knotted lines on the Lexington’s stern for a moment, both apparently unwilling to take the final step. Sherman ordered Seligman to go down ahead of him, as it was the captain’s “duty and privilege” to be the last man to leave the ship. As Seligman lowered away, an explosion went up amidships, throwing flames and airplanes high into the air, and Sherman ducked under the edge of the flight deck to get cover from falling debris. Seligman shouted at the skipper to come down the line. “I was just thinking,” Sherman replied: “wouldn’t I look silly if I left this ship and the fires went out?” The captain later wrote that abandoning the Lexington was “heartbreaking,” and “the hardest thing I have ever done.” But the venerable old carrier had run her race, and it was Sherman’s duty to deliver himself, physically intact, into the continuing service of the U.S. Navy. He went down the line and dropped into the warm dark water of the Coral Sea.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942