Crossing the Line Quotes

“In after years, when I was on the faculty of liberal universities where it was an unquestioned article of faith that dropping the bombs was a crime against humanity and another instance of American racism, I had to bite my tongue to keep silent, for to have said how grateful I was to the bomb would have marked me as a fascist—the kind I had spent five years fighting!”
― Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II

“We knew nothing of U-235, nor of the technology involved, and we cared almost nothing for the morality of using the bomb, the question that has so occupied generations since. The issue may have been raised but only to be disposed of quickly. They had attacked us, we had finished them with whatever means was at hand. That is what war is.”
― Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II

“I concluded that war’s cruelty and randomness, its indifference to human life, and the speed and ease with which it erases existence are not aberrations but speeded-up versions of how it always is.”
― Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II

“The failure of our torpedoes in planes and submarines during the first three years of the war—which everyone in the fleet knew and talked about—and the refusal of the administrators to acknowledge the problem and fix it, remains one of the scandals of the U.S. Navy.”
― Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II

“Cleanliness was not next to godliness in the United States Navy; it was godliness.”
― Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket's Odyssey in World War II