How many quotes did James D. Hornfischer wrote?

The author James D. Hornfischer wrote around 39 of quotes.

42 James D. Hornfischer Quotes on Battle, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal and The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines

Q: What is the best James D. Hornfischer quote?

"...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory." - James D. Hornfischer

Q: What are some James D. Hornfischer quotes?

"To give advice to a tyrant was to suggest his fallibility and offer oneself as a scapegoat should things go wrong." "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." "Wildcats could carry a light bomb load too. Their pilots, however, found to their dismay that the bombs could be difficult to drop: a pilot had not only to pull the bomb release but also to jerk the plane’s rudder back and forth, shaking the plane in midflight to dislodge the bombs from their notoriously sticky mountings." - James D. Hornfischer

Q: What are some short James D. Hornfischer quotes?

"sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch" "property of the U.S." "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

He believed that the quality of experience one has as a member of any team depends on the caliber and motivation of the people one serves with.

It has been written that so much of life is preparation, so much is routine, and so much is retrospect that the purest essence of anyone’s genius contracts itself to a precious few hours.

When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches.

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

It was downright harrowing to be airborne while battleships offshore were bombarding targets ashore. Pilots flying gunnery spotting missions became sandwiched in an invisible corridor between salvos from the big ships offshore. While they spotted shell bursts and called in corrections, fourteen-hundred-pound battleship shells flew overhead in trios, plainly visible to the eye. Below, the smaller warheads of the cruisers whizzed past.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser’s shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship’s hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

The after turret, with no such restraints, kept firing, however, and as it trained straight aft the wash of fire from her barrels set fire to her two floatplanes, fantail-mounted on catapults. The small bonfires raged briefly before the next salvo blew them right off the ship.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Dethlefs

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

When great men blunder, they count their losses in pride and reputation and glory. The underlings count their losses in blood. —Theodore C. Mason, Battleship Sailor (1982)

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

For reasons of electoral calculation—to preserve his Democratic majorities in a congressional midterm election—Roosevelt wanted American troops fighting Germans before the end of the year. “We failed to see,” Marshall would write, “that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Archer kept his course toward the battleship. He opened his bomb bay doors for show, hoping to persuade the dreadnought to veer from its course. Then, as he began to pull up over the ship, Archer rolled his Avenger over on its back and took his .38-caliber service revolver from its holster. Running on anger born of pain and not a little adrenaline, he squeezed the trigger repeatedly, sending six rounds into the dark superstructure of the battleship.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

By any measure the mathematics of the engagement were preposterously against them. The Yamato displaced nearly seventy thousand tons. She alone matched almost exactly in weight all thirteen ships of Taffy 3. Each of her three main gun turrets weighed more than an entire Fletcher-class destroyer.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack “sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Oldendorf’s fleet would hold its position astride the northern end of the strait and devour Nishimura’s column like a log thrust into the business end of a U.S. Navy wood chipper.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

The previous day, December 6, Sprague had upbraided his crew for their sloppy performance during an intensive series of drills. He broke with his nature and let them have it. Gathering his officers in the Tangier's wardroom, Sprague said, “We're not prepared. We can't trust the Japanese. How do you know the Japanese won't attack tomorrow?” The next morning the Combined Fleet struck.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

The portly Italian chief never talked much. Though he had played the royal baby at the crossing-the-line ceremony, he was the oldest man on the ship at forty-three and had little in common with boys twenty and more years his junior. Serafini was an immigrant from the Old Country whose Navy service dated to World War I. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, he had left a well-paying job in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and reenlisted despite both exceeding the age limit and his status as father of two. Serafini felt that he owed a debt of gratitude to the United States.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

Though distrust of the Japanese was widespread in the Navy, Sprague was among the first to appreciate exactly what the Japanese might do. In June 1928 the Lexington participated in a mock surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

On his visit to Henderson Field, Hanson Baldwin of The New York Times had sniffed out the latter story, as well as the torpedoing of the North Carolina. Though he itched to file stories, he saw a larger need. American readers certainly deserved to know the truth about Savo. The question was whether it put sailors at risk in the continuing fight. Baldwin wrote a series of stories, including an account of Savo as he had learned it on the beaches of Guadalcanal and the decks of warships. His eventual accounts withheld the number of ships sunk, their names, and the vulnerabilities that resulted in their loss. “I fudged this very carefully because I realized it was very important that the Japs not know exactly how damaged we were.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Still, the unfamiliar power of a new technology was seldom a match for a complacent human mind bent on ignoring it.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

it was probably more dangerous to remain aboard the fuel- and explosive-laden jeep carrier than to take off and glide-bomb a Japanese capital ship. As Leonard Moser, a plane captain on the Fanshaw Bay, was changing a carburetor on a VC-68 aircraft, half a dozen pilots hovered nearby, coveting a chance to climb into that cockpit and get their tails off the ship. The aviation machinist’s mate finished the job, then climbed up into the cockpit. “What are you doing?” one of the pilots asked. “I’m going to check this damn engine out,” Moser said, “and then go find a hole to hide in.” The pilot said that he would do his own engine check this time, thank you very much. Moser stepped aside. “He got in, started it up, and took off with a cold motor. My helper didn’t even have all of the cowling on. That pilot was glad to leave.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

Captain Copeland picked up the intercom mike and addressed the Roberts’s crew. That he was speaking for himself struck Ens. Jack Moore as unusual and urgent. Normally seaman Jack Roberts was the public address voice of his namesake warship. His southern drawl was all but unintelligible to anyone not acquainted with Dixie’s rhythms and diphthongs. But the skipper’s diction was as crisp as a litigator’s. He was talking fast and sounding more than a little nervous. “A large Japanese fleet has been contacted. They are fifteen miles away and headed in our direction. They are believed to have four battleships, eight cruisers, and a number of destroyers. “This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

The first time the South Dakota’s main battery was tested with a full nine-gun broadside, the wave of blast pressure pushed through the passageway where Captain Thomas Gatch was standing, tearing his pants right off him.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Inbound now at twenty thousand feet, moving swifly toward the island, came a wave of twin-engine Betty bombers and thirty Zeros, fuel burning fast on half-empty tanks.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Anxieties,” wrote Alfred Thayer Mahan, “are the test and penalty of greatness.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

When transports carrying survivors of the Battle of Savo Island finally returned home, the men were sent to quarantine, removed from public circulation. They had stories to tell that Admiral King would be quite happy not to see in the newspapers. Some five hundred survivors of the Astoria, Vincennes, and Quincy were held under virtual house arrest in a barracks that had been constructed on Treasure Island for the 1939 World’s Fair. Marines were detailed to prevent the sailors from leaving. “Don’t you say one word about the battle,” they were told.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

ESCORT CARRIERS HAD MANY nicknames, only a few tinged with anything resembling affection: jeep carriers, Woolworth flattops, Kaiser coffins, one-torpedo ships. Wags in the fleet deadpanned that the acronym CVE stood for the escort carrier’s three most salient characteristics: combustible, vulnerable, expendable. That most everyone seemed to get the joke—laughing in that grim, nervous way—was probably the surest sign that it was rooted in truth.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

The pressures of command were clearly weighing on him. He had insufficient authority, but he was no longer sure he wanted more of it.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

property of the U.S.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

sluice gate. Then they opened the door and opened the hatch

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Lieutenant Pat McEntee in the Atlanta witnessed it: a Wildcat closing fast on a Betty from behind. The fighter was evidently out of ammunition, for its driver resorted to an unusual tactic. Down came his landing gear. Down went his airspeed. It looked to McEntee as if he was trying “to set his ship down on the bomber’s broad back. And he did—again and again, and again, with sledgehammer impact. He literally was pounding the enemy into the sea with his wheels.” The bomber pilot had no escape. If he tried to pull up, it only increased the force of the impacts. Any evasive turn was easily matched by the agile fighter. “The only course open led down. But before the Jap could make a decision, something snapped under the pounding and the bomber plunged beneath the waves of Savo Sound.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

Wildcats could carry a light bomb load too. Their pilots, however, found to their dismay that the bombs could be difficult to drop: a pilot had not only to pull the bomb release but also to jerk the plane’s rudder back and forth, shaking the plane in midflight to dislodge the bombs from their notoriously sticky mountings.

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines Quotes

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.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

To give advice to a tyrant was to suggest his fallibility and offer oneself as a scapegoat should things go wrong.

Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal Quotes

...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.

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42 James D. Hornfischer Quotes on Battle, Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal and The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Fines - Quotes.pub