Ian W. Toll > 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

“Colonel Shoup, who wore a mask of dust and dirt like every other marine on the island, summed up the situation that afternoon: “Well, I think we’re winning, but the bastards have got a lot of bullets left. I think we’ll clean up tomorrow.”57 He was plainly exhausted, having slept not at all the previous night. He was still bleeding through his bandage. His report to General Julian Smith would enter Marine Corps lore: “Casualties many; percentage of dead not known; combat efficiency: We are winning.”
― Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944

“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

“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

“Stoddert named Joshua Humphreys Chief Naval Constructor of the United States, and authorized him to oversee naval shipbuilding operations throughout the country. But Humphreys’s efforts to impose his authority on shipwrights in other cities met with strong resistance. Different techniques, styles, and designs prevailed in the various seaports, and much of the terminology had evolved into regional dialects that outsiders found unintelligible. To ask a master builder to take direction from another master builder, in another region, was contrary to every tradition of the profession. Humphreys now proposed to bring openness and transparency to an enterprise that had always been shrouded in the medieval secrecy of the craftsmen’s guild. Shipbuilding is a “noble art,” he told a colleague. “I consider it my duty to convey to my brother builders every information in my power.”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“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

“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

“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

“The french Captain tells me, I have caused a War with France,” Truxtun wrote Stoddert. “If so I am glad of it, for I detest Things being done by Halves.” The”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“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 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

“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

“However ghostly it seems, you sense solidity through the soles of your shoes and know yourself to be a part of something big and strong;” wrote Dickinson; “a thousand other men and more, great guns, a powder magazine, an electric power plant that could run a city, a machine shop, beds and kitchens; all of this is compactly organized inside a vast steel hull, your planet.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“the British would get off two or three broadsides to the enemy’s one, and the ratio would continuously improve in their favor as the battle wore on toward its inevitable conclusion. The Royal Navy owed its advantage in gunnery to its commitment to intensive”
― Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy

“Families were bound by the oyaku-shinju (parent-child death pact). The were obligated to take their own lives and those of their kin by any means at hand. Cyanide capsules were given out until there were no more. Soldiers offered to shoot civilians in turn and did not always wait to be invited. In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand-grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them "Kill them yourself or I'll order my men to do it." Several mothers obeyed. As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island's northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women and children took that fateful last step.”
― Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944

“He would not be deterred by subtle arguments of strategy and tactics—he would simply throw everything he had at the enemy and slug it out until the issue was decided.”
― Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944

“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

“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

“Combat was a hard and unforgiving school, but the U.S. Navy was taking its lessons to heart. If the navy did one thing right after the debacle of December 7, it was to become collectively obsessed with learning and improving. Each new encounter with the enemy was mined for all the wisdom and insights it had to offer. Every after-action report included a section of analysis and recommendations, and those nuggets of hard-won knowledge were absorbed into future command decisions, doctrine, planning, and training throughout the service.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Bushido meant stoicism, self-discipline, and dignity in one’s personal bearing; it emphasized mastery of the martial arts through long training and practice; it lauded sacrifice in service to duty, without the slightest fear of death; it demanded asceticism and simplicity in daily life, without regard to comforts, appetites, or luxuries. The samurai was “to live as if already dead,” an outlook consonant with Buddhism; he was to regard death with fatalistic indifference, rather than cling to a life that was essentially illusory. Shame or dishonor might require suicide as atonement—and when a samurai killed himself, he did so by carving out his own viscera with a short steel blade. But traditional bushido had not imposed an obligation to abhor retreat or surrender even when a battle had turned hopeless, and the old-time samurai who had done his duty in a losing cause could lay down his arms with honor intact.”
― Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945

“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

“Anyone middle-aged or older could remember the repressive censorship regime imposed during the First World War. The “dignity” of President Woodrow Wilson had been held inviolable, and any criticism of the president or his policies, no matter how mild or well-meaning, had been grounds to prosecute or shut down an offending newspaper.”
― Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945

“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

“An officer who testified that he had served in naval intelligence was convicted of perjury, on the grounds that no such thing had ever existed. Rookie pilots were required to spend the day in fur-lined winter flight suits with helmets and gloves, scanning the horizon for icebergs using “binoculars” fashioned from a pair of Coke bottles.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“They advanced on a zigzagging track as a measure against enemy submarines, but that required mass-choreographed maneuvers that could easily go awry. When one of the cruisers missed a turn and dropped out of position, her captain received a sarcastic message by blinker light from Admiral Halsey: “May I suggest that if at all convenient you get where you belong?” Shortly afterward, he received another: “Have you any officer aboard able to judge distance accurately within 6,000 yards?”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Looking down, observers saw a sphere of purple-pink light burst through the cloud ceiling, like an air bubble breaking the surface of a body of water. William Laurence, watching from a window in The Great Artiste, was awestruck. The sphere merged into an ascending column of dirty brown smoke and ash, and “we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes”
― Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945

“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

“Before dinner each night the two leaders, Hopkins, and various other members of the president’s official family gathered for cocktails in the Red Room. Roosevelt sat by a tray of bottles and mixed the cocktails himself. This was a cherished part of the president’s daily routine, his “children’s hour,” as he sometimes called it, when he let the day’s tensions and stresses slip away. “He loved the ceremony of making the drinks,” said Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames; “it was rather like, ‘Look, I can do it.’ It was formidable. And you knew you were supposed to just hand him your glass, and not reach for anything else. It was a lovely performance.” Roosevelt did not take drink orders, but improvised new and eccentric concoctions, variations on the whiskey sour, Tom Collins, or old-fashioned. The drinks he identified as “martinis” were mixed with too much vermouth, and sometimes contaminated with foreign ingredients such as fruit juice or rum. Churchill, who preferred straight whiskey or brandy, accepted Roosevelt’s mysterious potions gracefully and usually drank them without complaint, though Alistair Cooke reported that the prime minister sometimes took them into the bathroom and poured them down the sink.”
― Ian W. Toll, Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942

“Lieutenant (jg) Ralph Hanks, an Iowa pig farmer before the war, became an “ace in a day” by shooting down five Zeros in a single skirmish. In a fifteen-minute air engagement, his throttle never left the firewall and his Hellcat surpassed 400 knots in a diving attack. Hanks had to stand on his rudder pedals and use his entire upper-body strength to keep his stick under control. Intense g-forces caused him to black out several times. This first massed encounter of Zeros and Hellcats did not bode well for the future of the now-obsolete Japanese fighter plane.”
― Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944