Alvin Kernan > Quotes

“Put it all together and the TBDs at Midway would have been worried about gas all the time they were in the air, and the four Enterprise and two Yorktown Devastators that made it back must have been running on empty at the end of their flight.”
― Alvin Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons

“In offering to use his own pilots, Waldron was almost surely insinuating that the fighter pilots were afraid to mix it up with the Zeroes, and at least a touch of this fear is around the edges of the overall fighter performance that morning.”
― Alvin Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons

“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

“loaded with a torpedo weighing over a ton, the old Devastator consumed between 30 and 50 gallons of fuel an hour, depending on its speed and its climb rate, but could carry only a reduced amount of its maximum 180 gallons of gas.”
― Alvin Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons

“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

“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

“Design differences were not the results of chance or fashion but reflected differing national attitudes toward war and the value of individual life. Where we chose ruggedness and safety for the flyers, to put it simply, the Japanese opted for performance and distance, sacrificing crew safety and endurance to achieve these goals.”
― Alvin Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons

“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

“Our fighters were at a disadvantage with their Japanese enemy, but the American torpedo plane was a real turkey.”
― Alvin Kernan, The Unknown Battle of Midway: The Destruction of the American Torpedo Squadrons

“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