Norman Friedman > Quotes

“... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools”
― Norman Friedman, E.E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry

“There seems no longer to be anything resembling the permanent structure which produced the Staff Requirements prominent in this book. Instead, ad hoc groups are formed. Their advantage – and disadvantage – is that they begin with a clean sheet of paper. Although members are aware of their own experience, they are unlikely to be aware of the many policy issues which had shaped previous ships.”
― Norman Friedman, British Destroyers & Frigates: The Second World War & After

“Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving his piece of paper and saying that his agreement to let Hitler take Czechoslovakia had guaranteed ‘peace in our time,’ but privately he said that he had found Hitler was the nastiest human specimen he had ever met.”
― Norman Friedman, British Destroyers & Frigates: The Second World War & After

“It may be that the effect of sea power often can be appreciated only in a dynamic war game, in which the enemy’s behaviour changes over time. This is why, during the 1980s, the US Navy invested so heavily in its wargaming facilities.”
― Norman Friedman, British Destroyers & Frigates: The Second World War & After

“All diesels have critical speeds at which torsional vibration damages them. The problem seems not to have been well understood before the end of the First World War, perhaps because engines rarely ran near their critical speeds.”
― Norman Friedman, British Submarines in Two World Wars

“Aylwin”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns & Gunnery

“US designers produced roomier ships, probably because they had lighter and more compact machinery.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“It appears in retrospect that the US Navy delegates to the Geneva conference deliberately constructed a cruiser policy (of equality and reduction) they knew the British would reject, in order to sink the conference.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“For years the Admiralty had quietly killed British submarine designs so as to hold back progress in submarine development, on the reasonable theory that submarines could not help the Royal Navy but could most certainly harm it.”
― Norman Friedman, British Submarines in Two World Wars

“1951, LST 712”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Anti-Aircraft Guns & Gunnery

“For the British”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era

“At this stage specified armament was five twin 4.7in and torpedoes. Three of the twin mounts would be forward and two aft, for the best possible arcs, despite the enlarged silhouette that would entail”
― Norman Friedman, British Destroyers & Frigates: The Second World War & After

“Europe. On that basis the Joint Intelligence Committee and later the British Government, designated 1957 as the ‘year of maximum danger’. The idea of a critical year had been adopted pre-war; in 1934, the year 1939 was so designated. The US Government adopted this British reasoning.”
― Norman Friedman, Fighters Over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

“If the ship seemed likely to be somewhat tight, the initial designer might add 10 or 20ft to its length, as a surrogate for adding deck space.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“The tower or island in turn created an air flow which blew smoke from the forefunnel back onto the bridge, so the funnels all had to be raised after comple-tion.19 This was an unpleasant surprise.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“FADE seems to have been the Royal Navy’s introduction to volume-critical ships, which have been the rule ever since.”
― Norman Friedman, British Destroyers & Frigates: The Second World War & After

“it had gradually ascended through different degrees of diminishing harmfulness, until it had attained total uselessness, which was the nearest approach to perfection such a system could know.”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era

“Ships and their systems reflect economic and political as much as technical compromises.”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era

“One solution, instituted by Winston Churchill when he was at the Treasury, was the ‘Ten Year Rule’, the doctrine that defence budgets could be written on the assumption that there would be no war for ten years. On that basis spending on expendables such as ammunition and even quartz transducers for sonars (Asdics) could be eliminated (major capital items such as ships could still be bought).”
― Norman Friedman, Fighters Over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

“The ships lacked enough internal volume to take enough ammunition for the 3in/70 which might replace their 5.25in turrets (they might have enough for only a minute and a half of fire).”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“These designs suggested that the earlier 10,000-ton cruisers had been a mismatch of guns and ships, and that the ideal was something far larger – and far less affordable.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“Holland’s initial interest in flight was probably crucial, because it appears that he realised that in effect a submarine was flying underwater. It could maintain depth dynamically rather than by the weight of its ballast. That meant relying on the force generated by water flowing over the submarine’s hydroplanes.”
― Norman Friedman, British Submarines in Two World Wars

“War itself would last only a week, which really meant until one side or the other credibly threatened to go nuclear.”
― Norman Friedman, British Destroyers & Frigates: The Second World War & After

“The night battle off Guadalcanal demonstrated the limitations of the pre-war centralised command system.”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era

“US surface-gun fire-control development effectively ended with the end of World War II.”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era

“Postwar US analysis was that a large armoured ship would succumb to such damage precisely because a magazine fire would produce a critical volume of gas without any relief due to venting or flooding; either event would be inhibited by the ship’s armour and her underwater protection. The loss of USS Arizona to a forward magazine explosion seemed to prove this point.”
― Norman Friedman, Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era

“For fleet air defence, by far the most important seems to have been the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL) in Buffalo, New York. To some extent BuAer’s relationship with CAL paralleled that between BuOrd and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), except that APL became system developer for several important surface-to-air missile systems (Typhon, Aegis, Sea Sparrow and RAM) as well as an essential source of analysis.”
― Norman Friedman, Fighters Over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

“However, through the 1950s and early 1960s the nuclear mission was paramount and US carriers had large numbers of bombs on board, typically about 200.”
― Norman Friedman, Fighters Over the Fleet: Naval Air Defence from Biplanes to the Cold War

“Later it became clear that many ships risked having their superstructures simply blown off because the structure linking them with the hulls was not sufficiently continuous, but that was not evident for some years.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After

“British designers favoured the tightest possible designs, with limited stretch for in-service modification.”
― Norman Friedman, British Cruisers: Two World Wars and After