Samuel Eliot Morison Quotes

As soon as Japan accepted surrender terms, the Navy moved into high gear on the twin problems of reducing its strength to a peacetime fleet and discharging its excess number of sailors. By an "Al-nav" of 15 August 1945, it replaced its "computed-age" formula for the release of officers and men to a point system such as the Army had been using in its rotation of troops. Age, length of service and number of dependents established an individual's number if points, which determined his eligibility and priority for discharge. Naval separation centers were established at key cities and training stations throughout the country.

Dedicated to the men of the Fleet

General Eisenhower was reluctant to exploit the Tunisian victory prematurely by moving up the Sicilian D-Day from 10 July. He decided to use the time at his disposal to capture the Italian island of Pantelleria, although his air force advisors regarded it as not worth the effort, alleging that it could easily be neutralized by air bombing. But the General wished to deny to the enemy the excellent radio direction stations on the island, use of which would have prevented tactical surprise in the forthcoming Sicilian operation; and he wanted the island as an advanced base for Allied fighter planes. The Combined Chiefs of Staff signaled permission on 13 May 1943 for Operation "Corkscrew," which did indeed draw the cork from the Sicilian bottle.

After the Chesapeake incident, Jefferson lost the only chance of declaring war against Great Britain, when such a war would have secured unanimous support. Looking back on 1807 from a period of Hague conferences and arbitration treaties, Jefferson's moderation and restraint at that trying period seems most commendable. But the sequel proved that none of his expedients could prevent a war, which might far better have come in 1807, with the entire nation up in arms over the insult to its flag, than in 1812, after one section of the Union had been led by four years of commercial restriction into an attitude of violent disaffection. Instead of commencing reprisals or encour- aging the war spirit, Jefferson issued, on July 2, 1807, a proclamation closing American ports to British men-of-war, and expressing his confidence that Great Britain would apologize for the Leopard's action. The British government did acknowledge its fault, though somewhat ungraciously, and sent a special envoy to the United States to make reparation for the damage done, but with such conditions attached as to make it impossible for Jefferson to accept the offer.

A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion. ... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

Finally, the historian should have frequent recourse to the book of life. The richer his personal experience, the wider his human contacts, the more likely he is to effect a living contact with his audience. In writing, similes drawn from the current experience of this mechanical age, rather than those rifled from the literary baggage of past eras, are the ones that will go home to his reader. Service on a jury or a local committee may be a revelation as to the political thoughts and habits of mankind. A month’s labor in a modern factory would help any young academician to clarify his ideas of labor and capital. A camping trip in the woods will tell him things about Western pioneering that he can never learn in books. The great historians, with few exceptions, are those who have not merely studied, but lived; and whose studies have ranged over a much wider field than the period or subject of which they write.

Yet, first and always, Paul Jones was a fighting sailor. In the history of the United States Navy, whose rise to be the greatest navy in the world he desired and foretold, Paul Jones now occupies a place comparable only with that of Nelson in the Royal Navy of Great Britain. And, although he never had Nelson's opportunities for fame, I have no doubt that, given them, he would have proved himself to be a great naval tactician and strategist. In the board-to-board, hand-to-hand sea fights in which he did engage, he was without peer.

With the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, something seemed to die in each one of us. Yet the memory of that bright, vivid personality, that great gentleman whose every act and appearance appealed to our pride and gave us fresh confidence in ourselves and our country, will live in us for a long, long time.

Theodore Roosevelt in his presidential address before the American Historical Association in 1912 made a ringing plea to the young historian to do better: “He must ever remember that while the worst offense of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he cannot write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.”

And although American historians cannot hope, as Theodore Roosevelt did, to “watch the nearing chariots of the champions,” or to look forward to the day when “for us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls,” we may indeed “show how the land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western and central Europe.” We may describe the race, class, and religious conflicts that immigration has engendered, and trace the rise of the labor movement with a literary art that compels people to read about it.You do not need chariots and horsemen, harps and war-horns, to make history interesting.

Generally, in an expeditionary force, a 3-to-1 ratio of superiority over the defending enemy is considered indispensable; and often in this war, as at Munda and Tarawa, that proved to be not enough. Here, the ratio at the start was about 1 to 4. Why then did the venture succeed? Simply because the United States and Australia dominated that stretch of the ocean and the air over it. The enemy had so few boats and barges that he was able to apply to his 4 to 1 superiority against the Cavalry-cum-Seabee spearhead. The Navy not only provided the Army with seagoing artillery but brought up troopers, beans and bullets in greater numbers; while the Japanese were as completely sealed off from help as MacArthur's forces had been on Bataan early in 1942.

There were more subtle implications to Guadalcanal. The lordly Samurai, with his nose rubbed in the mud and his sword rusted by the salt of Ironbottom Sound, was forced to revise his theory of invincibility. A month previously Hirohito had issued an imperial rescript stating that in the Solomon Islands "a decisive battle is being fought between Japan and America." Radio Tokyo gave out that the Imperial forces, "after pinning down the Americans to a corner of the island," had accomplished their mission and so departed to fight elsewhere. There was a laugh for Americans in that; but Guadalcanal never inspired much laughter. For those of us who were there, or whose friends were there, Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion, recalling desperate fights in the air, furious night naval battles, frantic work at supply or construction, savage fighting in the sodden jungle, nights broken by screaming bombs and deafening explosions of naval shells. Sometimes I dream of a great battle monument on Guadalcanal; a granite monolith on which the names of all who fell and of all the ships that rest in Ironbottom Sound may be carved. At other times I feel that the jagged cone of Savo Island, forever brooding over the blood-thickened waters of the Sound, is the best monument to the men and ships who rolled back the enemy tide.

It was a very costly war to both sides. The Germans reckon that they lost 32,000 submariners from 781 U-boats. They and the Italian submarines sank 2828 Allied and neutral merchant ships of 14,687,231 tons, together with 158 British Commonwealth and 29 American warships, several warships of other nations, and a very large number of aircraft. The loss of life at sea that the U-boats and Luftwaffe inflicted on the Allies has only been computed for the British merchant marine, which alone lost 29,994 men to enemy action. Hardly less than 40,000 men, and several hundred women and children, went down into the depths as a result of enemy submarine and aircraft attacks. The Atlantic, which since the dawn of history has been taking the lives of brave and adventurous men, must have received more human bodies into its ocean graveyard during the years 1939-1945 than in all other naval wars since the fleets of Blake and Van Tromp grappled in the Narrow Seas. Sailormen all, and passengers too, we salute you!

And in this flight of history from literature the public was left behind. American history became a bore to the reader and a drug on the market; even historians with something to say and the talent for saying it (Henry Adams, for instance) could not sell their books. The most popular American histories of the period 1890–1905 were those of John Fiske, a philosopher who had no historical training, but wrote with life and movement.

Andrew Jackson ended his long life of pain at Hermitage in 1845; John Quincy Adams, stricken at his seat in the House, survived his old rival less than three years. "Old Bullion" Benton was defeated for re-election to the Senate in 1851; his sturdy nationalism had grown too old-fashioned for Missouri. Clay and Webster, the one denounced as traitor by Southern hotspurs, the other compared with Lucifer by New England reformers, had two years only to live; time enough to give them grave doubts whether their compromise could long be maintained. With their death the second generation of independent Americans may be said to have gone. Of all statesmen born during the last century and brought up in the generous atmosphere of American Revolution and Jeffersonian Republicanism, only Van Buren was alive, fuming at home over the "half-baked politicians" of the 1850s; and the limp Buchanan. There seemed nobody left to lead the nation but weak, twofaced trimmers and angry young men, radical or reactionary.