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Thus, although Jones had it in him to be a great naval strategist, he found opportunity to prove himself only on the tactical level. There he was mag… - Samuel Eliot Morison
" "Thus, although Jones had it in him to be a great naval strategist, he found opportunity to prove himself only on the tactical level. There he was magnificent. Recall how he made prompt and sure decisions in emergencies, perfectly adapting his tactics to suddenly confronted facts, as in those first audacious cruises in Providence and Alfred and in the battles of Ranger vs. Drake, Bonhomme Richard vs. Serapis, and Ariel vs. Triumph. That sort of thing is the sure mark of a master in warfare. Of the quality of his seamanship, one needs no more evidence than those early escapes from faster and more powerful ships, and the saving of Ariel from crashing on the Penmarch rocks. His battle with Serapis, as an example of how a man through sheer guts, refusing to admit the possibility of defeat, can emerge victorious from the most desperate circumstances, is an inspiration to every sailor. To every sailor, I say, not only to Americans. In one of his letters of 1780, Jones wrote, "The English Nation may hate me, but I will force them to esteem me too." This prophecy was fulfilled over a century and a half later, when the Right Honourable Albert Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, in a broadcast beamed to America, declared that Paul Jones' defiant answer to Pearson expressed exactly what England felt in the dark days of the Battle for Britain. And in the six months of tribulation for the United States that followed the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor, the one sentiment in the back of every American sailor's mind was that of John Paul Jones: I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT
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About Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison (July 9, 1887 – May 15, 1976) was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942), a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography (1959). In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the American People (1965), and co-authored the classic textbook The Growth of the American Republic (1930) with Henry Steele Commager.
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Samuel Morison
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Additional quotes by Samuel Eliot Morison
Was President Roosevelt right when he predicted at the TRIDENT Conference in May 1943 that committing large armies to Italy "might result in attrition for the United Nations and play into Germany's hands"? Was Admiral King wrong in predicting that the invasion of Italy would "create a vacuum into which Allied forces would be sucked"? Before that campaign was over- and it was not finished until eleven months after the liberation of Rome- an army contributed by ten Allied nations faced Vietinghoff's Southwestern Army Group; and the Germans were still on Italian soil when that group surrendered on 2 May 1945.
Yet there is much to be said in defense of the Italian campaign, in the light of its other object as stated in the original directive to General Eisenhower: - "To contain the maximum number of German forces." Granted that the Allies had to fight Germans somewhere during the ten months that would elapse between the conquest of Sicily and D-day in Normandy, where else could they have fought them with any prospect of success? What was the alternative to Italy? Search the coasts of Europe and the Near East as you will, there was none, other than invading islands of slight strategic value, which the Germans would probably have evacuated in any case; or taking the long and torturous Balkans route which every military commander regarded as impracticable. We instinctively resent military campaigns in which there is great suffering with little result, as the American public in 1864 resented Grant's Wilderness campaign. But let us admit that the Italian campaign, like Grant's, was fought because it had to be fought.
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