16 Quotes by Walter R. Borneman

Assignments ashore and on ship came and went, but one’s academy classmates were forever. From Manila to Panama or Honolulu to Guantánamo Bay, the fraternity gathered just as if its members were still on the banks of the Severn.

But perhaps the greatest asset was the surviving oil tanks. Had 4.5 million barrels of fuel oil been blown up, what was left of the Pacific Fleet would have been forced to limp back to the West Coast and have its operations in the Pacific severely curtailed. That action, not Japan’s sinking of a few aging battleships, would have given Japan the free rein it sought in the South Pacific.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,” Lincoln lectured Herndon, “and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

Other men would get to command the spear point; Nimitz would calmly and diligently manage the arm that held the spear.

Nothing could ever replace the treasure of America’s men and women killed or forever maimed by Japan’s attack, but Nimitz looked around Pearl Harbor and decided that it could have been much worse. On the list of physical casualties, there were three glaring omissions that would prove to be major strategic blunders on the part of the Japanese.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history – at least that’s what Douglas MacArthur thought. When.

Then Nimitz, being Nimitz, posted the usual watches and did the only thing that made sense to him. “On that black night somewhere in the Philippines,” he later recalled, “the advice of my grandfather returned to me: ‘Don’t worry about things over which you have no control.’ So I set up a cot on deck and went to sleep.

On one foggy, misty night, King ordered the air groups from the Lexington and Saratoga to launch simultaneously well after sunset. The chaos was predictable but, in King’s mind, instructional.

John Quincy Adams was convinced that Polk’s election meant the end of the civilized world.