Word: battleships
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...House committee listened to the recital of this overwhelming array without batting an eye. Not so the Navy's flyers. Air-minded sailors of every rank groaned, "Ernie King and the battleship boys have won again." There were too many King-sized ships (i.e., battlewagons) in the deal, said one respected Admiral, who added that if he had his way he would sink them all. Only in the Second Battle of the Philippine Sea, airmen argued, had the battlewagon served as more than a fat flakship-and they were pre-Pearl Harbor ships at that...
...Congress would hear plenty from airmen about the battleship before the shape of the postwar Navy was finally set. It would also hear from the visionary pundits who would argue that this was the age of the atom bomb and the pushbutton war, and that there was no point in having a fleet...
Foreseeing the argument ahead, Jimmy Forrestal let it be known that the blueprint was no hard & fast plan; everybody would have a chance to make his case. Navy flyers and battleship men alike hoped that the prospect of weapons still to be built would not talk anybody into sinking the fleet or any part of it. Plain citizens who remembered the scrapping of some of the best of the fleet after World War I would agree with them...
During the early, tense days of World War II, when the U.S. people had little to hearten them, they eagerly grasped at two legends: 1) Captain Colin Kelly had sunk the Jap battleship Haruna by plunging his Flying Fortress "almost into the mouths of flaming Japanese guns"; 2) Major James P. S. Devereux, when asked if his handful of embattled Wake Island marines needed help, radioed: "Send us more Japs...
There were so many reporters (300-odd) scrambling around the battleship Missouri in Tokyo harbor last week that they spilled over their assigned space on the ship's deck. Dozens of the U.S. newsmen were looking for Joe Blow, the local boy who made good. Aboard one destroyer transport, the squawk box ordered all New York men to double to the fo'c'sle to meet the New York Times's representative. He turned out to be the Times's general manager himself, Brigadier General Julius Ochs Adler. Lesser reporters, many with the names...