Word: combatting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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World War II: Was at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Shackled to noncombat jobs until 1943, when he got a fine sea billet as captain of the new battleship Indiana in the Pacific. Proved himself a shrewd and relaxed combat officer. Once, when warned by the captain of the ancient Tennessee ("Old Blisterbutt") about making too much smoke, he coolly signaled back: "Smoke unavoidable. Forced to cut out the boilers and burn garbage to slow down to your speed." In 1944, promoted to rear admiral and assigned to MacArthur's theater; led an amphibian group safely through...
...nation lies defenseless, a Gulliver in Lilliput with Harry Truman as the second most Lilliputian of them all and Johnson a midget among them. We have only four combat airplanes, two tanks (one being Johnson himself), five six-star generals and a converted armored yawl, once the property of Josephus Daniels...
...Perhaps the stark horror of these facts can be better impressed on the gulled public by noting that the combat airplanes are Kaiser-Frazer 2's, the tanks were used to water Jefferson's horse on Inaugural Day, 1801, and the generals are not used to water in any form...
Macdonald learned the worth of sacrifice in a hard school. In 1942, after two years as a British army chaplain, he switched to combat duty with the paratroopers. A bit later, while commanding a platoon in North Africa, he was taken prisoner. Until the end of the war, he ministered to fellow prisoners, mostly U.S. airmen, in a Luftwaffe camp. "The war," he said, "taught us the indescribable latent courage of the ordinary person...
Actually, young Cocozza lived in a fairly pleasant working-class neighborhood, where his parents, Antonio and Maria Cocozza, had a six-room house and brought up their only child with pampering indulgence. The elder Cocozza, a decorated World War I combat veteran on a total disability pension, is a semi-invalid; his wife worked as a seamstress in the Army quartermaster depot. Freddy, as everyone called their son, was a spoiled, reckless kid: one of his teachers still remembers him with a shudder as "one of the biggest bums that ever came into the public-school system...