Word: commandeer
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Except in top command jobs, regulars among the Navy's personnel are now far outnumbered. "When our big new warships put to sea for a shakedown, as much as 87% of their crews have never been to sea before. Of the 2,981,365 persons in the Navy at the close of the 1944 fiscal year, 88% were schoolboys, farmers, or businessmen at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack...
...Darkest Day. Within an hour after the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor, Nimitz had impressed his superiors as a man well suited for the Pacific command. He had been summoned to Frank Knox's office on the second "deck" of the barracks-like Navy Department on Washington's Constitution Avenue. There were gathered the Secretary, Under Secretary Forrestal, Assistant Secretary Bard, Admiral Harold R. ("Betty") Stark, Chief of Naval Operations. Nimitz, then a rear admiral and chief of the Bureau of Navigation, was the calmest man present...
Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, in his role of CINCPOA (Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas), now has top command in all areas north and east of Luzon. He and MacArthur have got along well thus far. But Navy men in general have no love for MacArthur; many of them believe he has slighted their service. In a special sense, the Pacific War is and has been the Navy's war, and the Navy knows that its prestige in that war is its great claim to public and Congressional support after the peace. The Navy would shrink from...
...supplies were coming in; that was the important thing. The Chinese high command, in new headquarters at Kunming, prepared to muster its best forces: the American-trained First and Sixth Armies from India, the troops of bushy-mustached, "100-Victories" Marshal Wei Li-huang, the battle-tried formations of hot-tempered, half-pint General Hsueh Yueh. From Yünnan's high plateau these troops could look out over China's gullied lands; strike out to aid the Allies who might some day land on the coast...
Promptly a Canadian Naval officer rushed to the U.S. commander to apologize. Furiously, the Navy Minister at Ottawa, Angus Macdonald, ordered his Pacific Command to get to the bottom of the trouble. A board of inquiry sailed into the case at top speed, pausing only long enough to mutter that the first reports were "greatly exaggerated...