Word: fleetness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Before the end of World War II, seaplanes had become the stepchildren of naval aviation. Here & there a fleet of lumbering PBYs and Martins still put out on patrol, and a few floatplanes were catapulted from cruisers. But the Navy was turning almost exclusively to landplanes when the jet age caught up with naval aviation. Then seaplanes seemed to show promise again, and the waterways that cover more than half the world once more looked like useful airfields...
...FLEET ADMIRAL KING (674 pp.)-Ernesf J. King and Walter M. Whitehill-Norton...
...dust was settling over the ruin at Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt decided that the U.S. Fleet needed a new commander. He chose a man who was tall, straight as the spruce spar of an old ship-of-the-line, and as hard as the chrome-steel armor around his own battleships. His name was Ernest Joseph King. Nobody has ever offered a better explanation for his selection than King himself gave when he arrived in Washington to take over: "When they get into trouble, they send for the sons of bitches...
...four years, less two days (which he still begrudges), King commanded "the fleet"-which actually grew into a dozen fleets, the mightiest assemblage of sea power, afloat and on the wing, that the world has ever seen.* No service commander had more to do with the winning of World War II. None showed keener strategic vision, or made fewer spectacular mistakes. None is so little known, and for that, King himself is mostly to blame. Now 74, weakened by a stroke five years ago, he is anxious to find his niche in history, and so has collaborated with Walter...
...Fleet Admiral King, like its subject, is heavy weather nearly...