Word: machinistic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hero Al Schmid (John Garfield), a 21-year-old Philadelphia machinist, joined the Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor and became a machine-gunner. One night on Guadalcanal, defending a river crossing, he killed some 200 Japanese. Toward morning, a grenade went off in his face and ended the war, for him, in blindness...
Admiral William F. Halsey, who had already been promised a saddle for his projected ride on Hirohito's white horse (TIME, July 2), heard that a pair of handmade spurs were in the offing. Vernon L. Fertig, Machinist's Mate 3/C, had been working on the spurs for more than four months, wrote wistfully from the Aleutians: "I'd like to be there to saddle the horse...
...cigaret. He turned to me: "That's the third one we've had this month. And this time it's the best man we've got on the ship. I've watched that kid change slowly from a Middlewest farmer to the best machinist's mate I've seen in the Navy. When we wanted a job done we turned it over to him and that was like saying the job was done. But he's through now. He's through for a while anyway. We'll keep him busy...
...heavy mortar was splashing around them. Farther inland our naval barrage was laying in some white puffs amid the jungle green. We had been at general quarters since dawn and the machine-gun bursts from the shore side told of men fighting and dying there. But to the machinist's mate sitting alone in the quiet of his anguish, the war and all its noises had faded away. The war had lost its meaning. Everything he had been trained for had lost its meaning. "The best man on the ship" had been sabotaged...
They instructed Navy pilots in instrument flying (in Link trainers), taught Navy airmen to shoot. They had become metalsmiths, radiomen, aviation machinist's mates, truck drivers, laboratory technicians, decoders and cooks. There are some 1,000 naval installations in the U.S., and at roughly half of them WAVES are at work. At the Navy Department in Washington there are more Navy women than men. In Hawaii, the farthest place overseas to which Congress would let them venture, the WAVES are competently filling a crying need for yeomen, aviation ratings, hospital corpsmen...