Word: merchantmen
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Change of Course. The comeback was amazing even to the Japanese. By V-J day the U.S. had sunk 80% of Japan's merchant fleet, once the world's third biggest. left it with only one passenger liner, five ocean-going merchantmen and a few hundred overworked and battered coastal vessels. SCAP also scuttled any plans to rebuild the fleet. Under the surrender terms, Japan could build no ships for herself bigger than 5,000 tons, none of them faster than eleven knots...
...ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men." It begins late in 1939, when the corvette Compass Rose, "a fiddling bloody little gash-boat," is commissioned. A few halcyon runs, and then the U-boats come. On one ghastly trip to Gibraltar, a convoy of 21 merchantmen is reduced to seven-a slaughter with all too many counterparts in wartime reality...
...foreign relations he has moved from 100% isolationism to a cautious endorsement of U.S. participation in world affairs. Before World War II he opposed conscription, lend-lease, the destroyers-to-Britain deal, arming U.S. merchantmen. When Germany broke with Russia he declared: "The victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous to the U.S. than the victory of fascism." In February 1941, he said that the danger of attack by Japan was "simply fantastic." He opposed Bretton Woods, the reciprocal trade agreement, the "Voice of America," the loan to Britain. He supported the U.N. Charter but later...
...Beauty. Occasionally Professor Morison interrupts his hurried pitching of facts to write lovingly of his subject: "A convoy is a beautiful thing. . . . The inner core of stolid merchantmen in column is never equally spaced, for each ship has individuality. . . . Around the column is thrown the screen like a loose-jointed necklace, the beads lunging to port or starboard and then snapping back . . . each destroyer nervous and questing, all eyes topside looking, ears below waterline listening, and radar antennae like cats' whiskers feeling for the enemy...
Tough Jobs. But it was during the war that the Moran Co., which operated 122 tugs for the Government, performed its most notable feats. While the company towed dredges and drydocks around the globe and brought home disabled merchantmen and battleships, Ed Moran went into the Navy as a lieutenant commander in 1942. He came out a rear admiral in November 1945 with a chestfull of decorations and a worldwide reputation...