Word: navale
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...views on Caribbean policy and on colonial policy in general. A fat, rambling, earnest, occasionally angry, sometimes eloquent book, it is full of Olympian judgments, professional footnotes, diary extracts and side remarks on subjects as remote as the writings of Vincent Sheean or the progress of the Pacific naval war. But the main theme is clearly and realistically developed. It may shock the kind of complacent liberal who assumes that Puerto Rico's troubles could be solved in short order if only some New Dealer would come along, ease out the "big sugar interests" and clean up the noisome...
...proper public light (despite his specialized knowledge of the Japanese language and Japanese navy, Annapolis-trained Ellis Zacharias remained a captain during World War II, reached flag rank only at his recent retirement). The others are: 1) to plead the case for broader and better U.S. naval intelligence; 2) to blast away at U.S. naval stupidity; 3) to make sure that nobody undervalues the particular intelligence work in which Ellis M. Zacharias was concerned...
...suggests-expanding the testimony he had already given before the congressional Pearl Harbor Investigating Committee-was the banner day for U.S. naval stupidity. Eight years before, in 1933, elaborate Pacific maneuvers known as Fleet Problem 14 had been performed. Their underlying assumption: that an enemy would strike with carrier-based planes at a U.S. naval base. Yet "at Pearl Harbor, at the moment of the most intense Pacific crisis in 1941, we repeated the very conditions of Fleet Problem...
Uphill Fight. Later in the war Zacharias was called back to Washington as second in command of the Office of Naval Intelligence, under Rear Admiral Harold C. Train ("who had never had one day's experience in intelligence work"). It was an "uphill fight . . . against obstruction and inertia." Then, "just when I was at the top of my successes, and was planning new ones ... I was ordered to sea in command of the battleship New Mexico. All of my subordinates were amazed . . . and so was I. . . . It will have to be credited to the fact that I was moving...
...ignorant and well-connected")-If at times brash, energetic Author Zacharias seems on the verge of confessing that he is the only U.S. Navy officer who knew what World War II was about, his general complaints about barnacled gold-braid thinking are all too probably justified. Whatever naval pundits may make of his claims and conclusions, lay readers should be interested in his story, much of it well told and all of it as shy as a is-gun salute...