Word: useless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...page 1 editorial, the Washington Post took President Roosevelt hotly to task for criticizing the people's complacency while his Government goes on piling up useless jobs and bureaus. Said the Post: "If there is any one industry in this country which needs conversion to a wartime basis it is our Government." The President answered: It would help if the "bright boys" who talk of Government economy would specify what activities they would like to see reduced. Economy was up to the people and their representatives, said Franklin Roosevelt. Then he quietly ordered all agencies to divert surplus manpower...
Victory was no longer the question. The opposite choice, death, would have meant the useless slaughter of civilians. And so General Percival made the hard, the humiliating choice. He went, as directed, to a Ford Motor plant at the foot of Bukit Timah, a hill where, earlier that day, there had been bloody fighting. There, at 7 p.m., after some palaver, he signed away large pieces of the land, the power and the pride of the British Empire...
...reconnaissance crews in all France. Of the 23 which comprised their group, 17 had already perished. Their chances of survival even on a good day were one in three, and this sortie was an "awkward"' one. The information, even if they brought it back, would be useless, even if it were to reach the General Staff, which it would not. It was "as if you dashed glassfuls of water into a forest fire." And yet "it's no one's fault. . . . Everybody struggles as hard as he can to make war look like war." Their business...
...last defiant gesture, two Japanese who were manning a now useless machine gun took off their shoes and hurled them at a tank. The Americans were unable to leave the tank without being shot, so they ran the steel monster over the Japanese position...
...Batavia, doves cluster at dusk on the crocodile cages, supple natives bathe in the filthy canals ("They are a very clean people, but they like their water dirty"). An ancient cannon, sacred but now annoyingly useless, stands at Batavia's Amsterdam Gate. The native women pray to it for fertility and have so many babies that Java has 817 people per square mile. According to native superstition, the cannon has a wife at Bantam on the western end of the island. When the two meet, Dutch rule in Java will...