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"What was I most proud of as commanding officer of the submarine Barb during World War II? My answer is simply this. No one who ever served under my command was awarded the Purple Heart Medal for being wounded or killed, and all of us brought our Barb back safe and sound- ready, eager, and willing to fight again after unparalleled patrols, lauded by naval seniors and authors. No submarine can or should claim to be the greatest, particularly if her crew is lost. There were many great patrols during the various phases of the war, some probably unknown."

"The Barb was never in competition with anybody but herself. We were determined on each patrol to do better than the last one."

"Our third reunion, in 1986, was inspiring. After a banquet, each shipmate gave an account of his life after he left the Barb. The first one to speak reminded us all that we had been close friends in the Barb, whether officers or enlisted men. Each man had been born again by the Barb and love. She enriched our lives and gave us our philosophy: We don't have problems, just solutions."

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as commanding officer of the U.S.S. Barb during her 11th war patrol along the east coast of China from 19 December 1944 to 15 February 1945. After sinking a large enemy ammunition ship and damaging additional tonnage during a running two-hour night battle on 8 January, Comdr. Fluckey, in an exceptional feat of brilliant deduction and bold tracking on 25 January, located a concentration of more than 30 enemy ships in the lower reaches of Nankuan Chiang (Mamkwan Harbor). Fully aware that a safe retirement would necessitate an hour's run at full speed through the uncharted, mined, and rock-obstructed waters, he bravely ordered, "Battle station[--torpedoes!" In a daring penetration of the heavy enemy screen, and riding in five fathoms of water, he launched the Barb's last forward torpedoes at 3,000-yard range. Quickly bringing the ship's stern tubes to bear, he turned loose four more torpedoes into the enemy, obtaining eight direct hits on six of the main targets to explode a large ammunition ship and cause inestimable damage by the resultant flying shells and other pyrotechnics. Clearing the treacherous area at high speed, he brought the Barb through to safety, and four days later sank a large Japanese freighter to complete a record of heroic combat achievement, reflecting the highest credit upon Comdr. Fluckey, his gallant officers and men, and the U.S. Naval Service."

"To [crewmember name], As Captain, it has been an outstanding honor to be your representative in accepting the Congressional Medal of Honor for the extraordinary heroism above and beyond the call of duty which you and every officer and man in the Barb displayed. How fortunate I am, how proud I am, that the President of the United States should permit me to be the caretaker of this most distinguished honor which the Nation has seen fit to bestow upon a gallant crew and a fighting ship, the Barb. Sincerely, Eugene B. Fluckey."

"Then it dawned on me that the men in the Barb who gave her life and taught me the most valuable philosphy for my life. Regardless of all the dangers they accepted at my command, and without the knowledge that was available to me, a reciprocal trust glowed. I find it applies totally for success in life, love, marriage, and business. Simply put, "I believe in you.""

"Being ready is not what matters. What matters is winning after you get there."

"Second, they believe that when the Marines go to war they invariably turn in a performance that is dramatically and decisively successful—not most of the time, but always."

"First, they believe that when trouble comes to our country there will be Marines—somewhere—who, through hard work, have made and kept themselves ready to do something useful about it, and do it at once."

"The third thing they believe about the Marines is that our Corps is downright good for the manhood of our country; that the Marines are masters of a form of unfailing alchemy which converts unoriented youths into proud, self-reliant stable citizens—citizens into whose hands the nation’s affairs may safely be entrusted."

"I wrecked an airplane and I didn't even get the guy out of the wreckage. I happened to be an aviator but an infantryman can dig deep enough or fast enough to get away from the gunfire, but he'll jump up and pull a buddy to safety. It's an attitude that is latent for the most part in normal life but comes out when you are suddenly confronted with life or death in a situation like that. And I don't think a lot of kids recognize the love one person can have for another that sometimes comes out only in time of war. That's why veterans always want to get together for silly, stupid reunions. It's memories of times when these people would do anything for one another, groveling around, or being shot at four thousand feet, trying to get something accomplished for absolutely nothing at all but the satisfaction that they maintained what freedom they could for the country- because freedom for the U.S. means freedom for the whole world. If we weren't out there, the world would be absolute chaos."

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty as a pilot in Fighter Squadron 32, while attempting to rescue a squadron mate whose plane, struck by antiaircraft fire and trailing smoke, was forced down behind enemy lines. Quickly maneuvering to circle the downed pilot and protect him from enemy troops infesting the area, Lt. (j.g.) Hudner risked his life to save the injured flier who was trapped alive in the burning wreckage. Fully aware of the extreme danger in landing on the rough mountainous terrain, and the scant hope of escape or survival in subzero temperature, he put his plane down skillfully in a deliberate wheels-up landing in the presence of enemy troops. With his bare hands, he packed the fuselage with snow to keep the flames away from the pilot and struggled to pull him free. Unsuccessful in this he returned to his crashed aircraft and radioed other airborne planes, requesting that a helicopter be dispatched with an ax and fire extinguisher. He then remained on the spot despite the continuing danger from enemy action and, with the assistance of the rescue pilot, renewed a desperate but unavailing battle against time, cold, and flames. Lt. (j.g.) Hudner's exceptionally valiant action and selfless devotion to a shipmate sustain and enhance the highest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service."

"The test of character is not 'hanging in there' when the light at the end of the tunnel is expected, but performance of duty and persistence of example when the situation rules out the possibility of the light ever coming."

"I know Stockdale has become a buzzword in this culture for a doddering old man. But let's look at the record folks. This guy was the first guy in and the last guy out of Vietnam, a war that many Americans, including your new President, chose not to dirty his hands with. The reason he had to turn his hearing aid on at that debate is because those fucking animals knocked his eardrum out when he wouldn't spill his guts. He teaches philosophy at Stanford University. He's a brilliant, sensitive, courageous individual, and yet he committed the one unpardonable sin in our culture – he was bad on television. And Paddy Chayefsky must be laughing his ass off out there."

"For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty while senior naval officer in the prisoner-of-war camps of North Vietnam. Recognized by his captors as the leader in the prisoners' of war resistance to interrogation and in their refusal to participate in propaganda exploitation, Rear Adm. Stockdale was singled out for interrogation and attendant torture after he was detected in a covert communications attempt. Sensing the start of another purge, and aware that his earlier efforts at self-disfiguration to dissuade his captors from exploiting him for propaganda purposes had resulted in cruel and agonizing punishment, Rear Adm. Stockdale resolved to make himself a symbol of resistance regardless of personal sacrifice. He deliberately inflicted a near-mortal wound to his person in order to convince his captors of his willingness to give up his life rather than capitulate. He was subsequently discovered and revived by the North Vietnamese who, convinced of his indomitable spirit, abated in their employment of excessive harassment and torture toward all the prisoners of war. By his heroic actions, at great peril to himself, he earned the everlasting gratitude of his fellow prisoners and of his country. Rear Adm. Stockdale's valiant leadership and extraordinary courage in a hostile environment sustain and enhance the finest traditions of the U.S. Naval Service."

"Everybody does have to play the game of life. You can't just walk around saying, "I don't give a damn about health, or wealth, or whether I'm sent to prison or not." Epictetus says everybody should play the game of life-that the best play it with "skill, form, speed, and grace." But like most games, you play it with a ball. Your team devotes all its energies to getting the ball across the line. But after the game, what do you do with the ball? Nobody much cares. It's not worth anything. The competition, the game, was the thing. The ball was "used" to make the game possible, but it in itself is not of any value that would justify falling on your sword for it. The ball-game analogy, incidentally, is almost a verbatim quote of Epictetus's explanation to his students in Nicoipolis, colonial Greece, 2,000 years ago."

"Stoicism is a noble philosophy that has proven to be more practicable than a modem cynic would expect. The Stoic viewpoint is often misunderstood because the casual reader misses the point-that all talk is in reference to the "inner life." Stoics belittle physical harm, but this is not braggadocio. They are speaking of it in comparison to the devastating agony of shame they fancied good men generating when they knew in their hearts that they had failed to do their duty vis-Q-vis their fellow men or God. Though pagan, the Stoics had a monotheistic natural religion and were great contributors to Christian thought. The fatherhood of god and the brotherhood of man were Stoic concepts prior to Christianity. In fact, Chrysippus, one of their early theoreticians, made the analogy of what might be called the soul of the universe to the breath of a human (pneuma, in Greek). Saint Paul, a Hellenized Jew brought up in Tarsus, a Stoic town in Asia Minor, always used the Greek work pneuma, or breath, for soul."

"But I was a changed and better man for my introduction to philosophy, and especially to Epictetus. I was on a different track--certainly not an anti military track, but to some extent an anti-organization track. Against the backdrop of all the posturing and fumbling that peacetime military organizations seem to have to go through, to accept the need for graceful and unself conscious improvisation under pressure, to break away from set procedures, forces you to be reflective as you put a new mode of operation together. I had become a man detached-not aloof but detached-able to throw out the book without the slightest hesitation when it no longer matched the external circumstances. I was able to put juniors over seniors without embarrassment when their wartime instincts were more reliable. This new abandon, this new built-in flexibility I had gained, was to payoff later in prison."

"Halsey was perhaps the Navy's nearest analogue to the Army's General Douglas MacArthur, a towering personality to whom the ordinary rules did not consciously apply. Halsey was never as overbearing as MacArthur, nor did he cross the red line into domestic US politics, but he was a political and strategic asset to Admiral Nimitz and the Navy's top commanders in Washington throughout the war. No one better exemplified the warrior spirit of the US Navy during the greatest trial by combat in its history."

"I graduated from the Naval Academy on 5 June 1974, receiving my diploma from President Richard Nixon. He said, "Good luck young fellow," as he handed it to me and I nervously said, "And good luck to you, sir." I remember seeing a bit of a scowl on the Superintendent's face standing nearby. I had no idea why. Two short months later, President Nixon resigned his office. I swear I was not making a political statement."

"Former Secretary of Defense Mel Laird has said that NATO is an alliance strung together by ships. That is certainly true. This is a reflection of the total dependence of the alliance upon the reinforcement/resupply effort. It is the Atlantic that gives NATO its character. The ocean which connects the members of the NATO alliance was exploited very successfully by a different alliance in the course of World War II. It was the basis for the longest, most bitterly fought, painful campaign of that war—the Battle of the Atlantic."

"Although numbers of ships, planes, and weapons are important, you cannot look at the maritime balance in terms of numbers alone. We feel that the maritime forces of the alliance do have a slim margin of maritime superiority over the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact today. Having said that, we must remember, that the Japanese had a slim margin of maritime superiority over the United States in the Pacific at the start of World War II, and they lost that slim margin overnight in the Battle of Midway."

"It’s a pity that the war in the Pacific generated such great interest on the part of historians that it has totally consumed their activity. Our naval historians have contented themselves with dealing exclusively with the sea control war in the Pacific, where two competing powers fought each other with large-deck aircraft carriers and produced such memorable naval leaders that their names will live on for centuries and become the basis for much discussion on the part of midshipmen and students of naval history. In the course of speaking to service colleges in the United States and Europe, I have often paused and asked the students if they can name one admiral of any nation who fought in the Battle of the Atlantic. Very seldom can anyone, even among students of history, come up with the answer to that question. The Battle of the Atlantic went virtually unobserved by U. S. historians and by many political leaders. It was a dirty, grubby war which at its height involved dozens of aircraft carriers operating on the submarine problem and much of our intelligence services. In the end, however, it was responsible for the successful reinforcement and resupply of Europe. We must not forget that lesson. It is very pertinent to the problem we are facing today."

"Admiral Harry D. Train II is part of a Navy family. He is the son of the late Rear Admiral Harold Cecil Train and the father of Rear Admiral Elizabeth L. Train. “I was absolutely steeped in Navy from my first conscious thoughts,” he reflected at the start of his oral history, published by the U.S. Naval Institute in 1997. “I can’t remember a day in my entire life that the Navy was not a dominant element in my life.” During 1945-1982, Train rose from midshipman to admiral in an active-duty career that included operational surface ship and submarine commands, destroyer flotilla and carrier battle group commands, and service as Commander, Sixth Fleet. From 1978 to 1982, he was triple-hatted as Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Atlantic Command, and Commander in Chief, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Ashore, his assignments included director of the Joint Staff, as well as individual tours with the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs."

"I think it is generally agreed that credible naval forces provide, to the nation or the alliance which possesses them, a backdrop for political actions on the part of elected leaders. But to be credible, it is extremely important that naval forces be able to win battles and win wars. Therefore, the maritime balance among seafaring nations is extremely important. Raymond Aron, the French professor and journalist, made a very wise observation during the Sea Link Conference at Annapolis last June: “While military might cannot do everything, without it you cannot do anything.” Perhaps that is the central theme of the marriage of maritime capability with those political, economic, and ideological factors that loom so large in the political eyes of the NATO nations."

"As we look at the problem of allocating priorities within the NATO nations, we need not necessarily make the choice between social programs and defense expenditures. It’s possible to accommodate both requirements simultaneously. During the Eisenhower years in the United States, we did both concurrently. At that time, the United States invested 10% of its gross national product in defense. Unemployment was the lowest it had been in two decades. The inflation rate was the lowest in two decades, and there were no overriding social problems resulting from that allocation of priorities. The defense effort, in conjunction with the effort to build the interstate highway system of the United States, resulted in the creation of sufficient jobs to minimize the social problems that the country might have been faced with. Nor did we accumulate the enormous national debt that one might expect from that experience. The parallels with today are not exact, of course, but it could well be that the experiences of the past can help us chart our course for the future."

"And I must say that throughout this entire Vietnam operation ah, I was appalled at the fact that so many people in and out of the government, and certainly I would put the media at the top of the list, seemed far more concerned about the lives of the people in Southeast Asia than they were the lives of the young men that were fighting for their country. Let me give you an example of this. For instance, when I was ah, describing the torture that was being inflicted on the POW's in ah, in North Vietnam I've actually had the American citizens tell me, "Well it serves them right – they had no business volunteering.""

"But you've got to work. What bothers me is we've gotten to the point where the people in this country believe that any time they have a problem, the federal government in Washington will take care of it. It's got to educate them, it's got to train them, it's got to take care of their children. I think that's all nonsense. The concern I have is the breakdown of the family, which is a basic beginning of a strong nation."

"One must remember that the North Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, had been fighting ah, first the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, and now the Americans. And they were professionals in every sense. Ah, the South Vietnamese, on the other hand, were ah, primarily those ah, that were ah, more or less, uh, under the command of the French, and had ah, never had an opportunity to uh, develop leadership."

"President Johnson was almost entirely focused on his efforts to introduce what was called the Great Society. He was unfortunate to be involved in the Vietnam War during the time when the public and media were getting more and more disenchanted over it, and he, in my view, looked at the war where he didn't want to put out enough effort to win it, but at the same time he wanted to put out enough not to lose it, which is not exactly the way to go about any kind of a combat. My view is that if you make the decision to get involved, you should get it over with as soon as possible. I could go into great length about this particular point."

"I have predicted for years that Germany was going to reunify. The Germans are going to be the most powerful nation in Europe, both militarily and economically as time goes on. I'm confident of that. I told some of my French friends one time that they could rest easier if they could get the Germans to sleep one hour later. What I'm really talking about there is the work ethic that they have, which has propelled them along. The same thing for the Japanese. The Japanese have everything in their favor in terms of high technology and production capability, and educated people."

"Well, the only way, the only reason to go to war, at any time, uh, is to overthrow a government that's doing something you don't like. And if you announce at the outset that you are not going to overthrow the government, then, so far as I’m concerned ah, you should come home immediately."

"Now, the budgeteers always want to divide your force up into what they call a high-low mix. In other words, you build two kinds of weapons systems, one is highly capable, with advanced technology, and then you build another more or less ordinary group. Of course, in my view that's a stupid idea because you'll never get the Soviet to arrange things so that they send their medium-quality forces against your medium-quality forces, and their high-quality forces against your high-quality forces. What'll happen is, first thing you know, your low-quality forces will encounter the high-quality forces and that'll be the end of it."

"The government is not going to be able to solve everything, but the politicians, of course, use that to get votes. I'm concerned about the ethics of the country and the focus on material things by the young people. And they want it overnight. You can't just start out as being a chief executive officer at General Motors, and you won't take any job less than that. That's nonsense. You've got to be fifty, sixty, even seventy years old before you've acquired enough knowledge and experience to handle those kinds of jobs."

"I tell young people [that] they are, in effect, the leaders in the future. Young people don't realize that they're not going to be young forever. Time marches on, and pretty soon they're going to have the mantle of responsibility. So the first thing they've got to recognize is that in order to be a leader, you must have knowledge. Education is the key to success, and it's becoming more and more so. Secondly, you've got to learn about human nature and how to deal with people. You've got to work at it; it doesn't just happen. So, in the first place, surely they know that they have an opportunity, just by virtue of living in the United States, that's not enjoyed by billions of others. Why is it that the pressure for immigration is so heavy in the United States? We don't have any boat people leaving the United States, everybody's coming this way. And why? Because of our freedom and our way of life, and the fact that the Lord has given us an area that's bordered on one hand by the Pacific Ocean, on the other side by the Atlantic Ocean. We have a marvelous climate. We only use less than 5 percent of the population to grow food. If there are no oranges in Florida, there are plenty of oranges in California. If there is no wheat in Montana, there's plenty of rice in Louisiana. In other words, the idea of having a famine never crosses our mind. So the opportunity is here, and the freedom is here, and these young people should realize how fortunate they are."

"The point is [that] in the old days, when you only had a spear or maybe a one-shot rifle or something like that, you didn't have to go to school to learn how to work it. Today, we have tried in the United States to use technology to reduce manpower requirements. But what that does is impose on you the need for very intelligent people that can understand and maintain and operate these complex machines that we have today. So that's what you're up against. Every time the politicians have drawn a line and split a nation that was originally formed by a common culture and by geography and so on, it always results in a war."

"If you want to really get worried, just leap out in the middle of the ocean and let somebody drop a few bombs around you and you can really get worried. It's a matter of relativity. So many people in the country today and the world today, frankly, have nervous breakdowns over what I consider to be nothing."

"So, you've got to have patience, you've go to work, and you've got to remember, as I said a while ago, that it's not the people that you work for that are going to guarantee your success, it's the people that work for you. That's where you've got to put your attention, and take care of them first."

"Of course, survival is very important, and how the people around you behave and how you can help them, and so on. I made up my mind that I was not going to be worried in the least in the future by any ordinary things."

"You've got to be willing to take orders. You've got to be willing to live in harsh circumstances. As someone has put it, you've got to be able to miss a meal if it's necessary. And you've got to have a wife that will put up with all these things. My wife has been wonderful. We moved twenty-six times, lived all over the world. When I was away, she was responsible for everything -- for buying houses, for paying the children's tuition, taking them to the hospital, etc., etc. Today, so many of the very young people are getting married, and we have also so many girls in the military. Someone over in the Pentagon told me the other day [when] I asked him what are the main problems now, he says: "Child care and pregnancy." But that wasn't present when I was a young officer."

"Vice Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, victor of Midway13 and subsequently Admiral Nimitz's chief of staff, became Commander Fifth Fleet on 5 August 1943 and so also of the Gilbert Islands expeditonary force. 13 Admiral Spruance, in commenting on the first draft of this volume, requested that I delete "victor of" and substitute "who commanded a carrier task force at"; but, for reasons which readers of Vol. IV will appreciate, I have let it stand."

"Spruance received his written orders in the evening of 27 May, the night before he got underway. They comprised ten succinct pages. All operation orders in the early stages of the war were terse, reflecting the command philosophy of King, Nimitz, and the better admirals. That philosophy was to tell the subordinate commander what you wanted done, give him the necessary resources, provide as much information as you could about the enemy, and then let him alone so he could accomplish his mission. King would upbraid any commander for the sin of oversupervising his subordinates with complex, overly detailed directives. The intent was to encourage the on-scene commander to use his initiative and not to inhibit his freedom of action. Spruance's personal belief was that the commander responsible for accomplishing the mission should develop the necessary plans; the proper role of the next highest command echelon was to establish the objective and to suggest how the objective might be achieved."

"Decades later, when Spruance's military and diplomatic career had become history, Spruance was generally regarded as a man endowed with extraordinary intelligence and proven wisdom. Whether he was an intellectual is debatable. Intellectuals are commonly associated with the pursuit of the liberal arts and the physical sciences, with advanced academic degrees, and with learned writing and speaking. As a distinguished author recently observed, "In common parlance an intellectual is a man soaked in the advanced critical ideas of the liberal-academic establishment; and even an opponent of these ideas... has them all at his fingertips." Using these standards alone, Spruance would not be regarded as an intellectual. His formal education ended at the Naval Academy, and he read few, if any, of the classic works in science, literature, and philosophy. He disliked writing, and what little he wrote was not for publication. He also disliked public speaking, and what few speeches he did make were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, Spruance was an intellectual in the purest sense of the word. He was a person with superior mental power. He was deeply interested in fields of knowledge outside the technicalities of the naval profession. He once told some university students, "I think it is most desirable for you to retain and to stimulate your intellectual curiosity in other fields where you may have a natural interest." He explained that those with a liberal education in art, literature, and music had an advantage over people- such as himself- with only a technical education. "A knowledge and appreciation of these subjects enriches their lives," he said, "and makes them more interesting individuals to their friends and acquaintances." Finally, Spruance was a classic intellectual in the sense that he was extremely rational and relied upon his intellect rather than his emotions or feelings. He later regarded the war against Japan as an intellectual exercise that posed a complex yet interesting series of problems that challenged and stimulated his mind. These problems had to be solved using logic and reason that was unaffected by the violent passions of war."

"The Congress during World War II created a limited number of five-star ranks for the Army and the Navy, designated General of the Army and Fleet Admiral. The Navy by law was authorized four Fleet Admirals. Three were easily chosen: Ernest J. King, Chester W. Nimitz, and William S. Leahy, chief of staff to President Roosevelt. The choice for the fourth was between Halsey and Spruance. Secretary of the Navy Forrestal told King that he would have to decide between the two. It was a difficult task, because Halsey and Spruance both had influential supporters in Washington. The most powerful was Representative Carl Vinson, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who had publicly endorsed Halsey. The Navy did not like to oppose Vinson on anything. King put off the decision for several months, then sent a memorandum to Forrestal summarizing the pros and cons of each candidate. There were many things in Halsey's favor. He was the senior admiral, he had been at sea since 1938, his performance in the South Pacific in the dark days of 1942-1943 had been brilliant, and his raids against the Japanese empire in late 1944 had been spectacular and devastating. Against him, wrote King, were his errors in judgment in not evading two typhoons that severely damaged his fleet in the latter part of the war. King said very little about Halsey's questionable decisions at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. King then turned to Spruance, whom he would have endorsed for CNO had it not been for Spruance's mandatory retirement age. "As to brains," wrote King, "the best man in every way." His record in the Pacific was self-evient. The only argument against Spruance was that he had held relatively subordinate commands during the early part of the war."

"Halsey eventually received the five-star rank. The Congress, in an effort to compensate Spruance and to acknowledge his wartime achievements, authorized full pay for life as a four-star admiral, whereas all other naval officers received reduced pay upon retirement. A controversy has continued ever since, the gist being that Halsey's publicity had own his fifth star, and that Spruance had been at a disadvantage because he had avoided publicity. Many efforts were subsequently made to promote Spruance to Fleet Admiral, all reportedly thwarted by Vinson. After Vinson retired, still more attempts were made, but the Navy has been unwilling to reopen the case. The Navy's reasoning is that Spruance was the only World War II naval officer who retired on full pay by a special act of Congress, and thereby he had been appropriately recognized and honored by the people of America. Spruance expressed his personal feelings on the matter in a 1965 letter to Professor E.B. Potter of the United States Naval Academy. "So far as getting my five star rank is concerned," wrote Spruance, "if I could have had it along with Bill Halsey, that would have been fine; but, if I had received it instead of Bill Halsey, I would have been very unhappy over it. The present situation is that World War II will have been over twenty years next August, which is a long time. Also, the central and western parts of the Pacific Ocean are a long way from Washington.""

"On the forenoon of June 19th began the Battle of the Philippine Sea. The Japanese carriers launched their attacks from outside the range of our planes, with the apparent intention of having them land on their airfields on Guam and Rota, in the vicinity of Saipan. This day, June 19th, will be remembered by Navy men everywhere as the "Marianas' Turkey Shoot." The result of the day's action was 408 enemy planes destroyed out of 545 sighted, as against 32 American planes lost and negligible damage to 4 ships. There was nothing else like it in the whole of World War II."

"World War II gave King the opportunity of putting in practice another conviction. His earliest studies of the Napoleonic campaigns had indicated to him that the great weakness of the French military system of the period was that it required the detailed supervision of Napoleon. His belief that one must do the opposite, and train subordinates for independent action, had been confirmed and strengthened through his years of association with Admiral Mayo. During World War II King would jokingly maintain that he managed to keep well by "doing nothing that I can get anybody to do for me," but in all seriousness he could not have survived the four years of war without having made full use of the decentralization of authority into the hands of subordinate commanders, who were considered competent unless they proved themselves otherwise, and who were expected to think, decide, and act for themselves. Upon Nimitz in the Pacific, Edwards, Cooke and Horne in Washington, Ingersoll in the Atlantic, Stark in London, Halsey, Spruance, Kinkaid, Hewitt, Ingram and many other flag officers at sea, King relied with confidence and was not disappointed."

"Our meeting with Admiral Leighton Smith, on the other hand, did not go well. He had been in charge of the NATO air strikes in August and September [1995], and this gave him enormous credibility, especially with the Bosnian Serbs. Smith was also the beneficiary of a skillful public relations effort that cast him as the savior of Bosnia. In a long profile, Newsweek had called him "a complex warrior and civilizer, a latter-day George C. Marshall." This was quite a journalistic stretch, given the fact that Smith considered the civilian aspects of the task beneath him and not his job — quite the opposite of what General Marshall stood for. After a distinguished thirty-three-year Navy career, including almost three hundred combat missions in Vietnam, Smith was well qualified for his original post as commander of NATO's southern forces and Commander in Chief of all U.S. naval forces in Europe. But he was the wrong man for his additional assignment as IFOR commander, which was the result of two bureaucratic compromises, one with the French, the other with the American military. General Joulwan rightly wanted the sixty thousand IFOR soldiers to have as their commanding officer an Army general trained in the use of ground forces. But Paris insisted that if Joulwan named a separate Bosnia commander, it would have to be a Frenchman. This was politically impossible for the United States; thus, the Franh objections left only one way to preserve an American chain of command — to give the job to Admiral Smith, who joked that he was now known as "General" Smith. … On the military goals of Dayton, he was fine; his plans for separating the forces along the line we had drawn in Dayton and protecting his forces were first-rate. But he was hostile to any suggestions that IFOR help implement any nonmilitary portion of the agreement. This, he said repeatedly, was not his job. Based on Shalikashvili's statement at White House meetings, Christopher and I had assumed that the IFOR commander would use his authority to do substantially more than he was obligated to do. The meeting with Smith shattered that hope. Smith and his British deputy, General Michael Walker, made clear that they intended to take a minimalist approach to all aspects of implementation other than force protection. Smith signaled this in his first extensive public statement to the Bosnian people, during a live call-in program on Pale Television — an odd choice for his first local media appearance. During the program, he answered a question in a manner that dangerously narrowed his own authority. He later told Newsweek about it with a curious pride: "One of the questions I was asked was, "Admiral, is it true that IFOR is going to arrest Serbs in the Serb suburbs of Sarajevo?" I said, "Absolutely not, I don't have the authority to arrest anybody"." This was an inaccurate way to describe IFOR's mandate. It was true IFOR was not supposed to make routine arrests of ordinary citizens. But IFOR had the authority to arrest indicted war criminals, and could also detain anyone who posed a threat to its forces. Knowing what the question meant, Smith had sent an unfortunate signal of reassurance to Karadzic — over his own network."

"With Leighton Smith in charge, we've got a Navy admiral running a predominantly land campaign — the first ever in NATO's 47-year history. … As the U.S. continues to withdraw from overseas bases, Naval Forces will become even more relevant in meeting American forward presence requirements."

"I remember a picture I saw in a paper not long before the wall came down. There was a man standing holding a very young daughter, my guess was that she was only about one or two years old. She had on a rather plain dress, he had on a coat and a tie and he was carrying probably a cardboard suitcase. And my guess is that everything he owned in the world was in that suitcase. And he was weeping. He wasn't weeping because he left his car and the rest of his family back on the other side of that Iron Curtain; he was weeping because he was free. He was weeping because now he had opportunity, he had the chance to choose for the first time in his life, and his daughter whom he was holding in his hands had a future, whereas before she would not have had one. That struck me as a very, very vivid picture of what this all meant."