Summary of James D. Hornfischer's Who Can Hold the Sea

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. , was the leading public face of the Navy, and he was quick to command a crowd. His peers during the war were disinclined to speak of their work, and thus secretive.

#2 The United States Navy ended World War II with nearly 1,200 combatant ships, 41,000 planes, and 3. 4 million personnel. It had 758,000 civilians on its worldwide payroll, more than half of them at the government-owned naval shipyards at Bremerton, Boston, Charleston, Mare Island, New York, Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, Philadelphia, Portsmouth, San Francisco, and San Pedro.

#3 The push to cut costs fell upon the Pentagon like a weather front. The Senate was considering a bill to unify the Navy and War departments, along with a new department designating the Air Force as a single administrative entity.

#4 The Navy was able to save the country 25 percent of the $265 billion it had cost to fight the war. The Navy’s budget writers considered this a lurid fantasy. The senator who had been impressed by Army presentations said to a Navy official, Atomic energy has driven ships off the surface of the sea. I don’t see how a ship can resist the atomic bomb.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822534476

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Insights on James D. Hornfischer's Who Can Hold the Sea

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 15

Insights from Chapter 16

Insights from Chapter 17

Insights from Chapter 18

Insights from Chapter 19

Insights from Chapter 20

Insights from Chapter 21

Insights from Chapter 22

Insights from Chapter 23

Insights from Chapter 24

Insights from Chapter 25

Insights from Chapter 26

Insights from Chapter 27

Insights from Chapter 28

Insights from Chapter 29

Insights from Chapter 30

Insights from Chapter 31

Insights from Chapter 32

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Admiral William F. Halsey, Jr. , was the leading public face of the Navy, and he was quick to command a crowd. His peers during the war were disinclined to speak of their work, and thus secretive.

#2

The United States Navy ended World War II with nearly 1,200 combatant ships, 41,000 planes, and 3. 4 million personnel. It had 758,000 civilians on its worldwide payroll, more than half of them at the government-owned naval shipyards at Bremerton, Boston, Charleston, Mare Island, New York, Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, Philadelphia, Portsmouth, San Francisco, and San Pedro.

#3

The push to cut costs fell upon the Pentagon like a weather front. The Senate was considering a bill to unify the Navy and War departments, along with a new department designating the Air Force as a single administrative entity.

#4

The Navy was able to save the country 25 percent of the $265 billion it had cost to fight the war. The Navy’s budget writers considered this a lurid fantasy. The senator who had been impressed by Army presentations said to a Navy official, Atomic energy has driven ships off the surface of the sea. I don’t see how a ship can resist the atomic bomb.

#5

The admiral was extremely critical of his colleagues, who were turning opportunistic and using exotic propaganda to erode the Navy’s long-cherished autonomy. He was reluctant to oppose his commander in chief, but he had been candid in his testimony to the Senate Military Affairs Committee the previous week.

#6

After World War II, each service could claim primacy in its realm of combat operations. The Air Force could skirt a contested hemisphere and flatten a metropolis in a flash. The Navy could carry out an offensive over the oceans and sustain it with a mobile logistics train and airpower from out of the blue.

#7

Sea power was about more than just the ability of your own ships to destroy your opponents at sea. It was about the life and work of every citizen, and national power in the broadest sense.

#8

The challenge was to close gaps between foreign policy and military policy, national strategic planning and logistics, and the problems of mobilization faced by the Pentagon and civilian agencies. President Truman chose James Forrestal to lead the centralized new department that would become known in a few years as the Department of Defense.

#9

Forrestal was a practitioner of pure power politics, but he knew that the moral authority of America was its greatest strength. He was a boxer in the style of the New York Athletic Club, streetwise in the sense of the suburban-dwelling bond trader.

#10

The Army and Navy were two separate combat arms, but they were also distinct in their traditions and cultures. The Army was a mass-manpower organization, while the Navy was an engineering organization. The Navy cherished its freedom to use whatever