Taffy 3 Quotes

By any measure the mathematics of the engagement were preposterously against them. The Yamato displaced nearly seventy thousand tons. She alone matched almost exactly in weight all thirteen ships of Taffy 3. Each of her three main gun turrets weighed more than an entire Fletcher-class destroyer.

But he and his compatriots would soon assess the cost of Taffy 3’s audacious resistance, the effectiveness of which no tactician could ever have foreseen and no statistician could have measured.

Jenn,” I said very loudly, sidestepping Jackson and inserting myself between the two of them. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you.” “Have you?” she asked, her sweet face tipped back and her impossibly pretty eyes arresting mine. “Yes. I have,” I said, then promptly forgot what I was going to say next. I sensed a hovering presence behind me so I glanced over my shoulder at Jackson—the hoverer—and frowned impatiently. “Do you mind? Give a man some space.” “That’s real funny, Cletus,” he said, not sounding amused. “Because I was just—” “Do you have any—uh—taffy?” I asked Jennifer, not wanting to hear Jackson’s complaining. If he was going to complain, I decided it was best to pretend he was a ghost. Taffy was the first thing to pop into my mind. “Taffy?” Her dark eyebrows drew together; I wondered if her real hair color would be the same dark shade as her eyebrows. I hoped so. “Yes. Taffy,” I said gently, and smiled when she smiled and shrugged. “I like to live dangerously.” She opened her mouth, just about to ask me something and I couldn’t wait to find out what, when Jackson cut in impatiently. “By eating taffy?” “Yep,” I turned just my head and gave him my profile. “It puts my dental fillings in grave peril.

I have to tell you, Major, if we don't get these bombs and stop this Jap fleet, they're gonna come in here and bomb the hell out of this place and maybe recapture it. Then their planes will be dropping these bombs on you. I've gotta have these bombs, sir, or we'll have a disaster on our hands.' Lupo asked who the major's superior was. The Army officer mentioned a colonel who stationed out toward the front. 'He's out fighting a war, and I'm not going to bother him." 'Well," Lupo said, "that's just too bad." The pilot pulled out his service revolver and pointed it at the major. Then Lupo handed the pistol to his radioman, Earl Gifford, instructing the flabbergasted aircrewman to hold the Army officer at bay. Lupo climbed into the cockpit of his plane and hailed the Fanshaw Bay on the radio. His fellow pilots from VC-68 and other Taffy 3 squadrons were already inbound

No matter how overmatched the Americans were at Samar, no matter how dashing their screening ships were in intercepting the superior force during the critical first ninety minutes of the unlikely battle, the strength of the U.S. forces that Kurita confronted was more formidable than many analysts have allowed. It does nothing to diminish the valor of the tin can sailors aboard Taffy 3’s destroyers and destroyer escorts, or of the gallant aviators and airedales who flew on that day, to say that Kurita’s ultimate victory was by no means assured, and that withdrawing in the face of continuous and savage air assault was perhaps the prudent thing to do.

A fighting force cannot be reduced to its order of battle any more than a ship’s value can be reduced to the number of guns she carries or the shaft horsepower her turbines can generate. A vessel draws life from the spirit of her crew, which derives in large part from the leadership qualities of her chiefs and officers. Morale defies quantification--and yet it weighs significantly on the ultimate lethality of the tools of war. A ship’s effectiveness is the product of thousands of bonds that develop between individual officers and crew. The bonds form and break in a chain reaction, the power of which is determined by drill, by relationships, by fortitude, faith, and values. Task force commanders can be only abstractly aware of these uncountable qualities as they exist on the particular ships under their command. The officers of the ships themselves see these qualities more clearly but still can only guess how the chemical reactions will coalesce when the real shooting starts and men begin to die. And so orders of battle are drawn up to focus on the tangibles: speed, displacement, armament, and sensors. On that score Taffy 3 scarcely even registered on the scale of force that Takeo Kurita brought against them.