Toll Shipping Quotes

Stranger, think long before you enter, For these corridors amuse not passing travellers. But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself. Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue. These columns rose not, for the such as you. But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees. The earth has many flowery roads; choose one That pleases your whim, and gods be with you. But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude Which like the deep dream world of the sea Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins; Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods; And mermaids, with flowing golden hair That charm a patch of silent darkness Into singing sunlight.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it. On January 30, 1945, four torpedoes waited in the belly of Soviet submarine S-13.

As the ship soared, the open OMS ports took their toll. The crew rocked in their couches as the craft shook violently. Martinez

There is opportunity in every disaster," Jeri told her. "A ship goes down, that's when I get excited. Because I know there are always treasures in the wreckage. Look what I found at the bottom of the sea. I found you.

On the qualities required of naval officers, Roosevelt was outspoken: “They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.

The lilacs shed as I walked the bridge. My phone buzzed twice and I turned it off. The city was radiant and I felt untouchable. I experienced the boundlessness that ships cut from their moorings must feel. I experienced again that feeling of having money, paying the tolls, of being allowed to enter the race. Yes, I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn’t quite recapture the hope. I could have walked all night. All the times I’d been denied entrance, all the times I’d asked permission - but it was my city too.

The ships themselves were extremely vulnerable, but they could inflict heavy punishment on an enemy from long range, if they could find him and strike him first. The tactical imperatives were to keep moving; to keep your scouts in the air, flying wide search patterns; and to hide your flight decks in weather fronts while pinning your enemy down in zones of clear visibility. “If they can’t find you they can’t hit you,” said Captain Sherman of the Lexington. “The carrier is a weapon that can dash in, hit hard and disappear.

Just as Europeans would be long obsessed with African cannibalism, so Africans imagined Europeans practicing the same thing. The whites were thought to turn their captives’ flesh into salt meat, their brains into cheese, and their blood into the red wine Europeans drank. African bones were burned, and the gray ash became gunpowder. The huge, smoking copper cooking kettles that could be seen on sailing vessels were, it was believed, where all these deadly transformations began. The death tolls on the packed slave ships that sailed west from the Congo coast rose higher still when some slaves refused to eat the food they were given, believing that they would be eating those who had sailed before them.

A highway, a bridge, a navigable canal, for example, may in most cases be both made and maintained by a small toll upon the carriages which make use of them: a harbour, by moderate port-duty upon the tonnage of the shipping which load or unload in it. The coinage, another institution for facilitating commerce, in many countries, not only defrays its own expense, but affords a small revenue or seignorage to the sovereign. The post-office, another institution for the same purpose, over and above defraying its own expense, affords in almost all countries a very considerable revenue to the sovereign. When the carriages which pass over a highway or a bridge, and the lighters which sail upon a navigable canal, pay toll in proportion to their weight or their tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarce possible to invent a more equitable way of maintaining such works.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea. This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog — in such tones he commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy — The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God’s sun-lit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom. I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell- Oh, I was plunging to despair. In black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints- No more the whale did me confine. With speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God. My song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.

Industrial food may be inexpensive, but its production exacts a significant toll on the environment and on the health of workers. For every calorie of industrial food you eat, approximately 10 calories of fossil fuel were spent to plant, fertilize, harvest, ship, and process the food before it got to your plate.27 Further, unless the food was organic, massive quantities of pesticides and inorganic fertilizers were used, polluting water supplies and sometimes poisoning workers. The most extreme and disturbing type of industrial food is meat. Because

Castro’s revolution, with all of its supposedly good intentions, put a stop to the growth of Havana. Of course it put an end to the Mafia controlling the casinos and entertainment, but for them it was a minor setback. They just packed their bags and went to Las Vegas where they expanded and developed “The Strip!” Batista and his followers fled Cuba for the Dominican Republic, Europe and South Florida. Many Cubans lost everything they had but others fled taking their wealth with them. The upheaval in 1959 marked the beginning of austerity for this former freewheeling city. The communistic de-privatization of all businesses, along with the embargo imposed by the United States, created a serious decline in Havana’s economy. The constant pressure to nationalize, as well as the severe crackdown by the régime to keep people in line, curtailed growth and placed an enormous hardship on the Cuban people. Since the Castro Revolution, the people of Havana have been severely affected, because of the absence of commerce with its former trading partner, the United States, located only 90 miles to the north. In all Havana has taken a severe toll economically, with its dilapidated houses, and the pre-1959 cars on the streets of the city being a testimony to the bygone era. It is only now that with the hope of normalization between the governments of Cuba and the United States that perhaps the people will benefit. For the greatest part, the Port of Havana has also been bypassed, chiefly due to the restrictions placed on them by the United States. However, the Cuban government is now attempting a comeback by attracting tourism from Canada, Mexico, the Bahamas, Latin America, Asia and Europe. The city of Havana has renovated the Sierra Maestra Cruise Port, but only very few cruise companies consider Havana a port of call. Slowly, German and British ships started to arrive, including the Fred Olsen Cruises and Carnival Cruise Line. Technically Real Estate Brokers and Automobile Dealers are illegal in Cuba, although real-estate offices and car dealerships are blatantly open for business. The buying and selling of real estate and cars, which was forbidden for many years, can now be done because of some changes brought about by Raúl Castro, but only by full-time residents of Cuba. However, gray market sales are thriving through the use of friends and family as proxies.

Reaching California, many of the Pacific-bound servicemen were caught in limbo, waiting for a ship and that suited them fine. No one doubted that the route to Tokyo would be long and bloody, and they were in no hurry to travel it. The sweating malarial jungles of the South Pacific, the infinitesimal atolls of the Central Pacific, all those obscure islands with their alien names - Efate, Espiritu Santo, Malaita, Gaudalcanal, Emirau, Tarawa, Majuro, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Ulithi, Palau, Saipan, Morotai, Mindinao, Iwo Jima, Okinawa - they would see them soon enough.

They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.

The RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on the night of April fourteenth 1912, and sank in the North Atlantic waters in the wee hours of the following morning. She took more than 1,500 souls with her. While this death toll is devastating, it is by no means the greatest at-sea catastrophe in western history. Even besides wartime disasters, the explosion of the Mont-Blanc in Nova Scotia killed almost two thousand in 1917, the 1707 Sicily Naval Disaster killed almost the same number of people, and several other shipwrecks with smaller death tolls were arguably more dramatic. Yet fascination with the Titanic has persisted since she rested on the ocean floor, long before James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster film. Why?

Only a handful of iconoclasts guessed that airplanes and submarines would rewrite all the rules of naval warfare, that by the late 1930s battleships would be worse than useless (because of the money and manpower they diverted), and that Mahan’s three dogmas were sinking rapidly into obsolescence. The First World War revealed glimpses of the future. The German U-boats proved that submarines could menace seaborne supply lines. The war in Europe hinted at the possibilities of airpower, and by the end of the war the British had demonstrated that airplanes could take off from and land on ships. Jutland, the largest naval battle of the conflict, neither bore out Mahan’s doctrines nor completely refuted them. But none of the lessons of the First World War could break the power of the battleship cult, whose acolytes dominated the ranks of all the world’s major navies until the opening salvos of the next war.

By 8:10 a.m., just fifteen minutes after the first bombs and torpedoes had struck the ships lying in Pearl Harbor, the main battle force of the Pacific Fleet was crippled. Along the eastern shore of Ford Island, in the anchorage known as “Battleship Row,” the battleships lay smashed, burning, and blackened, their masts and superstructures leaning over the harbor at 45-degree angles. So much thick black smoke was billowing out of the stricken ships that observers could barely tell which had been hit.

The stricken vessel started getting deeper in the water, slowly going down, as if she too were reluctant to give up the battle. With her colors proudly flying and the last signal flags, reading ‘I am abandoning ship,’ still waving at the yardarm, she went under on an even keel, like the lady she always was.

Even seasoned military men found it difficult to believe what they were seeing, and admitted to feeling bewildered and disorientated as the attack unfolded. The notion that an actual raid was underway was slow to enter their minds. In the eyewitness accounts, that pattern of belated comprehension is repeated again and again. A plane approaches. ( “Why are those planes flying so low?”) American ground-based antiaircraft guns fire at the intruder. (“Why are the boys shooting at that plane?”) A bomb drops. (“What a stupid, careless pilot, not to have secured his releasing gear.”) It explodes. ( “Somebody goofed big this time. They loaded live bombs on those planes by mistake.”) As the plane turns upward, the Japanese “Rising Sun” insignia comes into view on the underside of the wings. ( “My God! They’re really going all-out! They’ve even painted the rising sun on that plane!”) An American ship explodes. ( “What kind of a drill is this?”) Even then, some men refused to believe that a war had begun that morning—perhaps, as Commander A. L. Seton of the light cruiser St. Louis first guessed, the attacker was “a lone, berserk Japanese pilot who somehow had gotten to Pearl and now would be in trouble with his navy and ours.

Naval Warfare: For surface vessels and even submarines there was much continuity between the First and Second World Wars. The battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and submarines of the 1939-45 period were generally bigger, faster, and better armed than their 1914-18 predecessors but not fundamentally different. Indeed, they had not changed much since the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Yet naval warfare was nevertheless transformed by the introduction of aviation. Fleets that were once built around battleships came to be built around aircraft carriers instead. Aircraft proved superior not just to conventional surface ships but also, in the Battle of the Atlantic, to submarines as well. German U-boats preying on Allied shipping were foiled through a variety of means including convoying of merchants ships and the use of radar and sonar. But the weapon that proved most effective was an aircraft dropping depth charges. The dispatch of long-range B-24s equipped with the latest radar to patrol the North Atlantic in 1943 helped to turn the tide against the U-boats. The proliferation of small escort carriers also allowed air cover for convoys even in the middle of the ocean. Submarines proved more effective in teh Pacific, where the vast distances precluded effective patrolling by aircraft and where the Japanese did not devleop the types of advanced antisubmarine techniques employed by the Allies in the Atlantic. U.S. submarines took a heavy toll on Japanese merchantmen and warships alike once they managed to fix the problems that bedeviled their Mark 14 torpedo early in the war. "A force comprising less than 2 percent of U.S. Navy personnel," naval historian Ronald Spector would write of U.S. submariners, "had accounted for 55 percent of Japan's losses at sea." The torpedo, whether launched by submarines, surface ships, or airplanes, proved the biggest ship-killer of the war.

Mahan’s dictum that good men and bad ships make a better navy than bad men and good ships was always near Nimitz’s thoughts.

Gone the glitter and glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation; gone the strange excitement of a polyglot and many-sided city; gone the island of Western civilization flourishing in the vast slum that was Shanghai. Good-by to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kid­napers; the exclusive foreign clubs, the men in white dinner jackets, their women beautifully gowned; the white-coated Chinese “boys” ob­sequiously waiting to be tipped; Jimmy’s Kitchen with its good Amer­ican coffee, hamburgers, chili and sirloin steaks. Good-by to all the night life: the gilded singing girl in her enameled hair-do, her stage make-up, her tight-fitting gown with its slit skirt breaking at the silk­ clad hip, and her polished ebony and silver-trimmed rickshaw with its crown of lights; the hundred dance halls and the thousands of taxi dolls; the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jongg pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking; the sailors in their smelly bars and friendly brothels on Szechuan Road; the myriad short-time whores and pimps busily darting in and out of the alleyways; the display signs of foreign business, the innumerable shops spilling with silks, jades, embroideries, porcelains and all the wares of the East; the generations of foreign families who called Shanghai home and lived quiet conservative lives in their tiny vacuum untouched by China; the beggars on every downtown block and the scabby infants urinating or defecating on the curb while mendicant mothers absently scratched for lice; the “honey carts” hauling the night soil through the streets; the blocks-long funerals, the white-clad professional mourners weeping false tears, the tiers of paper palaces and paper money burned on the rich man’s tomb; the jungle free-for- all struggle for gold or survival and the day’s toll of unwanted infants and suicides floating in the canals; the knotted rickshaws with their owners fighting each other for customers and arguing fares; the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo, “protecting foreign lives and property”; the Japanese conquerors and their American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient: good-by to all that.

Yes, sir; no orders were given to me about them, and I knew that I might be relieved any day. I think I have had three bottles of brandy. I used to take a tot every night, thinking that there could be no harm in that." "No harm at all," Wilkinson said. "I suppose properly, under ordinary circumstances, the stores should have been handed over at once to the Tigre; but as no orders were given about it, I think you were perfectly right in taking toll, though I don't know that it would have been justified by the regulations. However, certainly I shall risk it myself." "Of course, sir, as commander of the ship, it is a different thing altogether. I was only put here to look after the men working the guns." For some hours the crew were hard at work lowering down the stores into the hold, packing the ammunition in the magazine, hoisting up the two eighteen-pounders and their carriages, and getting them into position. At half-past three a boat was sent ashore, and returned with the two Turks and a quantity of provisions. The carcases of three sheep were handed over to the crew, with the greater portion of the vegetables, one sheep being kept for the use of the cabin and

If brute force wouldn't suffice, however, there was always the famous Viking cunning. The fleet was put to anchor and under a flag of truce some Vikings approached the gate. Their leader, they claimed, was dying and wished to be baptized as a Christian. As proof, they had brought along the ailing Hastein on a litter, groaning and sweating.  The request presented a moral dilemma for the Italians. As Christians they could hardly turn away a dying penitent, but they didn't trust the Vikings and expected a trick. The local count, in consultation with the bishop, warily decided to admit Hastein, but made sure that he was heavily guarded. A detachment of soldiers was sent to collect Hastein and a small retinue while the rest of the Vikings waited outside.  Despite the misgivings, the people of Luna flocked to see the curiosity of a dreaded barbarian peacefully inside their city. The Vikings were on their best behavior as they were escorted to the cathedral, remaining silent and respectful. Throughout the service, which probably lasted a few hours, Hastein was a picture of reverence and weakness, a dying man who had finally seen the light. The bishop performed the baptism, and the count stood in as godfather, christening Hastein with a new name. When the rite had concluded, the Vikings respectfully picked up the litter and carried their stricken leader back to the ships.  That night, a Viking messenger reappeared at the gates, and after thanking the count for allowing the baptism, sadly informed him that Hastein had died. Before he expired, however, he had asked to be given a funeral mass and to be buried in the holy ground of the cathedral cemetery.  The next day a solemn procession of fifty Vikings, each dressed in long robes of mourning, entered the city carrying Hastein's corpse on a bier. Virtually all the inhabitants of the city had turned out to witness the event, joining the cavalcade all the way to the cathedral. The bishop, surrounded by a crowd of monks and priests bearing candles, blessed the coffin with holy water, and led the entire procession inside.  As the bishop launched into the funerary Mass, reminding all good Christians to look forward to the day of resurrection, the coffin lid was abruptly thrown to the ground and a very much alive Hastein leapt out. As he cut down the bishop, his men threw off their cloaks and drew their weapons. A few ran to bar the doors, the rest set about slaughtering the congregation.  At the same time – perhaps alerted by the tolling bell – Bjorn Ironside led the remaining Vikings into the city and they fanned out, looking for treasure. The plundering lasted for the entire day. Portable goods were loaded onto the ships, the younger citizens were spared to be sold as slaves, and the rest were killed. Finally, when night began to fall, Hastein called off the attack. Since nothing more could fit on their ships, they set fire to the city and sailed away.97 For the next two years, the Norsemen criss-crossed the Mediterranean, raiding both the African and European coasts. There are even rumors that they tried to sack Alexandria in Egypt, but were apparently unable to take it by force or stealth.

She regretted her decision almost from the time the ship departed. Dorothy did not adjust to missionary life; the climate challenges, cultural adaptations, grinding poverty, strange sicknesses, and the death of a child took their toll. After about three years, she lapsed into a deep depression. She lived her final thirteen years in a padded room behind a locked door.

The V-2's accuracy remained very poor, however, with misses of up to 14 miles and sometimes as much as 40 miles not uncommon. The Germans built, at the highest estimate, 6,915 V-2 rockets, a remarkable and remarkably wasteful feat given the 46-foot length and immense complexity of each missile. Some 3,225 rockets that reached their targets killed 2,700 British citizens. The effects in Antwerp, however, reached appalling levels; as many as 30,000 civilians and soldiers died in V-2 strikes, including 591 people killed on December 16th, 1944 when a V-2 struck a packed theater, the “Rex Cinema,” screening the Gary Cooper film The Plainsman. The rockets also sank at least 150 ships, and approximately 15,000 slave laborers died building the V-2s, a deadly effect which might perhaps also be counted among the weapon's death toll.

That leadership was more dangerous than all the ships in the universe, than all the courage, skill, or impressive technology. Leaders could turn the weak into juggernauts of unstoppable power, ready to toll over whatever stood in their path.

The infamous Fray Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres, who had sniveled around the Royal Court wanting to become a favorite of the pious Queen Isabella, was appointed Governor of the Indies, replacing Francisco de Bobadilla, the man who had been responsible for sending Columbus from Hispaniola, back to Spain in irons. Prior to his appointment Fray Nicolás de Ovando had been a Spanish soldier, coming from a noble family, and was a Knight of the Order of Alcántara. On February 13, 1502, Fray Nicolás sailed from Spain with a record breaking fleet of thirty ships. Since Columbus’ discovery of the islands in the Caribbean, the number of Spanish ships that ventured west across the Atlantic had consistently increased. For reasons of safety in numbers, the ships usually made the transit in convoys, carrying nobility, public servants and conquistadors on the larger galleons that had a crew of 180 to 200. On these ships a total of 40 to 50 passengers had their own cabins midship. These ships carried paintings, finished furniture, fabric and, of course, gold on the return trip. The smaller vessels including the popular caravels had a crew of only 30, but carried as many people as they could fit in the cargo holds. Normally they would carry about 100 lesser public servants, soldiers, and settlers, along with farm animals and equipment, seeds, plant cuttings and diverse manufactured goods. For those that went before, European goods reminded them of home and were in great demand. Normally the ships would sail south along the sandy coast of the Sahara until they reached the Canary Islands, where they would stop for potable water and provisions before heading west with the trade winds. Even on a good voyage, they could count on burying a third of these adventurous at sea. Life was harsh and six to eight weeks out of sight of land, always took its toll! In all it is estimated that 30,500 colonists made that treacherous voyage over time. Most of them had been intentionally selected to promote Spanish interests and culture in the New World. Queen Isabella wanted to introduce Christianity into the West Indies, improve the islands economically and proliferate the Spanish and Christian influences in the region.

calls to adventure are puzzles waiting to be solved. Anyone can apply, but the price of admission is paid in imagination. As journeys unfold, new challenges arise and pressures mount. These successive tolls must too be paid in creativity and ingenuity, as they were by history’s most imaginative minds. The only way that Jason can claim his rightful place as ruler of Iolcus, Greece, is by retrieving the fabled Golden Fleece from distant lands. The problem? Everyone considers the task impossible, fraught with terrifying perils certain to kill any man. Jason isn’t so sure. He assembles a mighty team of warriors—the Argonauts—and builds the largest ship ever constructed. He then figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed oxen, trick a mighty army guarding the Fleece into ravaging itself to pieces, and drug a sleepless dragon into its first slumber. Four months after departing, Jason

Many calls to adventure are puzzles waiting to be solved. Anyone can apply, but the price of admission is paid in imagination. As journeys unfold, new challenges arise and pressures mount. These successive tolls must too be paid in creativity and ingenuity, as they were by history’s most imaginative minds. The only way that Jason can claim his rightful place as ruler of Iolcus, Greece, is by retrieving the fabled Golden Fleece from distant lands. The problem? Everyone considers the task impossible, fraught with terrifying perils certain to kill any man. Jason isn’t so sure. He assembles a mighty team of warriors—the Argonauts—and builds the largest ship ever constructed. He then figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed oxen, trick a mighty army guarding the Fleece into ravaging itself to pieces, and drug a sleepless

The ship had already played a short-lived but memorable part in the early days of the conflict. On February 24, during the initial invasion, the crew of the Moskva famously demanded that a garrison of thirteen border guards on the Ukrainian-owned Snake Island—right at a crucial military and shipping access point to the Black Sea—lay down their arms and surrender. Their response, roughly translated as “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” went viral. Barely six weeks later, the ship was aflame in the same sea it was protecting, hit by a pair of Ukrainian-made Neptune missiles. The photographs that followed were yet another embarrassment to Putin: There was the pride of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, christened after its capital city, burning brightly. In state media, the Russian government claimed the ship had caught fire and sunk in bad weather—an excuse that even some of its own state TV hosts didn’t buy. The death toll remained unknown. The successful attack became the first of many stories about Ukrainian inventiveness and pluck. “People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” observed Ben Hodges, the former United States Army commander for Europe, referring to the popular 1980s TV show in which the lead character constantly improvised to get out of impossible jams. “With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective antiship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around.” More importantly, the war’s narrative was changing. The Russians had retreated from Kyiv. They had lost their warship. For the first time it looked like Ukraine might survive. There was even talk about Ukraine winning—if you defined winning as forcing Russia to retreat back to its own borders, the borders that existed prior to February 24, 2022.

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.

Chivalrous or not, there was no denying that of the 1,667 men on board, only 338, or 20.27 percent, had survived as compared with a 74.35 percent survival rate for the 425 women. On April 21 the bodies of the Titanic’s victims began to be pulled out of the north Atlantic by the Mackay-Bennett, a cable ship that had been sent out from Halifax with a hundred tons of ice and 125 coffins on board. The Mackay-Bennett’s captain described the scene as resembling “a flock of sea gulls resting on the water.… All we could see at first would be the top of the life preservers. They were all floating face upwards, apparently standing in the water.” John Jacob Astor’s body was found floating with arms outstretched, his gold pocket watch dangling from its platinum chain. To the ship’s undertaker it looked as if Astor had just glanced at his watch before he took the plunge. It is often written that Astor’s body was found mangled and soot-covered and that he must therefore have been crushed when the forward funnel came down. Yet according to three eyewitnesses, Astor’s body was in good condition and soot-free, and like most of the other floating victims, he appeared to have died of hypothermia. On April 25 the body of the Buffalo architect Edward Kent was recovered. In the pocket of his gray overcoat was the silver flask and ivory miniature given to him by Helen Candee on the grand staircase, and these were later returned to her by Kent’s sister. Frank Millet’s body was found on the same day and identified by the initials F. D. M. on his gold watch. The next evening the Mackay-Bennett left for Halifax with 190 bodies on board, another 116 having been buried at sea. A second ship, the Minia, had arrived on the scene, but after a week’s search it retrieved only seventeen bodies, and two other ships would find only an additional five. The Mackay-Bennett landed in Halifax on April 30 to the tolling of church bells and flags flying at half-staff. Horse-drawn hearses took the bodies from the dock to a temporary morgue set up in a curling rink.

Musashi. As one of the two most heavily armored ships in the world, she could take a great deal of punishment, and she had—more than twenty bomb hits topside, and about nineteen or twenty torpedoes below the waterline, including fifteen in her port side.

The captain and executive officer were the last to go. They had paced the flight deck one last time, looking for stragglers. Finding none, they stood above one of the knotted lines on the Lexington’s stern for a moment, both apparently unwilling to take the final step. Sherman ordered Seligman to go down ahead of him, as it was the captain’s “duty and privilege” to be the last man to leave the ship. As Seligman lowered away, an explosion went up amidships, throwing flames and airplanes high into the air, and Sherman ducked under the edge of the flight deck to get cover from falling debris. Seligman shouted at the skipper to come down the line. “I was just thinking,” Sherman replied: “wouldn’t I look silly if I left this ship and the fires went out?” The captain later wrote that abandoning the Lexington was “heartbreaking,” and “the hardest thing I have ever done.” But the venerable old carrier had run her race, and it was Sherman’s duty to deliver himself, physically intact, into the continuing service of the U.S. Navy. He went down the line and dropped into the warm dark water of the Coral Sea.

Reaching California, many of the Pacific-bound servicemen were caught in limbo, waiting for a ship, and that suited them fine. No one doubted that the route to Tokyo would be long and bloody, and they were in no hurry to travel it. The sweating malarial jungles of the South Pacific, the infinitesimal atolls of the central Pacific, all those obscure islands with their alien names—Efate, Espiritu Santo, Malaita, Guadalcanal, Emirau, Tarawa, Majuro, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Ulithi, Palau, Saipan, Morotai, Mindanao, Iwo Jima, Okinawa—they would see them soon enough. “Golden Gate in ’48, bread line in ’49.” That pessimistic slogan, which began circulating in 1942, revealed a great deal about the attitudes of the American servicemen who fought in the Pacific. They fully expected that the war would last twice as long as it eventually did, and they assumed, as a matter of course, that the long effort would exhaust and bankrupt the nation. But the words also indicated a gritty, persevering determination. The Japanese had fatally misjudged them. They were not cowed by the prospect of a long war and a destitute homecoming. They would go on fighting, killing, and dying, overcoming fear, fatigue, and sorrow, until they reached the beaches of the detested empire itself. There, in 1945, the irresistible force of the Yankee war machine would meet the immovable object of the “Yamato spirit,” until two mushroom clouds and an emperor’s decision brought the whole execrable business to an end.

After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.

The navy is much larger and many times more expensive than it once was. The armed forces are much better-paid, in order to keep them quiet. Unrest, revolts, and minor blazes of civil war all take their toll.” “But it’s been quiet under Cleon. And we’ve had fifty years of peace.” “Yes, but soldiers who are well-paid would resent having that pay reduced just because there is peace. Admirals resist mothballing ships and having themselves reduced in rank simply because there is less for them to do. So the credits still go—unproductively—to the armed forces and vital areas of the social good are allowed to deteriorate. That’s what I call decay. Don’t you?

In four months, Nagumo’s carriers had traveled more than 50,000 miles, spreading terror and devastation a full third of the way around the earth, from Hawaii in the east to Ceylon in the west. But the mileage was beginning to wear. The ships and crews had been sent on too many missions in too many directions; they had traveled too many miles with too little rest; they had been pushed to the limits of endurance by commanders who were loath to accept that such limits even existed.

As a collector he was careful, too, and much of his collection was acquired at reasonable prices, because not many people were interested, at that time, in his field. He really knew about everything he bid for at auctions or acquired after spending hours in old bookstores or print shops. His interest was in the American Navy and he collected books and letters and prints and models of ships. The collection was fairly sizable and interesting when he went to Washington as assistant secretary of the navy, but those years in the Navy Department gave him great opportunity to add to it. He was offered and acquired an entire trunkful of letters which included the love letters of one of our early naval officers. He also acquired a letter written by a captain to his wife describing receipt of the news of George Washington’s death and his subsequent action on passing Mount Vernon. He is said to have instituted a custom which every navy ship has followed from that day to this, and which varies only according to the personnel carried by the ship. All the ships lower the flag to half mast, man the rail, toll the bell and, if a bugler is on board, blow taps.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff is the deadliest disaster in maritime history, with losses dwarfing the death tolls of the famous ships Titanic and Lusitania. Yet remarkably, most people have never heard of it.

I am convinced that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships,” he said. “We can not manage by cooperation. Human frailties are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service. If we make a plan for unified command now, it will solve nine-tenths of our troubles.

All the ships flew huge American battle flags from mastheads,” he said. “Ships knifing through huge breaking blue swells, boiling wakes from high-speed ships, flags flying. . . . It was a scene I will never forget.

The conditions suffered by the American soldiers captured by the British in and around New York were almost too horrible to describe. They were stuffed into jails, churches, warehouses, and decrepit ships in the harbor and left to rot. Their cells had no heat. They used a corner or a bucket for their toilet and were never allowed to bathe. They did not have blankets, warm clothes, or medical care. They had to drink dirty water. Their meals were raw pork, moldy biscuits infested with maggots, peas, and rice. About half of the two thousand Americans captured at Fort Washington died from disease and starvation within weeks. If the British had not allowed the citizens of New York to bring blankets and food to the prisoners, the death toll would have been higher. Captured officers, however, were treated differently. They were allowed to stay in boardinghouses, to work, and to walk around the city as long as they did not try to escape. The British felt that officers were gentlemen and deserved to be treated according to their higher social class. More than 10,000 American prisoners of war died in British captivity.