Word: mitscher
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...back to Washington to straighten out Navy air administration -particularly in the matter of getting combat-equipped planes from the factories to the fighting areas. When that had been satisfactorily attended to, he went to sea again, this time commanding Carrier Group 58.4-a component of wizened, brilliant Marc Mitscher's Task Force 58. His group joined the first carrier strikes- after Doolittle-on the Japanese home islands...
Hard-hitting Arleigh Burke was always a handy man to have around in a fight. In the South Pacific campaign he won the nickname "31-Knot Burke" from the speed with which he pushed his destroyer squadron into action. He became chief of staff in Marc Mitscher's mighty Task Force 58, won a chestful of medals, was promoted to the temporary rank of commodore. When the Navy's own war against the Air Force and the Defense Department broke out, Burke was assigned to head "Op-23," a compact and more or less secret Navy Department task...
Wearing his famous broad-billed cap, perched on a high stool on the flag bridge facing aft ("only a damn fool faces into the wind"), Mitscher directed the mightiest naval unit in history in a soft, flat monotone that belied the compressed fury with which he fought. He was never known to get excited, even when Kamikaze flyers almost literally blew him off the flagships Bunker Hill and Enterprise...
...Shampoo. He. was also a master tactician. He discarded the hit-&-run tactics of earlier carrier raids, and developed the technique of wearing down the enemy's defenses, winning control of the air, and then slugging. Flyers called his method of blasting enemy airfields the "Mitscher shampoo." In their flexibility, his battle plans were a bewilderment to the Japs...
This week, at 60, in the Norfolk Naval Hospital, Pete Mitscher died of coronary thrombosis. History made room for him among the U.S. Navy's heroes...