Word: morisons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Suicides & Storms. Though the whole of Morison's history displays U.S. productive might and organizing skill as decisive in both oceans, this last chapter is as full as all the others of men's ordeal by storm and by battle. When Admiral William F. ("Bull") Halsey led his fleet into its second typhoon in six months, a court of inquiry urged that he be transferred "to other duty," and Navy Secretary Forrestal was only dissuaded from retiring the Navy's No. 1 popular hero by the argument that to do so would boost enemy morale. Battered...
With the completion of his naval history-a 15th volume, containing only an index and technical data, is due next year -Boston's Samuel Eliot Morison takes his place in the line of classic narrators of the American past-James F. Rhodes, John B. McMaster, George Bancroft and Edward Channing. Right after Pearl Harbor, Morison, Harvard professor of history and Pulitzer prizewinning biographer of Columbus (Admiral of the Ocean Sea), proposed to his friend Franklin Roosevelt the idea of a "full, accurate and early" history of the naval war and got the assignment himself along with a commission...
...Morison and his staff witnessed all major U.S. naval operations, interviewed top brass and boot seamen; after the war, he settled down on Boston's Beacon Hill and rolled out volume after imposing volume. Before his mission was accomplished, Morison retired from both Harvard and (as a rear admiral) from the Navy. But only last year, at 72, he published John Paul Jones and thus sailed another Pulitzer prizewinning biography into port...
Recollected in Tranquillity. Imaginative use of Japanese as well as U.S. sources doubles the depth of this incomparably best of World War II service histories. Morison's insistence that it be "unofficial" (though all royalties go to the Navy) gives him room to light the text with judgments-as of Halsey's and Kinkaid's faulty assumptions in the battle for Leyte Gulf-that at times scorch the gold braid off commanding sleeves...
...Morison probably writes his best about the giant hull-to-hull slugging matches in which American sailors showed their best. "Lord of himself," he said of Midway's victor, "Raymond A. Spruance emerged from this battle as one of the great fighting and thinking admirals in American naval history." Of the fight for the South Pacific, he says: "For us who were there, or whose friends were there, Guadalcanal is not a name but an emotion." Sailor-Scholar Morison, who rode eleven ships and won seven battle stars and the Legion of Merit with combat clasp while getting...