Word: sankes
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...hours from reporting the full extent of the disaster to Yamamoto. Only in late afternoon did he finally tell him that the Hiryu, the last of his carriers, was burning out of control. With that, Nagumo decided to withdraw the remnants of his fleet from the battlefield. Yamamoto sank into a chair and sat staring into space, as stupefied as MacArthur in his penthouse in Manila...
More heroic but no less doomed was Wake Island, a tiny atoll between Hawaii and Guam. A Japanese fleet closed in to start landing troops at dawn on Dec. 11. U.S. Marines under Major James Devereux scored four direct hits on the flagship Yubari and sank two destroyers. The force withdrew -- the first small U.S. victory in World War II and the only time in the war that defenders beat back an invasion fleet. In reporting this small triumph to Pearl Harbor, according to a story that may be apocryphal, one of Devereux's men added a bit of bravado...
...abandon the Repulse, his officers had to wrestle him into joining the evacuation. Captain John Leach of the Prince of Wales refused to be saved. "Goodbye, thank you, good luck, God bless you," he kept saying as he bade his crew farewell. When the two ships capsized and sank, within three hours after the attack began, the 840 victims included both Leach and Admiral Phillips (some 2,000 were rescued). The loss of the warships, wrote Britain's Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, "means that from Africa eastwards to America, through the Indian Ocean...
...result included some absurd errors. Several Japanese planes tried unsuccessfully to land on the deck of the Yorktown; several American pilots tried unsuccessfully to bomb the cruiser Australia. In the first U.S. attack on a major Japanese warship, though, bombers from the Lexington and the Yorktown trapped and sank the 12,000-ton light carrier Shoho; nearly 700 of her 900 crewmen went down with her. Lieut. Commander Robert Dixon triumphantly radioed, "Dixon to carrier, scratch one flattop...
...mental image of a major nation in decline is Britain. And, in retrospect, the British handled their decline pretty gracefully. In just a couple of generations Britain sank from economic and political superpower to second-rank member of a second-rank regional bloc. Yet the transformation happened without much domestic rancor, despite Britain's supposedly bitter class divisions. At worst, the general attitude was a certain sullen resignation. At best, there was a jolly, fatalistic insouciance. The Brits almost seemed to enjoy their ride down...