Word: tautly
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...Captain Charles H. ("Sock") McMorris, Kimmel's war plans officer, who had said (a week before Dec. 7) that Japanese airmen would never surprise Pearl Harbor. In BuNav, Nimitz had seemed a hard executive, despite his amiable manner. He had found the Bureau slack, and had made it taut. The officers whose careers had seemed blasted by Jap bombs and torpedoes expected Nimitz to sweep them all out to some naval Siberia and to bring in his own team. They trudged to the new CinCPac's conference...
...long armistice between the wars, Nimitz had the usual assortment of duty. Always his chief contribution was a sense of balance, of pulling the team together. If things were slack, he tightened them. If he took over a taut ship, he loosened it up a little. He got along well with civilians, because he did not brass-hat them...
...room. . . ." The Jap commandant even banned hand-holding ("He said such displays of affection offend the morals of his guards"). Food was scarce and nauseating. "The cereal in the dishpans was brown and shimmering on top from the thick layer of crawling weevils that covered it. ..." Under the taut, enervating pressures of the camp, the internees' characters changed, warped, withered and, in some cases, held firm. Talkative, irrepressible Dodie Morrison was hospitalized with hemorrhages, but her almost childish faith in her soldier husband sustained her courage ("We can't lose. He is so strong and clean and brave...
...this moment, Russia finally came through in southern Poland with what the Germans called "the greatest offensive of all time" (see below). Instantly the slack in the ring around Germany snapped taut; instantly the eastern front became a magnet pulling on German reserves, including those with which Rundstedt was still toying in the west. Much was hoped for from this new Red assault, both as a military contribution and as a balm for inter-Allied political tensions...
...atmosphere of frustration, the International Civil Aviation Conference drew to a close last week. Five weeks of conferences in smoky rooms in Chicago's Hotel Stevens failed to resolve the fundamental differences between the U.S. and Great Britain. But they stretched tempers wire-taut...