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Ranger-75 -> News Flash - Walter Lord dies at age 84. (5/22/2002 9:47:24 AM)
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Walter Lord the author of "A Night to Remember", "Day of Infamy" and, of course, "Incredible Victory" died Sunday in New York at age 84. He had been suffering from Parkinson's disease.
In a short tribute to Mr. Lord, here is the Foreward of his best selling book, it caught my eye some 28 years ago and still does:
By and ordinary standard they were hopelessly outclassed.
They had no battleships, the the enemy eleven. They had eight cruisers, the enemy twenty-three. They had three carriers (one of them crippled); then enemy had eight. Their shore defenses included guns from the turn of the century.
They knew little of war. None of the Navy pilots on one of their carriers had ever been in combat. Nor had any of the Army fliers. Of the Marines, 17 of 21 new pilots were just out of flight school - some with less than three hours' flying time since then. Their enemy was brilliant, experienced and all-conquering.
They were tired, dead tired. The patrol plane crews, for instance, had been flying 15 hours a day, servicing their own planes, getting perhaps three hours' sleep at night.
They had equipment problems, Some of their dive bombers couldn't dive - the fabric came off the wings. Their torpedoes were slow and unreliable; the torpedo planes even worse. Yet they were up against the finest fighting plane in the world.
They took crushing losses - 15 out of 15 in one torpedo squadron ... 21 out of 27 in a group of fighters ... many, many more.
They had no right to win. Yet they did, and in doing so they changed the course of a war. More than that, they added a new name - Midway - to that small list that inspires men by shining example. Like Marathon, the Armada, the Marne, a few others, Midway showed that once in a while "what must be" need not be at all. Even against the greatest of odds, there is something in the human spirit - a magic blend of skill, faith and valor - that can lift men from certain defeat to [SIZE=3]Incredible Victory[/SIZE] .
(repeated from the Pac War forum)
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