“All we had aboard the ship that morning was one Annapolis graduate and three reserves.”

After the atomic bombs were dropped, the war ended and we went into Tokyo Bay with the rest of the fleet, the Missouri and the rest of them, while they signed the terms of surrender that ended the war.

I’d get a shell, they weighed about 80 pounds I think, but when I was 19 or 20 that was nothing. I’d take a shell and a bag of powder, I’d put it in the hoist and then I would send it up to the gun.

The gunner’s mate came up and started breaking the locks on the ammunition. Everything was locked up for fear that someone might go in there with a cigarette or something.

I was standing on the deck of the USS Blue, a destroyer. We were all alone out there at this buoy, tied up.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.

Everything was black in the harbor, but there were still some fires burning on the ships.

We did not all come over on the same ship, but we are all in the same boat.

In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

Politicians are like ships: noisiest when lost in a fog.

The captain doesn’t think about death, or life, he thinks about saving his ship.

The man without religion is as a ship without a rudder.

The wooden wall alone should remain unconquered.