Naval fleet

You're the worst kind of person.

The UN Naval Fleet appears in this episode, giving it a heavy military feel.

The UN's Naval Fleet's flagship is Over the Rainbow, and the fleet consists of ships and craft from both the eastern and western camps.

Its main force consists of formerly American naval ships, and each has been given a codename from among Shakespeare's plays, such as Othello, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, and The Tempest.

This war has now been going on for six months.

The strain that is put on the United States Navy fleet, but most importantly, its people and their families have not truly been accounted for.

And I think the toll of all of this will be seen not only after the sailors come home, but in the immediate months and years following when retention in the Navy out of all the branches of service goes down.

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Even now, in its present dark obscurity, it has reason to be proud.

It may consider itself the father of one of the lustiest young sewers in the metropolis, for the London Bridge Sewer and its neighbor the Fleet are the largest channels of underground London.

The Fleet itself, the Turnmill Brook, the River of Wells, bubbles up in a hundred volumes.

It trickles through poems, forms little pools in plays, and sparkles here and there in less imaginative pages.

Some historians of the Fleet Brook have regarded it with more veneration or enthusiasm than others, and have mused over its probable condition in the remotest times.

They have pictured the period when Roman villas studded its banks, when Snow Hill was famous for its snowdrops, when Saffron Hill was a wooded slope like the Thames banks at Richmond, and when the stream wandered down from its source in the Hampstead Hills, carrying swarms of silver trout into the Thames.

They have dreamed over the time when large vessels may have floated up as high as King's Cross, where this black river is now carried over the underground Metropolitan Railway in an iron pipe or tunnel.

Some excuse for this dream about an extinct inland river may be found in the tradition that an anchor was found some years ago as high up as the site of the Elephant and Castle at Pancras Wash, where the road branches off to Kentish Town.

So to recap, you're talking about a man that barely had an education, that grew up in the segregated deep South, joined the Navy anyway, was only limited to be a mess attendant, and was able to fight back at America's lowest point, saving lives and shooting down Japanese planes to which he was not trained, and then later dies on board USS West Virginia while he continued to serve a nation that did not fully recognize who he was or what he brought to the table.

As I mentioned earlier, aircraft carriers typically are named after presidents, but there have been exceptions like Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz had an aircraft carrier named after him, the Nimitz.

But you also have a couple of congressmen, senators, Carl Vinson, the John C. Stennis that had things named after them as well.

Now, these were political people.

Reach had fallen.

The Great Fortress World, headquarters of Fleet Command and anchor of humanity's military defenses, was no longer a functioning base.

Ships had been destroyed, orbital guns silenced, and much of the command staff killed or cut off.

Around the crescent-shaped table sat officers who could still issue orders across human space.

A clean organizational chart became considerably less clean once the shooting started.

Naval command itself depended on several different forms of authority.

Fleet command directed the movement and tasking of naval squadrons.

Naval Logistical Operations Command dealt with construction, maintenance, ammunition, spare parts, food, and the other matters without which a fleet becomes an expensive collection of pressure-tight monuments.