Education: Admiral's History Lesson

The World War II battle for Leyte Gulf was the "greatest naval battle of all time," according to Historian Samuel Eliot Morison* and to 16-year-old Bill Frazer the sea fight seemed a fine subject for a U.S. history-class term paper. But the skinny (5 ft. 11 in., 128 lbs.), scholarly San Fernando (Calif.) Senior High School junior was dissatisfied with the research material availableĀ—he knew of only about 250 books on the Pacific phase of World War II. So Bill who six years ago bought a set of lead models of Japanese fighting ships with his newspaper-route earnings, and began reading...

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