Word: aft
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...double-elliptical, high-uffen-buffen, double-turreted, back-acting submarine war junk. . . . She is about the shape of a sweet potato that has burst in the boiling. She draws 14 feet of mud forward, and 16 ft. 6 in. of slime aft, and has three feet of discolored water over the maindeck in fair weather. . . . All the clinkers, ashes, buckets, shovels, etc. and an occasional sleepy coal passer are sucked up the flue and blown thousands of miles...
With her rudder jammed hard over, the Marblehead circled like a headless hen, smoke seething fore & aft. Her decks slithered with oil, water, patches of blood. Once more the ship was hit. Sky guns from the cruiser Houston winged a bomber which tried to suicide-dive the Marblehead, crashed into the water only 30 feet away...
...painted flag enormous on her flanks, the brand-new, U.S.-built, 12,500-ton tanker Victoria, Felix G. D. Salomone, Master, tanks blown full of Argentine linseed, was clipping along northbound 300 miles off Cape Hatteras. Just before sundown one day, a torpedo smacked into her 30 feet aft of amidships. Deck plates buckled, but her all-welded Albany hull stood up: the bulkheads of the tanks were unbreached...
Reason for this sudden interest in subs was the realization that, apart from the airplane, the 1942-model sub is the best U.S. bet for an offensive weapon. Weighing over 1,500 tons and 300-plus feet long, it shoots torpedoes fore & aft, carries quick-firing cannon and anti-aircraft guns, is fast enough to keep up with any fleet. It can cruise on its own for months, with a radius of 20,000 miles. From any angle the sub looked like the best way to clip the tensing strings of Japan's supply lines...
...dusk. The cargo of petroleum was ablaze in an instant. On the stern of the tanker, Kelly and ten shipmates struggled frantically with the falls of a lifeboat. Said Kelly: "I saw the captain, with his face all bloody, run through the flames along the flying bridge and come aft." In launching, the lifeboat turned over, and Kelly and his shipmates hid under it when the sub cut loose with deck guns. When things quieted down, they clambered up on the bottom of the boat and waited for dawn...