Word: amethyst
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ever since her duel with Chinese Communist shore batteries off Rose Island (TIME, May 2), the shell-pocked British frigate Amethyst had been blockaded 140 miles up the Yangtze River from Shanghai, with 86 men of her original crew of 192 still aboard. The Communists kept 105-mm. howitzers constantly trained on the Amethyst at a murderous 400-yard range. The colonel commanding the batteries had warned the Amethyst's captain: "If you move, I'll sink you instantly...
...spring wore into a cruelly hot summer, the Amethyst's Lieut. Commander John S. Kerans faced mounting difficulties. The heat aboard the motionless steel vessel frequently drove the temperature to 120. Fuel supplies were perilously low, because the ship's oil bunkers were being sapped daily to run her generator...
Give It Back to the Bahstads. Within a few minutes the Amethyst's captain was mortally wounded; the ship's doctor and pharmacist's mate were dead. Another hit demolished a rear turret. The Amethyst ran up two white flags in clear token of surrender. But the shelling continued. The stricken captain ordered Chief Boatswain's Mate David Heath and 59 others, including the wounded, to abandon ship. Some reached the south bank in the Amethyst's whaler, others swam. Once on the south shore, they crawled into Nationalist territory. Said Heath: "The Reds machine...
Aboard the Amethyst, other wounded and the dead still lay on the deck. The British destroyer Consort had started from Nanking at the Amethyst's first S O S, to succor the stranded crew. The Consort was flying seven large British flags. She, too, was fired upon by the Reds, and retaliated with her 4½-inch guns. "It was bloody awful," said a Cockney survivor from the Consort. "But we gave it back to 'em. I saw one of their nahsty damned 'owitzers blown right aht of its bloody emplacement. Sky 'igh it went...
...Consort made three runs past the Amethyst in vain attempts to get a towline to her. She could not come nearer than 1,000 yards. After the third run, she headed downstream to Shanghai, where a guard of British and U.S. bluejackets and U.S. Marines attended the removal of the Consort's ten dead and two score wounded...