Word: armada
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...test veterans he could find. As his force grew, so did the costs: up to $1,000,000 a day. Involved are some 1,700 airmen, 6,600 sailors, 600 soldiers, 100 marines, 1,000 civilian technicians, 1,800 civilian construction workers. Starbird's air armada includes highflying U-2s, workhorse C-130s...
...more than 45,000 men. German bombers had ruined Dun kirk's seven modern dock basins. Because the beaches were shallow, small craft were needed, and the navy, in a brilliant recruiting operation, found them. By dawn of May 30, the first wave of an astounding cockleshell armada was heading across the Channel. There was never a navy like it; the beachboat Dumpling had been built in Napoleon's day; the Fleetwood fishing trawler Jacinta, to the horror of the troops that sailed home in her hold, stank to the skies of cod; the destroyer Harvester, built...
Commissioned in 1946, Vanguard never fired a shot in anger, and her last commander agreed unabashedly that "battleships are out of date." But for Britain's old salts it was a mournful moment; since the first Vanguard fought against the Armada, twelve Royal Navy ships have borne the name. And Vanguard herself seemed to have an apprehension about where she was headed. In Portsmouth harbor she slipped away from four tugs, slewed around sharply and ran bow up on a mudbank, where she clung so stubbornly that it took an hour...
...nervous Nazi garrison at St. Nazaire got its answer soon enough. In the wake of the hit-and-run bombers that ominous night in March 1942, a motley armada ghosted in across the broad tidal flats of the Loire estuary. Thin-skinned motor launches flicked their white wakes into the glare of hastily lowered searchlights. Ack-ack gunners frantically cranked their weapons toward zero elevation. Shells screamed across the river, and the water ran with fire as fuel tanks were...
...thunder of those seaborne demolition charges rings distant in the ear; the armada that sailed from Falmouth is already as quaint and archaic as the fleet that sailed with Drake. For in a world of ballistic missiles, nuclear warheads and intricate, intercontinental guidance systems that are not bothered by such hazards as the River Loire mud flats, the glory of the Greatest Raid seems strangely out of date. Its moving and carefully compiled record belongs on history's bookshelves, a reminder of a non-atomic world when everyone was sure that wars could still...