Word: backed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...murky night last week a Chinese Nationalist convoy steamed west from the Formosa Strait's Pescadores Islands toward the China coast. It consisted of a creaking, World War II-type LSM, two small gunboats and a minesweeper. For two nights in a row it had turned back in the face of Communist gunfire before accomplishing its mission: delivering supplies and 400 Chinese Nationalist reinforcements to the island of Quemoy. This time some 30 newsmen and photographers were also aboard, among them TIME Correspondent Jim Bell. Bell's report...
...coxswain made a quick personal decision to execute the classic naval maneuver known as getting the hell out of here. Our escorts and minesweeper broke off and began firing back at the Communist PTs and gunboats that had ambushed us. Blood-red tracers zipped, skipped and finally floated out like spent skyrocket bursts as they sought targets. Brilliant, diamond-bright air bursts from Communist shore batteries to the east rained shrapnel down. Over the roar of small boats' motors rose the baritone whump of Nationalist three-inchers and the chatter of both sides' machine guns...
...other landing craft. For once the battle broke, it became a fire fight between the attacking Communists and our escorts. The Nationalists later claimed all but one of the attacking PTs and gunboats sunk, but I saw no explosions. One of the Nationalist gunboats got hit and was towed back to the Pescadores lying low in the water. The LSM also turned back, its troops and supplies still on board...
...dropped their nets within seven miles of Iceland's coast. The Icelanders had succeeded in getting nine men aboard the trawler Northern Foam when the British frigate Eastbourne charged at flank speed onto the scene. The nine boarders were quickly subdued, bundled into a motor launch and ferried back to Thor. But Thor's skipper refused to accept them, on grounds that the British had used coercion in removing them from the trawler. Reluctantly, the skipper of the Eastbourne took the Icelanders aboard his own ship-not as prisoners, but as "guests" of the British Admiralty...
Meanwhile, the Maria Julia pulled alongside the trawler Lifeguard with another boarding party ready to leap. But as the two ships tossed and rolled, the Icelandic boat was holed above the waterline by the Lifeguard's hull, and her boarders beaten back by a flourish of British boathooks and axes backed up by the threat of fire hoses primed with steaming water from the Lifeguard's boilers...