Word: battleships
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...clear up any implication that the Navy had not been frank with Congress, the Senate Naval Affairs Committee last week had up Secretary Charles Edison. Admiral Harold Raynsford Stark, Chief of Operations, had lately declared his unremitting faith in the battleship over aircraft, urged Congress to steam ahead with battleship construction. But Secretary Edison had announced last fortnight that aircraft had a "temporary advantage over ships," had said the Navy would have to revise its ship designs. Last week Mr. Edison did a neat straddle. Said he: ". . . Battleships were, are and will be for many years the backbone...
...British battleship . . . was ... hit between two forward turrets by a heavy caliber bomb. A half minute later a flame 500 meters [1,654 ft.] long appeared from the vessel, followed by thick smoke. When the smoke disappeared, nothing further of the vessel was seen except some floating debris...
...hrer Hitler promptly bestowed Knight's Crosses of the Iron Cross upon Generals Milch and Geisler and upon Major Harlinghausen, an active pilot and squadron leader, who presumably had crowned his career by leading the dive-bombers down upon the battleship. An extended version of the official German story, which was withheld for 24 hours "to see whether Churchill will have the courage to admit this terrific loss," added the following items to the alleged action...
After an interval long enough for the Allied troopship convoy to reach Great Britain, the British Admiralty tersely stated: "The German claim to have sunk a British battleship and a cruiser of the York class in operations off Namsos is untrue." Next day the Admiralty announced that no troopship had been touched, but that the "Stukas," diving wave after wave, did sink the heavy destroyer Afridi. The French Admiralty announced that their destroyer Bison was sunk in the same attack. The Poles in London verified the loss of their destroyer Grom off Narvik...
...simple arithmetic justified the British in calling the German bombers' boast of sinking a battleship "fantastic." Greatest terminal velocity ever achieved by an air bomb of best design is 700 ft. sec. That is about half the striking speed of a 12-inch armor-piercing coast guard rifle shell at close range. But air bombs are not armor-piercing. They explode on contact. To reach a Queen Elizabeth magazine from between the forward turrets (extremely lucky hit), a bomb would have to penetrate one unarmored deck, one 2-inch armor deck, another 1¼-inch armor deck, another...