Word: battleships
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First Stab at Trondheim. The narrow, rutted roads were knee-deep in late-April slush. German bombers and attack ships roared low over the pinetops. From southeast of Steinkjer, smashing echoes rolled into the mountains from the guns of German destroyers and a pocket battleship (probably the Liitzow) bottled up in Beitstad Fjord, as the Germans moved them up to support their land forces...
...Narvik, after the battleship Warspite and attendant destroyers blasted the remaining Nazi warships to the bottom and silenced all German firing from the shore last fortnight, the British marines and sailors present did not at once follow-up their advantage. The German forces ashore, numbering some 2,500, returned to the town, retained their hold on the iron-ore railroad as far as the Swedish border. Reinforced with mountain artillery flown in, they even began spreading up & down the coast. Northward they encountered British land forces 15 miles away, at Gratangen. These troops were from the main Allied landing point...
Addressing an audience of 20,000 (including 2,000 Red Cross nurses) in Berlin's Sportspalast, Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels recited a two-day score as follows: two British cruisers sunk, two heavily damaged, a battleship damaged, a heavy destroyer and a submarine sunk, a large transport bombed with severe loss of life near Narvik. Preceding and succeeding Nazi claims would have accounted for 61 units of the British Fleet in the past fortnight. Of this list, the British admitted losing only four destroyers and one submarine...
...signs all point to the conclusion that the battleship boys are playing on current fears to puff out their chests like Aesop's frog who burst trying to look like a bull. Our navy is now adequate for defense, and even Admiral Taussig doesn't claim it should be anything else. Americans love newsreel shots of new battleships, but Ann Sheridan is just as photogenic and not nearly so expensive...
Phase Five: Extermination. Three days after Hero Warburton-Lee's raid, the battleship Warspite arrived off Narvik accompanied by the remains of the H-class destroyers, plus the heavier (1,870 ton) "Tribal" destroyer flotilla including the famed Cossack (which raided the prison ship Altmark in Norwegian waters in February). This heavy force plowed up the fjord, silenced the Nazis' shore guns, sank seven destroyers, stood by to watch Norwegian shore forces clean out the landing party of 5,000 Nazis...