Word: battleships
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...Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, with a loss of 833 lives...
Blitzkrieg and deception. In disputed Danzig, the once German port administered by the League of Nations since the end of World War I, the attack had begun half an hour before the invasion, when local Nazi Storm Troopers seized several key buildings and intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where 51 postal workers barricaded the doors...
Adolf Hitler saw the great dreadnought as the key to ending Britain's naval supremacy. Even Winston Churchill conceded that the 823-ft., 42,000-ton German battleship was a "masterpiece of naval construction." Rather than emerging as the scourge of the Atlantic, however, the Bismarck fell victim to a superior British force in one of World War II's most spectacular naval engagements. Only nine days after leaving on her first combat mission, she was sunk on May 27, 1941, with all but about 115 of her 2,200-man crew aboard...
...Brest by Robert Ballard, the undersea explorer who in 1986 located the wreck of the passenger liner Titanic. As in the search for the Titanic, Ballard, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, used the unmanned submersible Argo in his Bismarck quest. According to Ballard, the battleship, which lies 15,000 ft. below the surface, is intact, upright and "in an excellent state of preservation" -- a remarkable fact considering that more than 300 shells and torpedoes were fired into the Bismarck by its Royal Navy attackers. Ballard says he does not plan to salvage the Bismarck. Last...
...days after a 16-in. gun turret blew up on April 19 during practice firing on the battleship U.S.S. Iowa, the Navy presented one of the heroes of | the disaster at a press conference: Gunner's Mate Third Class Kendall Truitt, 21, who had been sacking powder in a lower-level magazine when the blast took 47 lives. A bespectacled sailor with a mild manner, Truitt calmly recounted his escape from the burning turret. Last week the Navy's inconclusive probe of the explosion took a bizarre twist, and Truitt was shoved front and center again -- but hardly...