Word: craft
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...also on the Rhine.* Along with the Royal Navy, the U.S. overland fleet had hundreds of vessels in action.† For months, on U.S. and United Kingdom streams, Navy crewmen had practiced a trick new to them-maneuvering their cumbersome, 50-ft.-long, 14-ft.-beamed LCMs (Landing Craft, Mechanized) in swift river currents. For weeks, in Belgium, khaki-clad, Army-helmeted sailors had worked like hairy-eared engineers to get the 26-ton LCMs and the 36-ft.-long LCVPs (Landing Craft, Vehicles, Personnel) safely transported over shaky bridges and damaged roads, through narrow village streets, to hiding places...
...European Theater required so much careful preparation. Vice Admiral Alan G. Kirk's landborne outfits were ready at H-hour. On the Twenty-first Army Group's north front, soon after the first troops had crossed in assault boats, the Navy's ramp-bowed craft came rolling up to the Rhine on mammoth trucks and were quickly launched. Soon a stream of LCVPs and LCMs were ferrying men, tanks, guns, bulldozers, hundreds of drums of gasoline to the east banks. Power launches and other small craft shuttled the Rhine in such profusion that amazed U.S. correspondents mumbled...
Even as you watch the immensities of a sea choked with craft, and realize the incalculably great massing and brandishing of skill and purpose assembled there, the whole motion forward has the involuntariness of a convulsion. Even as you look from a plane steep into the sea, and note the amazingly regular patterns of the wakes, it is more as if a stone had been gashed by the claws of a great beast. And along the ashen island, men and machines flounder and founder as desperately, and with as little apparent clarity of intention, as if they themselves were phantasms...
...gloom of dusk our craft fouled and for more than an hour we crouched in its belly, a perfect target for the Germans. Our little driver asked how far away the enemy was. 'Just over the bank,' someone replied. 'Which bank do you mean?' 'The one right in front of you.' 'Then let me out quick!' the driver yelled, and clambered over the side into two feet of water. ... I felt a lot safer myself after we were moving again. That night we slept in an abandoned farmhouse, and at an early...
Within the limits of military security (the enemy has had no opportunity to capture a P-80), estimates have been made of some of the features of the performance of the newest U.S. craft in the air. So fast is the P-80 that nothing that flies (including the tailless Messerschmitt 163 rocket interceptor) "can match its speed of "considerably more than 600 m.p.h." Its ceiling is well above the 40,000 feet at which propeller-driven planes can operate with efficiency, and it has a pressurized cabin...