Word: flotilla
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Meantime winter fogs emboldened Nazi destroyers based at Brest to slip across the Channel by night, hunting British sea traffic creeping along the island's south coast. R. N.'s 5th Destroyer Flotilla, commanded by King George's cousin, Captain The Lord Louis Mountbatten, in the brand-new Javelin, fell upon three raiders before dawn, drove them off with angry shellfire. As they lit out for Brest, the Germans loosed a flight of torpedoes, one of which caught the Javelin. She had to be nursed to port while R. A. F. fighters circled out from the headlands...
Meanwhile, with ostentatious secrecy, a destroyer flotilla of the U. S. Navy departed on a mystery voyage to waters near Martinique. With rumors multiplying of the Vichy Government's aggressive collaboration with Hitler, with Vice Premier Laval asserting that democracy throughout the world was dead, with no U. S.-built warplanes destined for France still immobilized in Martinique, the significance of that move caused some good guesses (see p. 35). Five destroyers and a seaplane tender slipped out of Key West; three others, attended by eleven seaplanes, followed them. At the same time 1,200 Air Corps officers...
...naval vessels and patrol plane were engaging in "scheduled exercises" near Martinique (see p. 17). Soon afterward he got a reassuring answer from Petain. At Martinique are some no U. S.-made warplanes, aboard the French aircraft carrier Beam. Besides the eight destroyers of the U. S. patrol flotilla, several cruisers of the recently reorganized Atlantic Squadron are on a training cruise to the Guantanamo Naval Station in Cuba. At San Juan, Puerto Rico, are 12,000 officers and men of the Navy Air Corps. If the problem of Martinique had to be settled, the U. S. was well prepared...
...came. Through the ship's corridors ran the call "Action Stations." Fire gongs clanged. Out of the darkness darted a flotilla of speedy, 679-ton torpedo boats, charging in close to loose a shoal of their tin fish. Heeling over hard, the Ajax spurted forward out of their path, opened up with her 6-inch guns. Into the hull of one Italian smashed the first salvo, scarcely dispersed at the point-blank range. But the other attackers maneuvered their small guns into play, began pumping 3.9-inch shells back at the Ajax. With an orange-colored flash, an Italian...
...that she was in reality sending them to join forces with Britain again. Just as slyly the British pretended to believe the trick, but made sure the squadron would never reach the rebellious colonies in French Equatorial Africa. Off the coast of West Africa British warships intercepted the French flotilla, drove it back to Dakar, in Senegal, which was still subservient to Vichy, and the westernmost tip of Africa...