Word: fueled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ignored by Yoshikawa, but moored between battleships California and Oklahoma on the night of Dec. 6, was the crack fleet tanker U.S.S. Neosho, as large, new and well manned as any tanker in the fleet. On the morning of the 7th, with 3,000,000 gallons of fuel oil aboard, she rated as a No. 1 priority target. It is not pleasant, even now, to contemplate Neosho and gasoline fueling facilities for the fleet on Ford Island had she been destroyed and Pearl Harbor flooded with millions of gallons of flaming...
...getting things ready for a pep rally to celebrate progress (85% complete) and ask for more. A fork lift truck started to pick up a big steel trash bin; apparently the bin nudged a heavy steel plate, which sheared off the valve of a 500-gallon tank of diesel fuel, used to test the big ship's generators. (Said Pipe Fitter Solomon Fried: it was like a "carom shot at billiards.") The fuel gushed out over the hangar deck, poured down a bomb elevator well to the deck below. There a spark from a welder's torch...
Ironically, Constellation was unable to defend herself. The ship has built-in fire-fighting equipment to flood its fuel compartments and cover the four-acre deck with foam in case of heavy attack.* But at dockside, the carrier was most vulnerable to fire damage, and entirely dependent on outside help. At the naval inquiry, Lieut. Milano admitted that 42 small fires had been snuffed out aboard Constellation before last week's holocaust...
Part of the jet cut through the roof of one house. Engines, fuselage, cargo, bodies cascaded with thundering crunches onto the street; rivulets of jet fuel skittered and splashed crazily and ignited into billows of flame, which in turn touched off the gasoline tanks of parked cars. Panicky tenants fled from a row of burning brownstone rooming houses. The empty Pillar of Fire Church (evangelical) turned into an inferno. Two men selling Christmas trees on a corner, a snow shoveler near by, and eight other Brooklynites were killed instantly...
...However, with all of my various sources of information, plus the local newspapers and radio ... I was able to send a constant series of messages to Tokyo." In that stream was included information about the number and type of ships at Pearl Harbor, local defenses, location of fuel dumps, disposition of ships. He noted, among many other things, that U.S. battleships were often moored in pairs; this indicated that torpedo attacks against the inboard ships would be ineffectual. That report, he says, "caused a strong emphasis on dive-bombing with specially built bombs evolved from 16-in. armor-piercing shells...