Word: gatun
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Barro Colorado Island in Gatun Lake, Dr. Schneirla followed the columns of army ants to their strongholds, then studied the biological mechanism which governs their lives...
...Gatun Lake, in the Panama Canal Zone, floats a little fleet of motorboats. They are blue-grey, stubby, old-so old, some of them, that they are kept lake-worthy mainly by the heroic ingenuity of their soldier crews. The soldiers who run the boats call them the third-ocean fleet. They are the supply boats of one of the finest, least-known outfits in the U.S. Army: the Panama Coast Artillery Command...
...hills, can even see the snouts of guns against the sky. Any Japanese or German strategist, studying maps of the Canal, knows that the guns are there to guard some of the most valuable military targets in the world: the locks in the Canal itself, and great earthen Gatun Dam (105 ft. above sea level and 400 ft. thick at the water level), where a break would empty the lake, dry up and close the Canal...
Example: when Colonel Oldfield's men were short of lumber for their barracks, he sent them by night to strip the hulk of an old ship, forlorn on the shore of Gatun Lake...
...saboteurs might block its locks or destroy its gates by blowing up a shipful of explosives on an apparently peaceful transit of the Ditch; 2) bombers launched from an enemy carrier at sea might succeed in a surprise raid in smashing lock machinery or breaching the great dam of Gatun Lake, thereby draining the Canal of water; 3) having gained a foothold in the Caribbean area, an enemy might go about systematic destruction of the Canal with large-scale attacks...