Word: graf
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...accidents as well as its accomplishments is the British Navy noted. On the same day last week that three British cruisers brilliantly defeated the Admiral Graf Spee (see above), two of the Navy's warships collided somewhere at sea and the destroyer Duchess went to the bottom with 129 men. The Admiralty refused to divulge either the place of the collision or the name of the other ship, but it could not conceal the fact that this was Britain's fourth largest naval disaster...
When the Nazi Admiral Graf Spee limped into Montevideo harbor last week to bury its dead, patch up, await orders, NBC-RCA's representative there, Bill Clark, signed up his friend Jimmy Bowen to keep watch on her. Jimmy, who had once broadcast a Montevideo opera opening for NBC, found himself with a microphone, headphones, and the job of periodically reporting the comings & goings of the Spec's officers, the feverish activities of her men, the vague rumors that drifted down to the docks...
Sunday afternoon, at 3:45 p.m. E.S.T., Jimmy came on the air to report that the Graf Spee was weighing anchor. At 5:15, he was on again, to report that the Spee had steamed out into the Plata Estuary. Before leaving, she had transferred many of her men to the Nazi cargo steamer, Tacoma. "The commander," Jimmy hazarded, "may try to scuttle the ship about five miles out." He was covering, he said, from a dock, in the midst of a crowd. "They are doing a lot of talking," he shouted. NBC cut him off the network...
Network programs going over 175 stations were cut off; programs on the NBC international short-wave stations (WNBI and WRCA) were silenced. Then Jimmy's voice, without a splutter or a wasted word, told the world: "We have just seen the Graf Spee explode five miles off the coast: the ship has been scuttled...
...have just received information here which is not official, and will possibly need a long time to be confirmed . . . that the explosion of the Graf Spee was done at the dictation of Mr. Hitler. Absolutely...