Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...World War II battle for Leyte Gulf was the "greatest naval battle of all time," according to Historian Samuel Eliot Morison* and to 16-year-old Bill Frazer the sea fight seemed a fine subject for a U.S. history-class term paper. But the skinny (5 ft. 11 in., 128 lbs.), scholarly San Fernando (Calif.) Senior High School junior was dissatisfied with the research material available-he knew of only about 250 books on the Pacific phase of World War II. So Bill who six years ago bought a set of lead models of Japanese fighting ships with his newspaper...
...testily to assert that "little information concerning actions of Shima fleet during the battle are found in the U.S., and many reports . . . were written neither with ample knowledge nor facts of actual features." He defended himself against Critic James A. Field Jr., who wrote in The Japanese at Leyte Gulf that "Shima, in a sense, is the buffoon of the tragedy...
Buffoon or not, Shima has a lot to explain. On Oct. 25, 1944, the second day of the historic sea fight, Shima steamed toward Surigao Strait, south of Leyte Gulf, with two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and four destroyers, still distant from the main battle. He hoped to reach Leyte Gulf in time to harass U.S. landing forces there, but his entire contribution to the battle, as Historian Morison observes, was to ram his flagship into a crippled heavy cruiser of another Japanese force, after firing 16 torpedoes at two islands he mistook for U.S. ships...
...modern bed, it remained and remains a geological curiosity. For, technically, it runs uphill. In a Department of Commerce publication, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey reported that the headwaters of the Mississippi are 3,956.17 miles from the center of the earth, while its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico is 3,960.22 miles from the center. As the Mississippi flows from Minnesota to the Gulf, it climbs 4.05 miles farther from the earth's center...
...journey 1,491 ft. above sea level at the latitudes of Minnesota. As it moves southward, its water feels more strongly the lifting effect of the earth's spin. Therefore, it can climb up the bulge, away from the earth's center. When it reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it meets the ocean, which has been raised to the same level by the same centrifugal force...