Word: gunboat
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Denver-born George Atcheson Jr., 50, entered the State Department 27 years ago as a student interpreter at the Peiping Legation, had specialized in Far Eastern affairs ever since. As second secretary of the Nanking Embassy, he was aboard the gunboat Panay when it was bombed and sunk by the Japanese in 1937. Two years later he was recalled to Washington for a stint on State's Far Eastern desk, returned to China as embassy counselor in Chungking...
...reserve lieutenant commander in the British Navy in World War II, Novelist Nevil Shute observed that the behavior of U.S. Negro troops was sometimes more orderly than that of white troops. Later he was assigned to a motor gunboat in Burma, where he was impressed with the intelligence and charm of the Burmese people. By the time he sat down to write The Chequer Board, his sympathy for colored peoples had become an explicit insistence on social equality. Says his white hero, slowly dying of his war wounds: "I had been thinking about these darker-skinned people that...
...Norfolk Navy Yard last week shipwrights swarmed over a rakish gunboat, reconverting her into a presidential yacht for Harry Truman. She was the U.S.S. Williamsburg, lately with the Atlantic Fleet, before that a high-speed convoy flagship based in Iceland...
When she is commissioned, in about two months, the Williamsburg will be the sixth in her line. In the Republic's first struggling century, U.S. Presidents went yachtless. But in 1893, as the head of a rising naval power, Grover Cleveland took to cruising aboard the gunboat Dolphin. McKinley sailed in the Sylph, and by the time Roosevelt I took over the hefty (2,690-ton) Mayflower, a yacht was considered standard office equipment for a President...
There are few anecdotes about circumspect Bill Leahy. But there is one story which, although apocryphal, is characteristic. When the Japs sank the gunboat Panay in 1937, Franklin Roosevelt, so the story goes, summoned the Admiral and asked: "Bill, what will it take to lick Japan...