Word: gunboats
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that boat and made for a motor gunboat. Mac pulled me aboard, that's Sergeant Major McEvoy, a grand guy. He told me my eye was gone and he bandaged my forehead. We got orders to transfer to a destroyer and Mac practically carried me up those ropes. I was pretty weak. He put me in the sick bay and said: "You'll be all right now, Joe." Then we got dive-bombed and a big hole was blown in the sick bay. The blast blew everyone around and I just about passed out. Mac got blown...
...bellyful of surprise. Chased out of bases in the Solomons, last week they decided to attack Milne Bay, which lies at the southern tip of New Guinea. They headed south in warships and transports. Allied fighter planes lugging small bombs spotted them, strafed their transports and sank a gunboat. But under a screen of low-lying clouds and a tropical downpour, they ducked into the ten-mile-wide mouth of Milne Bay, launched barges and poured out on the swamp-fringed shore...
Behind this larger ship, which Tex Hill later described as a light cruiser or destroyer, were two gunboats. Toward these Major Tex Hill now led his fighters in a great swooping dive. He made a pass at a destroyer but, on getting close and looking at it, he saw that it was armed to the teeth, so he swerved off, made a sharp bank and came down within 50 feet of the water, with all guns wide open shooting lead into the first gunboat. Before we could get to the second gunboat the deck was swept clean-figures threw themselves...
...Plus. Tallied by U.S. forces in that time were three Jap destroyers and one transport sunk; four cruisers, three destroyers, a gunboat and another transport damaged; seven enemy aircraft, possibly several others, destroyed. Any Japanese plan for a swift knockout blow to the main U.S. naval base in Alaska had been thwarted. But though Alaska stood firm, it was at a price...
...climax of anti-theatrics when Lieut. Thomas Wilson Boyd describes his part in the March raid on the St. Nazaire submarine base. Assigned to draw fire away from the destroyer Campbeltown, Boyd had, says he, an "easy job." All he had to do was to take his motor gunboat into the river, get in the crossbeams of the German searchlights and stay there...