Word: gunners
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Died. Sergeant James Matthew Maxon Jr., 33, son of the Episcopal Bishop of Tennessee; in a plane crash during a test flight; "somewhere in England." A bomber and rear-gunner in the R.C.A.F., he had made several flights over Germany...
When he was 15, Germany went to war. Big for his age, slow-spoken, a heavy-set boy with a flair for mechanics, William Sebold went too; before he was 19 he was a machine-gunner on the Western Front. When the Ruhr was swept by the Revolution, William Sebold lived through it. Later, like many another German of his generation, he went to sea. For years he lived the rootless, lonely, self-contained life of the post-war wanderers, never quite able to master the language of the people he lived with, never quite at home among them...
...pilot dropped to 100 feet, skidded his Beaufort around the stern of one of the port-flanking destroyers, squared away, launched a tin fish, and sheered off to the left within 100 yards of the pocket battleship's bow. There was a tense pause. Then the rear gunner shouted: "There's a column of water!" The pilot banked to have a look, and all he could see was what seemed to him a beautiful cloud of dirty white smoke...
Unseen by the raider, the last boat, a 16-ft. jolly boat containing seven men (the ship's chief officer, third engineer, wireless operator, gunner, three seamen), got safely away...
...simple supper, the King was taken out on the field, where he examined Britain's best night-fighting planes, the Bristol Beau and the Douglas DB7 Havoc-bigger ships than the day fighters. They are two-seaters so that the pilot can concentrate on navigation, the gunner on spotting and shooting; twin-engined so that they would not be blinded by propeller reflection or by fiery exhausts right in front of their eyes; and with capacious fuel tanks so that the planes can stay up until dawn and not have to land in the risky light of sputtering flares...