Word: hangar
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...swoop out of a blustery dawn onto the airfields around Tokyo. In the bad weather, the aviators had poor hunting. The Americans, on the southern flank of the attack, could find only nine seaplanes, all sitting ducks, of which four were burned and five damaged. They also smashed two hangars, sank three small craft and damaged ten others. The British, farther north, destroyed a hangar and 13 planes. Both groups shot up locomotives and hit factories and barracks...
...things probably saved the Ti, her officers said: 1) a sailor in hangar-deck control, though he was knocked down, crawled through twisted steel and turned on the sprinkler system; 2) Dixie Kiefer ordered the ship's ballast shifted to make a 10-degree list to port - so the flaming gasoline ran off the hangar deck into the sea; then he changed course so that the wind blew the flames away from the ship...
Five got through her fighter cover and her wildly crackling antiaircraft fire. Four of them smashed into her. The fifth plane, knocked into the sea, freakishly bounced into her side and exploded, rupturing her skin near the waterline. Flaming gasoline spewed across her hangar deck. One bomb penetrated four decks, wiping out living quarters. Fire swept the forward part of the flight deck...
...turned hoses on blazing planes (see cut). Gradually they got the fires under control, but not before planes parked on the hangar deck had been turned into charred skeletons. Gunners fought off a second plane attack. One bomb landed. Total casualties: 123 killed or missing; 192 wounded...
Stench of Death. Men began to come out of the numbed state in which, by instinct, they had performed their deeds, heroic or unheroic. The implacable Gehres gave them no rest. The hangar deck, where the worst fires had raged, was a nightmare of crushed planes, ruptured bulkheads, melted debris, burned and shattered bodies. Men had died by burning, by drowning in flooded compartments, by concussion, by electrocution, by hanging, by asphyxiation. Their shipmates cut away the wreckage to get at hundreds of bodies, hauled them out and consigned them to the sea. The stench of death pervaded the passageways...