Word: lifeboat
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...torpedo struck at dusk. The cargo of petroleum was ablaze in an instant. On the stern of the tanker, Kelly and ten shipmates struggled frantically with the falls of a lifeboat. Said Kelly: "I saw the captain, with his face all bloody, run through the flames along the flying bridge and come aft." In launching, the lifeboat turned over, and Kelly and his shipmates hid under it when the sub cut loose with deck guns. When things quieted down, they clambered up on the bottom of the boat and waited for dawn...
...probably killing every officer and man on the bridge and most of the men in the forward sleeping quarters. Less than a minute later, a second torpedo blew in the stern, exploding some of the destroyer's own depth charges. Four men tried to launch a lifeboat, but it was no use: the explosions had wrecked the davits. Realizing that they would have to drop life rafts and jump after them into the numbing black water, the four sailors went to the galley and gulped hot coffee from soup ladles. From the store room they got heavy underwear...
...When three torpedoes in 50 seconds finished off the Norwegian freighter Blink, 23 men got into a power-driven lifeboat. Only six reached shore alive. The first night they dragged a sea anchor, hoping to stay within sight of other survivors. In the morning none was visible and they tried to start the engine. It balked. They raised a sail; a gust of wind upset the boat and they lost all food, all drinking water, the oars and one man. They righted the boat and got back...
...half days were packed with equally nervous moments. His ship, last to leave Singapore harbor, was bombed with deadly efficiency by the Jap, was soon in flames. Yates McDaniel, propped against a coil of rope, took notes, stopping only to help fight the fires. A jam-packed lifeboat finally carried the oar-weary, bailing survivors to Bangka Island, five miles away. At dark, the tide so low that lifeboats could not float within a half-mile of the beach, the weary party began wading to deep water and rescuing launches from a nearby rubber plantation. Said Yates McDaniel...
...appalling tendency," he remarks, "to sit and watch this happen without taking any action, as though mesmerized by a snake." That time he got away, to crash-land safely "in the back garden of a Brigade cocktail party." When, a few days later, crewmen of the Margate lifeboat dragged Hillary, comatose, out of the North Sea, they rushed him ashore to have his burnt flesh caked with protective tannic acid, his eyes with a coating of gentian violet...