Word: merchantmen
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...Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, Great Republic, Red Jacket, Lightning showed clean heels to anything afloat. U. S. seamen, U. S. ships were the finest in the world. Before the Civil War the U. S. had the best and second-biggest (2,379,000 tons) fleet of merchantmen on the high seas, and carried over 77% of its foreign commerce in its own bottoms. But steam was replacing sail, and the U. S. never took to steam; it was too busy with other things: gold in California, oil in Pennsylvania, the Civil War, tricks with machinery...
Secondly, since Great Britain is having ships sunk at a rate of twice her capacity to construct ocean-going crafts, sooner or later there will not be enough ships available. To prevent any such eventuality, the League proposes the use of American merchantmen and naval warships for convoy duty...
...fleet had kept chopping at Italian supply lines all week. A submarine (British or Greek) sank three Italian merchantmen in the Adriatic. Next day another Italian ship was torpedoed off the Yugoslav coast. An armed merchantman was sunk after a running fight in the same waters. The submarine Thetis which foundered off Liverpool in 1939, now raised and renamed the Thunderbolt, torpedoed an Italian submarine cruising on the surface...
From Washington came hints of a partial solution. The U. S. Maritime Commission was mulling a swap of trade routes: let U. S. merchantmen carry British traffic in the Pacific, so that British ships could be transferred to the Atlantic...
...Germans claimed one and perhaps two other British destroyers and four merchantmen knocked out in this action. The old destroyer Sturdy, now a minelayer, ran ashore in rough weather off Scotland and was lost. Destroyers are what Britain can least afford to lose. Lack of them is what makes possible the kind of news the British faced as a new week began: a convoy 400 miles west of Ireland attacked by U-boats with a half-dozen ships sunk or damaged, two other vessels closer to Ireland attacked by bombing planes...