Word: micmac
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, Commander John Caldecott Littler sat in a naval courtroom at Halifax, an empty scabbard at his side, his sword lying crosswise on a table before the president of the court. As a result of last summer's collision between his destroyer Micmac and the freighter Yarmouth County (TIME, July 28), half a dozen charges had been brought against him. The most serious: he had hazarded his ship...
Almost to a man, officers and seamen of the Micmac stood by their short, wiry skipper. The fog into which he had raced at 26 knots, they said, had seemed like a mere wisp. Littler had used radar for eyes, and for once radar had proved to be blind. Radarmen said the fog might have caused an extremely rare phenomenon, shooting the radar waves upward so that a nearby target would be undetected. Pleaded Defense Counsel Roland Ritchie: "Is this man to be a martyr to this triumph of nature over science...
Under certain rare conditions, magic-eyed radar goes blind. This sad fact was brought out last week at a Halifax inquiry into the collision of Canada's destroyer Micmac with the freighter Yarmouth County (TIME, July 28). The Micmac's radar scopes, said her crewmen, did not show the freighter, hidden in a fog bank dead ahead...
...Yarmouth County shook herself, peered through the enveloping gloom to see what had hit her, felt gingerly for her wound. She found it. One of the Micmac's capstans was stuck like a burr in her side...
Under her own power, the wounded Micmac managed to limp into port. Naval experts were undecided whether she would ever sail again. The Navy last week held a court of inquiry into the worst peacetime disaster in R.C.N. history: six men killed, five "missing," 16 hospitalized...