Word: picketeers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...reasons for this damage was finally passed by censors: the gallant little ships (destroyers, destroyer escorts, LCSs) which formed the "picket line" 25 to 50 miles above the main anchorage had been severely mauled. By staying out front, the little ships with thin hulls had been able to warn the big transports and gunnery ships of approaching Jap planes. But they became the first Okinawan targets in the sights of the Jap suicide planes, . and they took the greatest concentrated damage, plus more than 1,000 casualties...
...little ships stuck to their picket line, and the men stuck to their guns. They set a world's antiaircraft record by shooting down 490 planes during the 82-day battle. They went to "general quarters" 150 times. The picket linemen's spirit was set down for history in a message sent by one little ship in April: "Have been hit by two suicide planes; shot down the third; am taking damaged destroyer...
TIME Correspondent Craig Thompson, looking and listening throughout the trial, wrote this account: The prisoners' dock was a picket-fence pen knocked together out of boards salvaged from packing cases. It contained four rows of seats, four to a row. Around the dock there was a plethora of blue-and-red-capped, uniformed guards of the NKVD. Between the dock and the audience stood two guards, immobile with rifles grounded, leather cartridge cases on their belts, unbuttoned bayonets glinting like polished silver under the batteries of Klieg lights...
...Most of the fellows who refuse to go through picket lines are yellow. It takes a real man to go through a picket line when he is ordered to do so by his International Union. . . . The man who observes the . . . decisions of his superior officers in the union is the real union man. The other fellow is, in most instances, a bunko artist who is looking for a chance to prove how good...
...available aircraft. To the strength of the Kamikaze Corps was already added that of the Jinrai (piloted buzz-bombs) and the Giretsu (airborne saboteurs). Ozawa would go further: he would take surface ships, rig them for self-destruction, then -if the Kamikaze squadrons could blast a way through the "picket line" (outer naval screen)-he would send the ships in to try "body-crashing" tactics against major U.S. fleet units...