Word: rafts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Curious soldiers clustered on a New Guinea riverbank. As the late afternoon sunlight slanted through coconut-palm fronds, a raft drifted around the river bend. Small frizzled-haired Papuan natives guided it slowly to shore. Heedless of cries of "Don't bother, we'll get it for you" from the soldiers on the bank, four Australian soldiers aboard the raft slowly gathered up possessions that only a soldier can truly treasure-firearms, rain capes, a few battered odds & ends. As they turned their sunken eyes shoreward, the shouting and chatter of the spectators ceased. The crowd parted...
Then another raft rounded the bend, and another, until eleven rafts had brought to safety 33 footsore, tattered Australians, remnants of a band of 50 that had battled the Japs on the north side of the Owen Stanley range. Outflanked and outnumbered, for 44 days they had fought off the Japs and beaten their way over jungle trails back to the Allied-held side of the mountains. Haggard faces, tattered uniforms, mute fatigue told a story of privation and courage that won the respectful silence of the other soldiers waiting at the jungle camp...
...feel that; we do. The seamen whose ships have been blown from under them talk of the useless waste because helpless boats are not convoyed. You haven't spoken to such men, I have. The stunned, half-dead sailors adrift for weeks on a raft-you haven't seen them, I have. And "little steel" asks for an increase in wages...
From deck chairs and other flotsam to which they clung, 18 people collected on a life raft. Four were children: Carol and Richard Shaw, whose mother and sister were drowned and whose father had vanished, and Mary and Robert Bell, whose missionary mother was rescued with them. Also dragged out of the sea was the torpedoed merchantman's skipper, 86-year-old Benjamin Bogdan of Brooklyn. Crowded on the raft, the 18 floated on the vast ellipse of the Caribbean. The sun beat down...
...after endless day dawned without a sign of a vessel. The children sang. Men & women raised their croaking voices with them. Finally a destroyer appeared. It mistook the raft for a submarine and began shelling it, realized the error and picked up the half-dead voyagers...