Word: rafts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kelly to the Mediterranean. On May 23, 1941, he was with the Kelly in the hell of Crete. This time, he did not bring her home. A dive-bomber found her. Within 70 seconds the Kelly sank, Lord Louis and some of his men escaped. Standing on a life raft, he led his men in a cheer for the dying Kelly. Down with her went two of Lord Louis' prized possessions: a silver cigaret lighter from his cousin, the Duke of Windsor, and a photograph of the reigning King and Queen. Both the lighter and the picture were inscribed...
Though his mother back in New Jersey had worn black for a month, Michael Wajda, ship's electrician, was not dead. While the raft under him drifted in the doldrums, he clung to life, alternately raved, mumbled and lay insensate under the equatorial sun. Last week came word that after 46 days on the flotsam-cradling sea he had been picked up near Georgetown, British Guiana, was recovering in a hospital there...
...torpedo had blasted Wajda's ship, a U.S. merchantman, at night; shellfire pummeled her carcass. Shell fragments got Wajda in the head and ankle, rolled him overboard like a sack. He came to on a pitching raft where ship's Engineers Mahlon Benton and Lindgren Bancroft had dragged him. They rigged a sail of two big yellow quarantine flags, dressed Wajda's wounds, doled him out a supply of chocolate and hardtack...
...monotonous and deadly, rain came and brought drinking water-and raised mold on the hardtack. Benton wove a net of twine. The three men trolled with it, caught fish, which they ate raw. The fish guts they threw into the water lured hungry sharks which, Wajda said, "slapped the raft with their tails and we were afraid it would overturn." Benton began to grow weak. "On the 24th day he died and we put him overboard, mumbling what prayers we could remember. . . . Then Bancroft started to go out of his mind. ... He tried to jump. . . . I grabbed...
Wajda was alone on the raft. Once he sighted a distant ship, dully watched it merge again with the sea. At last, on the 45th day, the water showed streaks of mud that mean only one thing in shipwreck language: land-and help. And help soon came. Said Wajda: "I almost fainted...