Word: sampan
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During the rest of that day, the 1,060-ton Ward, named after the first naval officer to be killed in the Civil War, remained on patrol. She ducked Jap air attacks, captured a motor-driven sampan with three prisoners. From that day on she was up to her gunwales in the Pacific war: she fought in the Solomons, bombarded Aitape, took part in the Aitape and Biak landings, saw action at Cape Sansapor, Morotai, Dinagat, Leyte...
Plans for the escape were made on a Thursday: the grim little group of officers had agreed that Singapore could not hold. On the Sunday of Singapore's collapse, an aide-de-camp swam out to a Chinese sampan and sculled it back to shore. Aboard went the officers, headed by Major General Henry Gordon Bennett, Commander of the Australian Imperial Forces in Malaya. After nightfall the sampan slipped out of the harbor...
...that Sunday night General Gordon Bennett's sampan had bumped into a seagoing junk carrying six British officers. The General's party switched to the larger vessel, set an uncertain course for Sumatra. The torn page of an atlas was their only chart. Dawn found them in waters a scant half-mile from a Japanese-held island. Their food and water were nearly gone when an Allied launch picked them...
...British "foreigners." A Chinese guide led them, by night, through narrow mountain passes to a farmhouse within earshot of a Jap garrison. Once, during their two-day hideout, they escaped a Jap searching party by a hair. A Chinese contraband runner loaded them at midnight into his small sampan, nosed upstream through sleet and snow for Free China. Japanese troops lined the right bank, Chinese the left; detection meant being riddled by both sides. At journey's end, too numb to move, they were carried through ice water and mud by the cheerful, barelegged boatman, given a royal welcome...
...Hawaiian Islands, "sampan" does not mean what Noah Webster says it does. In Hawaii, it means a boat owned by an Oriental. Residents of Honolulu, now queasy over the Japanese crisis in the far Pacific, regard the islands' chief sampan nest at the fisherman's wharf, a few miles from the Navy's base at Pearl Harbor, as nothing more than a nest of Japanese spies. Army and Navy men think so too. Many a destroyer commander on patrol before Pearl Harbor has stopped a fancy, high-powered motorboat inside the restricted zone, has had bland apologies...