Word: seamens
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...seemed unbelievable that a U.S. vessel could be brazenly held up and taken captive on the high seas. Nothing remotely like it had happened since 1807, during the Napoleonic wars, when a British man o' war overtook the U.S.S. Chesapeake, searched her for deserters and shanghaied four seamen. An even more dramatic depredation occurred in 1804, four months after Barbary pirates captured the grounded U.S. frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor and clapped her crewmen into prison. Lieut. Stephen ("Our country, right or wrong") Decatur sailed into the port aboard a vessel disguised as a blockade-runner from Malta, boarded...
...Settlement. The Bonin Islands, which include the bloody battleground of Iwo Jima where 21,000 Japanese and 4,189 American Marines died in early 1945, is a craggy archipelago of little modern-day strategic value, though it is just 700 miles southeast of Japan. Originally settled by 19th century seamen, including two New Englanders (many islanders still bear such old American names as Savory, Webb and Robinson), the islands are currently used by the U.S. only for a small naval and weather station, whose total complement is no more than...
...some of the heaviest bombing of the war. For five straight days, the whine of jets over Hanoi was almost monotonous. U.S. planes struck at a torpedo-boat base, an army barracks, storage depots, power plants, and two bridges over which supply trains from China funnel into Hanoi. Foreign seamen aboard ships anchored off Haiphong sat on the bridges with their feet on the railing watching duels between planes and ack-ack batteries...
...Allied freighter in the South Atlantic. The skipper then orders his young gunnery officer, Emil Kummerol, to destroy all "floating wreckage"-including a dozen helpless survivors. Otherwise, he explains to his shocked crew, Allied planes and subchasers would detect and destroy the U-boat. One of the helpless seamen survives machine-gunning, grenade tossing, ramming, and torturous exposure to the sea. Because of his testimony, Kielbasa and Kummerol are eventually brought before an international war-crimes tribunal. The captain's defense is that the slaughter was "an operational necessity," essential to preserve his own crew. Gunnery Officer Kummerol...
...nagging troubles threatened to torpedo the entire group of Cunard companies. In 1965 Cunard lost $7,560,000 on the Queens and its five other passenger ships, turned a slender $520,000 before-taxes profit only because of income from freighters and other investments. Last year's British seamen's strike, which cost Cunard more than $10 million in revenues, speeded the demise of the Queens...