Word: sirene
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...half an hour before lunchtime when the first siren screamed; about noon practically the whole Mitchel air fleet was aloft: medium Martin bombers (with machine guns, but no bombs in their racks), mean-looking, olive-drab...
...York Stock Exchange was sagging gently along early last week, when suddenly the news ticker flashed: "Unidentified planes two hours away...." Later, a huge siren near the old Treasury Building, right across the street, went off with an awful wail. On the trading floor men wheeled, dashed for the trading posts, frantically dumped thousands of shares of stock for whatever they would bring. This done, many of them high-tailed for office or home. When the all-clear sounded 17 minutes later, leading stocks had lost 2 to 10 points, the market was at a new four-year...
Back in the '20s, when he was captain in command of the battleship Mississippi, Tommy Hart was just as independent as he is today. Once, while leading eleven other battleships in a pea-soup fog, he heard a destroyer's warning siren, somewhere off his bow. Promptly, without consulting his fleet commander, he ordered the line to stop. Hauled up on the carpet for breach of regulations, he exploded: "If I couldn't see, how the hell could the flagship at the end of the line?" He was officially rebuked, unofficially applauded...
...couldn't hear a damned thing on the bridge because of the siren. We looked over the side to see whether the engines were still turning over or whether she was settling. It was a matter of minutes before she started to move forward." The explosion broke the bridge's control of the engine room and steering apparatus, "but pretty soon we were able to steer from the second conning station. . . . We had no compass working and the helmsman steered by the flag-that is, he watched the flag to see which way the wind was blowing." Ensign...
Because Dover still gets eight to ten siren warnings daily, the first lesson in 18 months was an air-raid drill: Teacher cried "Get in the cave," and pupils grabbed gas masks, cleared out in 30 seconds. At the second lesson they learned to dive under desks at the word "Shell...