Word: torpedo
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...October off Guadalcanal. The Jap cruiser wheeled and turned like a crazed whale. On the pursuing U.S. destroyer Duncan nimble fingers adjusted a torpedo director, sent a tin fish on its way. Smoke and water geysered up. The Jap shuddered, rotted over, started towards the bottom...
...Mack Truck's big tank-part plant at Allentown, Pa. was fortuitously near an abandoned airport. So when tank production was cut back the Allentown plant made an ideal spot for Navy torpedo bomber production by Vultee Aircraft. Cost of the changeover (including fixing up the airport): $6,000,000 v. the $15,000,000 it would have cost to start fresh...
...what Author Peter Marsh Stanford called his unorthodox proposal. Besides four 14-in. guns it would carry, as anti-aircraft protection, twenty-four 5-in. and eighteen 40-mm. guns, four multiple pom-poms plus machine guns, six planes with two catapults on the quarterdeck and sixteen 21-in. torpedo tubes. Such a mighty cruiser, said Stanford, would be necessarily shorter, fatter and slower than the Brooklyn, but anyway "no ship can ever be designed fast enough to run away from enemy aircraft...
Half an hour later 40 torpedo planes and dive-bombers swooped in. Only one plane got through, a torpedo bomber. It was just taking the attitude for its drop when shells clipped its wings. It flipped up and shot the torpedo high in the air, right across the fantail and into the sea on the opposite side of the stern...
After noon the stubborn ones came again -24 dive-bombers and torpedo planes. This time at least one attacker made good. He dropped a 500-pounder on one of the forward turrets. Captain Gatch, who was standing on the bridge's exposed catwalk, took a fragment of bomb in his neck. An artery was cut. His shoulder was torn. He was knocked out. But his ship got through...