Word: torpedo
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Tyrone Power's motor torpedo boat is destroyed by Jap fighter planes on the beach of Leyte, and it in too late for him to get transportation out of the Islands. He tries to get to Australia in a little sail-boat with a crew of flyers. The boat capsizes three days later and they have to swim eight miles back to Leyte...
...Navy bought her and 20 sister boats, gave them each a 3-in. gun, gear to catch something more deadly than tuna, and names from the birds, such as Bunting, Crossbill, Crow, Puffin and Heath Hen. They all had wooden hulls, so thin that a dummy torpedo dropped in practice from a plane once sank one. Still, the Magpie and her sisters, not without casualties, served in World War II, sweeping up enemy mines off Palau, Okinawa, the Philippines and Normandy...
...Tarawa-Makin). He had a prescient hunch that the Jap carriers, fed up with heavy daytime losses, would launch an attack at night. With Lieut. Commander Edward H. ("Butch") O'Hare, famed Congressional Medal winner, Radford worked out a radar-equipped night fighter system. When -sure enough-Jap torpedo planes were reported approaching after dusk, O'Hare took off with his bat team. Two of the approaching Japs were splashed (shot down) and the others, disconcerted, turned back. O'Hare never came back from the mission...
...Also known as the "Munroe effect," after Charles E. Munroe (1849-1938). Munroe, who also invented indurite, the first smokeless powder used by the U.S. Navy for large guns, noted the principle of the shaped charge in 1888, while chemist to the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport...
...shows in his massive new Dictionary of the Underworld that even in 18th Century London a beak was a magistrate, a college was a prison, and to frisk was to search. But U.S. criminals, no mere copycats, have made their own additions to the lingo, among them (see above): torpedo (to kill), pipe (to see), case dough (trial money) and square jack (honest money...