Word: torpedoed
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Little Ships. Escort carriers, converted or built from merchant hulls, do not carry many planes-a few fighters, and torpedo bombers which carry depth charges-but with those planes they can provide extensive cover for convoys beyond the range of land-based patrol planes. When the Allies announced the formation of an "air umbrella" which would provide air protection for convoys from continent to continent (TIME, May 10), escort carriers took over in that loneliest spot of the convoy lanes where the land-based planes turn back and leave the ships on their...
...TORPEDO 8-Ira Wolfert-Houghton Mifflin...
...Torpedo 8, fruit of NANA Correspondent Ira Wolfert's three-month stay in the South Pacific, is a report of U.S. air fighting in the Solomons. Terse and nerve-tingling, the book communicates the stab-&-run violence of aerial battle with a verbal violence as calculated and vivid as an explosion...
...pile of ants," Number 8 of the Navy's torpedoplane squadrons was utterly smashed by ack-ack and Zeros at the Battle of Midway. "The squadron was like a raw egg thrown into an electric fan, and only three men came out of the action alive." Reformed, Torpedo 8 was flung straight into the Battle for the Solomons under the leadership of ardent, painstaking "Swede" Larsen. Armed with stubby Grumman Avengers, Torpedo 8 changed its old slogan from "Attack" to "Attack-and Vengeance...
Dispensers of Death. Revenge, and how they got it, is Author Wolfert's story. Not that the men of Torpedo 8 were romantically vengeful: they were "astonishingly practical, very realistic and hardheaded." When asked to volunteer for near-suicide missions, they and their fellow airmen would withdraw to ponder upon the matter. They volunteered "only when, independently of their officers, they decide [d] the possible gain [was] worth the probable loss." They knew that launching torpedoes from the bellies of their fat little craft meant "going in fast and low and drawing their planes across the mouths...