Word: torpedoed
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...battle's great lesson besides Japanese skill and guts, was the importance of the aerial torpedo in fleet actions. Cecil Brown broadcast: "It's apparent that the best guns and crews would be unable to stem a torpedo-bombing attack if the attackers are sufficiently determined"-and insufficiently opposed by defending aircraft. After this battle, a capital ship without air screen must be reckoned nearly as vulnerable as one without armor. But a capital ship with an air screen is, as far as experience shows, still better than any other kind of ship afloat...
...Navy's boast that the Japs would be a pushover.* He knows how the cruiser Mogami, some of whose welded seams parted when she fired a full salvo on her trials, was exaggerated into a kind of saltwater One Hoss Shay. He knows how the little torpedo boat Tomoduru, which, because it was overloaded with guns and torpedo tubes and had insufficient displacement, tipped over on steam trials, was exaggerated into a great turtle-turning dreadnought, built from stolen plans...
Admiral Yamamoto subscribes also to the Japanese predilection for the torpedo as an attacking weapon. He considers the gun an ancillary weapon to be used mainly to create opportunities for decisive torpedo attack. The Japanese service torpedo is larger and more powerful than most (only equals: those fired by Britain's Nelson and Rodney), and Japan boasts an unusual number of small torpedo-bearing craft...
Admiral Yamamoto must have been trying a little Japanese wool-pulling when he surprised everyone at the London Naval Conference by defining the torpedo as a "defensive weapon." "Doesn't it depend, sir," asked a U.S. naval technician, "at which...
Searchlights and star shells stabbed suddenly through the pre-dawn darkness over the central Mediterranean one night last week. An Italian squadron of two cruisers, an E-boat (MAS) and a torpedo boat were caught off guard. From behind the lights came volleys of shells and torpedoes. One cruiser caught fire, exploded, dived to the bottom. The second blazed fiercely. The E-boat sank. The torpedo boat, badly crippled, may have escaped...