Word: torpedoes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Four torpedo planes came first. Heavy fire and Italian caution kept the planes well away, too high and too far for good aiming. Then came bombers, some high and some diving on the five light cruisers, the destroyers and the supply ships in the British convoy. Unscathed, the convoy pushed on toward Malta...
...away. Its forward turrets were a solid, orange wall of flame. The British gunners knew that their shells could do no more than annoy the battleship. But they fired away. A British destroyer careened out of the smokescreen. The captain was certain that he holed the battleship with a torpedo. Another destroyer captain believed that he got a second hit. The battle ship did not sink, but it had had enough. At dusk, after five hours of combat, the Italians gave...
After dark on the day of the Channel skirmish, the Germans sent another pack of speedsters against a British convoy in the North Sea. Again British destroyers blew two E-boats to flotsam, but this time the Germans fought back, spitting torpedoes. One torpedo punched the frail hull of the Vortigern, a 1,090-ton oldtimer, and she went down. The British patrol sloop Guillemot, a 580-tonner which can do little better than 20 knots, spotted an E-boat lying in ambush, crept up within 50 yards before the German crew woke up. The Guillemot sent...
...North Cape down to Alesund were tightly sealed. Across the Skagerrak, by ship and plane, streamed reinforcements for Nazi garrisons. Strung out along the thawing fjords were almost 200,000 troops, double the number that guarded Norway last fall. The powerful battleship Tirpitz, which recently weathered a British torpedo-plane attack, lay under the sheltering guns of Trondheim Fjord. With her were the 10,000-ton pocket battleship Admiral Scheer, the 10,000-ton heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. Were the Nazis about to move against Britain's supply lines to Russia's Arctic ports? Or were they plotting...
...fields, swung into firing position four miles from their objective. Overhead British bombers, roaring on to blast two Axis airdromes, dropped flares over the city of Rhodes which lit it brilliantly. Their target clear, the guns of the fleet in 20 minutes flung 20 tons of shells at motor-torpedo-boat bases, docks and factories. Startled Italian defenders took ten minutes to man their anti-aircraft guns and shore batteries, were still firing into the sky (thinking they were being bombed) when the attacking ships retired. Not a plane was lost, not a rating injured, the British reported...