Word: torpedoings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bombers and torpedo bombers from a U.S. carrier force unloaded 90 tons of explosives on Nauru, 500 miles west of the Gilberts. And on Saturday, when the landing forces struck, Army Liberators again attacked objectives in the Marshalls. Purpose: to ground or knock out the Jap air force before the invasion fleet arrived...
...been ordered to lead his fighters to cover dive-bombers and torpedo planes making a strike on a small Jap task force. When he got into the air, he found his instruments were quirky, but he decided to go on. The task force was spotted, then Jap planes appeared...
...stretched out on deck and calmly gave an order: "All right, general quarters." The port gunner, a blond youngster named Richard Dudziak, started to fire into the engine of an approaching plane. It looked like an American SBD but the location of two blue-burning exhausts meant a Jap torpedo plane. As the plane passed over, Skipper Berlin could almost reach and touch the red ball on the wings. One wing tip knocked off the Who, Me?'s antenna, and another scraped the forward gunner. The plane swept like a piece of paper into the darkening...
...crew looked over the side. Just below the gunner was a hole 9 ft. by 3. At the moment of the first attack a torpedo had passed clean through the Who, Me?'s bow. Below decks one of the crew found a torpedo's two-foot fin and rudder of fine stainless steel -it had sheered off the toilet seat from the crew's "head" and lodged in the crew's quarters...
Soon after, a Douglas-designed torpedo plane turned out so well that the Navy gave him a $120,000 order. With cash borrowed from Los Angeles businessmen, he set up shop in an abandoned studio, and later bagged an Army order. It was for only four planes, but they shot him to the top of the aviation world. For those planes were the famed DWCs, which were the first to fly round the world...