Word: torpedos
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...nosed through the harbor nets in the Loire estuary under a bright dome of anti-aircraft fire that brought into sharp relief the gaunt lines of her ancient U.S. hull. Around her, the motor gunboats and torpedo boats whined and sputtered. Above her. R.A.F. bombers roared and pounded. From the shore two powerful searchlights sought her out, and as the land batteries cut loose with furious cross-fire she belched angrily from her four thin stacks, stepped up her speed to 20 knots. Her 4-in. deck guns were quick to answer the shells that screamed at her from every...
...torpedo struck at dusk. The cargo of petroleum was ablaze in an instant. On the stern of the tanker, Kelly and ten shipmates struggled frantically with the falls of a lifeboat. Said Kelly: "I saw the captain, with his face all bloody, run through the flames along the flying bridge and come aft." In launching, the lifeboat turned over, and Kelly and his shipmates hid under it when the sub cut loose with deck guns. When things quieted down, they clambered up on the bottom of the boat and waited for dawn...
There was no doubt that the raid was costly. Dead were well over a hundred valuable Commando-fighters, sunk (according to German claims) were 13 British motor gunboats and torpedo ships. But the British were well satisfied. On their farthest Commando raid of the war, they had, they were confident, knocked out the only Atlantic port big enough to drydock the battleship Tirpitz, the dock that had once held the once-mighty Normandie, the busiest pen for Nazi subs. The raid was soothing to Britain's invasion boosters, too. To many of them it seemed that the British brass...
Only 30% of the crews of torpedoed U.S. ships came out of their jousts with the subs alive. Scandinavian crews (80%) and British (60%) seemed to have better luck. Reason: Nazi subs operating off the East Coast are chiefly occupied in blasting tankers, which usually burn or explode when a torpedo bores into them...
Next to steam (which old wind jamming navy men welcomed like a mouse in the morning oatmeal) the biggest thing that has happened to fighting-ship design is the airplane. Before the epochal crippling of the Bismarck by aerial torpedo, and the crashing success of unsupported aircraft in sinking the Prince of Wales and Repulse, designers of battlewagons and smaller craft had given only half an eye to defense against the new weapon on the seas. Those demonstrations ended all arguments, basically altered ship design...