Word: towering
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...conning tower, Captain Hans Langsdorff talked quickly and confidently with the navigator. This job should be easy. Overwhelming superiority in armament and firepower. The cruiser-identified now as the Ajax, 6,985 tons-would not dare come in close enough to dent the Spee...
...from lookout to keelson; bugles sounded to-your-stations. On the bridge the young officers put on their earphones and checked with the fire-control room and plotters. Observers focused their binoculars. The T-shaped range finders swung in the sleepy calisthenics of limbering and checking. In the control tower the plotters laid out their instruments-parallel, slide, caliper...
...half knots better than the Spee, maybe eight and one-half with all the truck-&-barnacles the German had picked up in the southern seas. The heavy cruiser was something to think about-8-inchers (they could crack most of the Spee's plate, including the control tower, from close range), and the vessel had an edge in speed...
...which must have been 256-pound shells from Exeter, since they both pierced heavy armament. One of them, high on the port quarter detonating a split second after getting inside, ripped gaping holes in side and deck. The other probably decided the battle. It pocked Spee's control tower fair and square. Lights went out. Telephones went dead. The central fire control went out of whack. Some of Spee's best plotters, gunnery officers, observers lay dead or wounded. From then on, orders had to go from less skilled men in secondary control stations. Speaking tubes, portable lights...
...still shooting up into the air. . . . The boys evidently are going to make a good job of it, and leave nothing but the pieces. . . . She is going down still. The bow is under. . . . The only thing showing now is her superstructure, the stack, and part of her control tower...