Word: turretful
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Jimmy Thach lived airplanes. He was an ace test pilot, flew patrol duty in the Aleutians in Martin PBM-15 ("The bearskin flying suits stank like hell"), catapulted off a turret top of the cruiser U.S.S. Cincinnati in SOC-15, patrolled the Canal Zone in PBYs. Stationed in San Diego in the 19305, Thach met and married Madalyn Jones (they have two sons, John Jr., an experimental psychologist, and William Leland, about to enter William and Mary), became gunnery officer of Fighting Squadron 3. He set up mock dogfights, gave new pilots the advantage of altitude and invited them...
...attic in years than it catapults upon the audience the most blisteringly vituperative character. While his better-born young wife (Mary Ure) bends over an ironing board and his working-class friend (Alan Bates) sprawls over the Sunday papers, Jimmy Porter looses his bilious scorn, like a revolving gun turret, on everything within range: art, religion, radio, Sunday, England and, again and again, his wife and mother-in-law. As minutely venomous as a wasp, as sweepingly violent as a whirlwind, his mockery sauced with self-pity, his growl subsiding in a whine, he brings to a vast repository...
...rumbled up, their great guns elevated, a small boy would leap out of a doorway, fling a pail of gasoline over the tank's engine compartment and leap back to shelter. As the tank took fire and its crew scrambled out of the turret, the young Tommy-gunner firing from the windows above would mow them down. An alternate system was to slosh a bucket of gasoline across a street and throw a match in it just as a Soviet tank plunged past...
...been eaten (albeit, without much relish) by the same infantrymen; and if anyone thinks a hot, dusty, cramped medium tank on the Sahara Desert is any picnic, let him try it; while we are about it, let's not forget the unpleasantness of a 12-in. gun turret firing support missions for the Marines. As to that which can truly be classed as torture, the effect of such methods can be materially negated by actual training somewhat resembling the original combined with good physical conditioning. As to the mental strain, any mature individual (or one conditioned to it) could...
...accepted in the postwar Navy. He was assigned to the battleship Arizona, in charge of a small air unit. His first planes were French Nieuports-war relics with the reliability of dime-store watches. They took off from a short runway built over the Arizona's forward gun turret; it was a good way to end up in the drink, and at least once, Pride did. There was little improvement when Pride's outfit got British Sopwith Camels. Recalls Pride: "When they landed, they humped." Of the rickety old planes, Pride now says: "Very simple. Not so many...