Word: wasps
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From the bridge of the racing, rolling destroyer-minesweeper Hobson, the air craft carrier Wasp was simply a dark bulk 3,000 yards off to the left, against the mid-Atlantic night. Like the destroyer, which was tearing through the rising seas with all hatches battened down, she was operating under simulated war conditions, and was completely blacked out save for a glimmer of light at her truck. The Wasp had planes in the air; when she began a sweeping 120° turn into the wind to pick them up, she came boiling through the darkness at 27 knots...
...also her task to avoid the carrier's 27,100-ton hull. Last week, before a board of inquiry at Bayonne, N.J., Lieut. William A. Hoefer Jr., 27, an ex-merchant mariner and senior surviving officer of the Hobson, told what happened in the moments before the Wasp rammed and sank the destroyer in the worst peacetime disaster of modern U.S. naval history...
...Like the Wasp (the second carrier* and seventh U.S. naval vessel to bear the name), the 37-knot Hobson was a veteran of many a sea battle of World War II. She was racing along off the carrier's port quarter on "plane guard"-ready for rescue work in case a flyer missed his landing and crashed. Under the impact of the collision the Hobson sank almost instantly, with many of her complement of 14 officers and 223 men asleep or helpless below. Amid a glare of searchlights, the carrier's crew began rescue operations. Other destroyers raced...
...hours of searching, only 61 of the Hob son's men, many of them dazed and injured, were found. As the Wasp steamed slowly back toward New York, her bow sliced open along the waterline by the impact, 176 men, including the Hobson's skipper, Commander William J. Tierney, were missing and presumably lost-the biggest peacetime casualty list in modern U.S. naval history...
...first carrier Wasp, then commanded by the late Naval Chief of Operations, Admiral Forrest Sherman, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Guadalcanal in 1942. Left a helpless cripple, she was sunk by guns of the Pacific Fleet...