Word: could
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Spee had two turrets of n-inchers. That is power. A direct hit with 670 pounds of explosive-packed armor-piercer could blow a hole big as a suite at the Hotel Adlon in any of these ships. Then she had the eight 5-9-inchers as well. Roughly, the Spee had a 3-to-1 advantage in armament and fire-power over all three cruisers put together...
Only way that the Spee could have overcome the British tactic was to get her two planes in the air for reconnoitering. It must have been early in the battle that a lucky British hit stripped to her fuselage the plane perched on the catapult-blocking the catapult so the other plane was also useless, and thus virtually blinding Spee. Despatches by week's end had not made it clear whether the British used their five available planes...
...Adolf Hitler's pleasure, communicated by wireless. There was no apparent reason for it. Assuming that the Spee was in no condition to engage even the light British cruisers, Hitler had nothing to lose by allowing her to be interned-unless he expects to lose the war, he could expect to recover the interned ship when war is over. World War I had been lost when the Germans scuttled their fleet at Scapa Flow. If Hitler ordered the Spee scuttled merely that his enemies would never lay hands on her, World War II was already half lost...
...defeated the Admiral Graf Spee (see above), two of the Navy's warships collided somewhere at sea and the destroyer Duchess went to the bottom with 129 men. The Admiralty refused to divulge either the place of the collision or the name of the other ship, but it could not conceal the fact that this was Britain's fourth largest naval disaster...
...Correspondent Stowe found them "helpless, tragic wretches. . . . The Russians wore Army overcoats of a cheap, part-wool mixture and uniforms of quilted cotton. . . . None of the men we saw had high boots, but they had ordinary shoes-and several of them, as a result, had feet so frozen they could hardly walk. . . . All said they were reservists, mostly of the class of 1925, and had been called up only three months ago. Most of these men were between 37 and 40. . . . The Finnish colonel said: 'Such infantry we have never seen. . . . They are cannon fodder, but no soldiers...