Word: searchlight
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Every man had a station on a gun crew or in the gun director, working on ballistics. They received actual experience in anti-aircraft firing, star shell firing, blackouts, and searchlight drills, as well as in the ordinary mechanics of firing...
...Government considered and rejected the idea of convoying U. S. ships in danger zones. It ordered U. S. ships, instead of slinking from U-boats or fighting back: to sail straight courses; at night to advertise themselves by a searchlight playing on the flags at their mastheads; to wear no camouflage but to paint the Stars and Stripes on their decks and hatch covers, to paint their names and flag large on their sides...
...gyros, turned out compasses for surface ships and submarines, stabilizers for seagoing craft from yachts to liners, automatic pilots and gyro instruments for aircraft. It also got many a confidential job from Army and Navy, soon branched out into the design and manufacture of complicated fire control devices, antiaircraft searchlights. Prize Sperry antiaircraft product is the Sound Locator-Searchlight, which picks out flying raiders by sound, focuses the lights on them, trains antiaircraft guns so that they "lead" bombing flights as a duck-hunter leads a flying mallard...
...Police in white raincoats and civilian air wardens halted cars, asked drivers to dim down to parking lights. Crowds out to see the fun bumped their shins on dark sidestreets and flocked into Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park, where spectators alternately cheered and groaned at the efforts of the searchlight crews...
...face of lovely Paris is pocked with gun emplacements, searchlight batteries, and trenches. Recently a demonstration of air defenses was held in the ditched and tunneled Esplanade des Invalides outside Napoleon's tomb. There are concrete gun platforms on the wooded Meudon and St. Cloud hills where Americans have their villas and restaurants serve cool drinks to heat-weary Parisians. On Mont Valérien, westward across the Seine from the Bois de Boulogne, is an impressive layout of long-barreled guns and searchlights with independent generators. Large railroad station signs, a give-away to low-flying raiders, have...