Word: spindrift
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Over Jupiter Island, north of Palm Beach on Florida's east coast, a stiff wind was blowing. It rattled the palm trees with a sound like distant machine guns, piled huge stacks of cumulus clouds in front of the sun. From the sea, a salty film of spindrift swept over the cluster of snug beach houses. In one of them last week, sitting intently by his radio, Under Secretary of State Robert Abercrombie Lovett listened to the President's undramatic announcement of a dramatic new turn in U.S. foreign policy...
...Channel was kinder now. The crosscurrents and races of this turbulent moat are never still, but the long winter storms were over. The fresh wind still snatched spindrift from the whitecaps in the narrows opposite Dover, as it did beyond in the North Sea, and around Cape Breton in the rough Bay of Biscay. But in the fjords, in the bays and river mouths, the way was smoother. Along the flat sand beaches and the rocky cliffs, around the peninsulas, along the marshes and the dikes the invasion season had begun...
...Spindrift was Mussolini's claim that "there has never been any act of sabotage or protest against the war." He conveniently forgot his purge of 160,000 faltering Fascist Party members and the close watch the Gestapo and the Ovra are keeping on suspected revolutionaries and possible Darlanites. He made no mention of reports that near Foggia 40,000 peasants had joined with local militia in a spontaneous uprising which was put down after four days by troops from Rome; or that at Genoa on Oct. 23 air-raid wardens staged an anti-war demonstration...
Home to the war went oak-hearted Winston Churchill, his dark blue Trinity House uniform damp with the spindrift of the high sea, his yachtsman's cap askew. Home to a nation which still believed it could avoid the war went broad-shouldered Franklin Roosevelt, faultlessly pressed, confident, characteristically hopeful of the world's destiny. They had kindled-so they hoped and perhaps believed-a fire that would be a light...
Battle Stations. Late on the third day out the wind made up and North Carolina rolled gently through a rising sea that whipped plumes of spindrift over her lean sides and wet down the main deck. The light was fading and the moon hung low in the west when a score of newsmen (including Reserve Lieut. Commander Walter Winchell) leaned against the wind and made their way forward to grandstand seats in the bow. Except for a few lights on her foremast, North Carolina was dark, as she and her destroyer escorts had been every night. But inside...