Word: baing
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...Fourth of July. The ancient cruiser Baía was patrolling the South Atlantic along the route that Allied planes fly from Natal to Dakar. With four U.S. Navy technicians aboard, some of the Brazilian sailors were celebrating Independence Day. A stunning explosion rocked the Baía. Subsequent blasts literally blew her apart. Blue-bloused sailors were tossed into the waves. Commander Davila Garcia Albuquerque, his arm shattered by the explosion, shouted to his crew, "Save yourselves; I'm finished." But few of them were able to. Three minutes after the first explosion the Baía sank...
Four days later, the British freighter S.S. Balfe came upon six of the Baía's life rafts, pulled aboard the 22 miserable survivors who gave the world its first hint of the disaster. Later, other rescue vessels picked up a few more of the Baía's 400-odd crew members, landed them at the port of Recife before a crowd of solemn men and weeping women. Only a handful were saved. The survivors believed that the Baía had struck a floating mine, exploded the magazine...
South of Manila, 11th Division paratroopers and amphibious forces struck suddenly for the prison camp at Los Baños, 25 miles behind the Japanese lines. They caught the darkly sinister commandant, Lieut. Konishi, lining up his charges for morning roll call. They killed the lieutenant and his 243 guards, rescued 2,146 sick and starving civilian internees...
Around 1870 there appeared at the Brazilian port of Baía a "somber anchorite with hair down to his shoulders, a long tangled beard, an emaciated face, and a piercing eye." He was clad in a blue canvas garment and carried a pilgrim's staff. He was young Antonio Conselheiro. For ten years he had been wandering in the backlands of Brazil (hiding there in shame after his wife had run off with a policeman), eating little or nothing, indifferent to danger, speaking in cryptic, prophetic monosyllables, sleeping in the open, and becoming a terrifying, unforgettable legend...
...tangible reality, was a trench of the dead, plastered with blood and running with pus. It was something beyond their wildest imaginings." The last defenders died at dusk. The next day the last of Canudos' 5,200 houses were destroyed. Thirty years after the prophet appeared at Baía his head was cut off and taken back to the coast "where it was greeted by delirious multitudes with carnival...