Word: fleetly
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...Churchill's declaration that Britain, France and Russia have a "common interest" in checking German agression. Moscow press and radio descriptions of Allied pulling of punches on the Western Front gave most Russians the definite impression that a truce to World War II was already at hand. Red Fleet, organ of the Soviet Navy, while noting that Britain and France have a superiority in tonnage of 374% over the Reich Navy, argued that German "blows to the British merchant marine on the seas and in ports, simultaneously with repeated air attacks on [British and French] industrial centres can lead...
When the last Armistice was flashed, a minesweeping force sped into the Dardanelles and in 24 hours removed 600 British and enemy mines, to let the fleet move in to Istanbul. At home, Britain's mine-sweeping fleet contained 17,000 ships, with Great Grimsby, the fishing port at the mouth of the Humber River, as their main base. Shallow-draft fishing boats, motor launches, even paddle steamers were pressed into service. In the first two months of that war, for every two mines swept up, one trawler was lost. By 1918, the rate was 80 mines swept...
...Allied civilians saw was a creeping infantry advance by the French Army onto German soil, three raids (one moderately successful, two unsuccessful) by the Royal Air Force on German naval bases. Against them they saw three damaging weeks of submarine warfare and two air raids (possibly unsuccessful) on their Fleet. Only by last week had a British Expeditionary Force of perhaps six divisions established itself in France. Already the impatient "let's get On with it" idea began to be heard, at least in England...
...blow to British morale as well as to the Navy. If she were still afloat, the British Admiralty was not tricked into telling where the Ark Royal was, but did announce she was "safe & sound at her allotted station." Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet, dismissed the North Sea bombing as a slight episode and observed that it was done from "really too great a height-some 12,000 ft.-for efficacy...
...another American-the U. S. Naval Attaché in England, Captain Alan G. Kirk-to give Britain the last, happy word in the Ark Royal dispute. Capt. Kirk reported to the state department that in the course of a "routine official visit" to the Fleet, he attended church services and ate lunch aboard the Ark Royal, found her "not scratched...