Word: foremast
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...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 she was alive. In fire-control stations, in the great turrets, on the bridge and below, her crew was at battle stations...
...dark. A white sheet of spray lifted high over the starboard lifelines and swished down on the deck. From the siren on the foremast came a hoarse groan-ten seconds to go. The loudspeaker took up the count. It came faint, thin and broken to the forepeak: "9-7,6-FIRE...
From North Carolina's port side burst a flaming earthquake-a roar that shattered its way to the marrow of man, a lurid flame that seemed to lick the water for hundreds of yards and lift itself above the ranging top of the foremast. The deck slid to starboard, oscillated to port, leveled off handily, rode steady again...
...third ship in the Italian line, the cruiser Fiume (10,000 tons, 8-inchers).- At this exceedingly close range, Warspite, whose heavy batteries had been brought to readiness, spoke up with a broadside of 15-inchers. The whole broadside found its mark. The Fiume burst into flames from foremast funnel to sternpost. The after turret flopped right into the sea. Warspite let her have another broadside. Fiume was now afire and hopelessly crippled...
When the Mary E. O'Hara came to rest on the bottom, twelve feet of her mainmast, five feet of her foremast stuck out above the waves. There on slippery, ice-covered halyards clung more than a dozen of her crew. Some of them were dressed only in the underwear in which they had slept. It was about 3:30 of a January morning...