Word: oak
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...another dark day for British sea power. Surprisingly lost that day was the aircraft carrier Courageous. Last week an even more astonishing disaster occurred. The Admiralty sent an electric thrill of horror through the nation by tersely announcing, with regrets, that "His Majesty's Ship Royal Oak has been sunk, it is believed by U-boat action." Royal Oak* was a battleship of 29,150 tons, built in 1914, and her loss reduced from 15 to 14 the number of Britain's capital ships. The time and place of the sinking were not officially divulged, but it appeared...
...about 1,200 men aboard Royal Oak, only 414 had been saved at latest reports, indicating that she had, when struck, gone down like a dumped ballast of pig iron. Question: How did it happen? Although one old battleship, the Britannia, was downed by submarines two days before the Armistice in 1918, not a single capital ship of the Grand Fleet was torpedoed by a submarine during the whole of the War, and anti-submarine tactics and technology are supposed to have vastly improved since then. In the absence of concrete information neutral naval experts were free to speculate. Best...
Assuming that Royal Oak was patrolling the North Sea (where some critics said a ship of its type had no business to be), its course was made known to the Germans either by espionage or by radio communication between reconnaissance airplanes or submarines. The German submarine then stationed itself along Royal Oak's path, turned off its engines to avoid detection, rested on the bottom, waited till the battleship came by, discharged a shoal of torpedoes. One could not have sunk Royal Oak, protected by "blisters" and by a compartmentized hull. Big German U-boats carry twelve...
...further directed by means of gyroscopes in their tails. The target's course and position can be calculated from, hydrophones. But warships have hydrophones too, and the British claim they can detect a submarine's position even when her motors are not running. Why Royal Oak or her escort failed to do so was another question. Evidently somebody blundered...
Britain's sea power was far from broken by the loss of Royal Oak. Together the Allies have 22 capital ships; Britain has nine more abuilding, and France has four. Germany has two, as well as three pocket battleships. But when British movie-goers last spring watched a Herbert Wilcox (Nurse Edith Cavell) film called Torpedoed-in which by models and studio shots Royal Oak is sunk by a U-boat (see cuts)-they little realized the melodrama's terrible impending reality...