Word: raider
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Searchlights of other ships immediately scraped the sky, said Prien, looking for airplanes. At first the British could not believe a U-boat had penetrated Scapa Flow. Then they swept the water, and depth charges thudded everywhere. But no light, no charge found Prien's raider and he wriggled out of the harbor as he had come, after executing perfectly a feat to rank with Stephen Decatur's burning of the frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli (1804), William Barker Cushing's torpedoing of the Albemarle in Plymouth, N. C. (1864), Commander M. E. Nasmith's penetration...
...Admiral Scheer was really the culprit, the Allies had a mean raider to track down. She is one of Germany's three pocket battleships.* Limited under the Treaty of Versailles to "coast defense" vessels not exceeding 10,000 tons, the ingenious Germans effected economies such as substituting welding for riveting, alloys for heavy metal, then armed the vessels to the crow's nests...
Whatever the raider, the incident raised one challenging question. Where was she based? The attack occurred at least 6,000 miles from German waters, and even the Admiral Scheer could cruise only 10,000. Fuel and supplies must have come from either a South American or West Indian port...
Possibility: the base was a ship at sea. Last week the world's largest submarine, France's Surcouf, claimed capture of a German merchantship 1,000 miles out in the Atlantic. The raider also may have had a rendezvous with the 13.615-ton passenger vessel Cap Norte, one of the fastest German ships in the South Atlantic service, unreported since she sailed from Pernambuco fortnight ago heavily loaded with fuel and accompanied by two German freighters carrying fuel and foodstuffs...
...London, Prime Minister Chamberlain announced that the Admiralty was already putting into operation a "prearranged plan" to cope with all this. The plan was apparently to send out part of Britain's American squadron, the cruisers York, Berwick, Exeter, to look for the raider...