the Navy ran a series of wave tank tests to see what kind of stresses their fleet could take. (They’d already lost three destroyers to a typhoon in 1944. Before going down the ships had radioed that they were rolling through arcs of 140 degrees. They downflooded through their stacks and sank.) The Navy subjected model destroyers and aircraft carriers to various kinds of waves and found that a single nonbreaking wave—no matter how big it was—was incapable of sinking a ship. A single breaking wave, though, would flip a ship end over end if it was higher than the ship was long. Typically, the
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