Brian Garfield, writing in 1995 in a new edition of his classic, The Thousand-Mile War, suggested, however, that there may be another explanation. Buller’s shearwaters are gull-sized seabirds that annually migrate between New Zealand and Alaska. They fly in massed flights and congregate on the surface at night in large groups to feed on plankton. Their mass might have been large enough to reflect a radar image, and doubtless they would have dispersed, or “disappeared,” after a few rounds of fourteen-inch shells came crashing in. Who is to say for certain what the target was, but the U.S. Navy
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