He'd already broken into a missile complex and a naval air station, sneaked onto a submarine, and used a crowd of tourists as a diversion to get onto a battleship.
"All right then," Benchley replied, undaunted, "get us a battleship".
Long afterward, he told a story of the day in 1914 when William Jennings Bryan, who was serving as Secretary of State — his "Cross of Gold" speech behind him — ran into his office and yelled, "I've got to have a battleship.
At the time, New Jersey was the only commissioned battleship anywhere in the world, and it was found that, in an effort to get another battleship commissioned to relieve New Jersey, the modernization of Iowa was stepped up, leaving her in poor condition when she recommissioned in 1984.
Smith's supervision also extended to answering the nearly 10,000 letters sent to the Navy from concerned citizens offering advice on how to get the battleship back into deep water.
It is an inevitability that the line "I've got a bad feeling about this" will pop up in Battleship, a movie inspired by a board game, with all the innovation of a dot-to-dot puzzle.
But we could order anything a battleship could order so we got an entire set of the Modern Library.
It was during this time he got an opportunity to watch classics such as Bicycle Thieves (1948) and Battleship Potemkin (1925), arranged by the teacher.
"We can get anything from a drawing pen to a battleship," he says.
Why else could it be parodied so fondly in "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" (1991), in which the grim and increasingly pissed reaper gets trounced at Battleship and Clue?
