Word: bardia
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...situation was not at all like that at Sidi Barrani, Bardia and Tobruch. There were no rigid, prepared defenses around Dérna (see map), no circles of wire and ditch. But the natural defense was rugged: a deep, wide wadi, the eroded path of an ancient stream. With more spunk than they had shown in seven weeks' war, 10,000 Italians fought to keep many more attackers from swarming into the wadi. Italian aircraft were active, tanks gave fight, artillery answered stubbornly. But numbers and more efficient supply told in the end. The town capitulated...
...Sidi Barrani the assault took three days. At Bardia it took two and a half. This time, at Tobruch, the job was done in one. The pattern was familiar by now. First the thin semicircle of defense around Tobruch was surrounded. Day before the attack, by way of feint, heavy concentrations of vehicles and men were massed east of the town, near the sea. In the night they were stolen away to the point of real attack-a place just by the Bardia road where the Italians, in digging their tank traps, had come to solid rock and dug down...
...Near Bardia, a handful of fugitive Italians disappeared into a coastal cave. A British sergeant called a colonel from his swim, and while the colonel, clad only in his slippers, stood guard with revolver at the entrance, the sergeant wriggled into the cave, shooting. Out crawled the Italians, among them Francesco Argentina, erstwhile commander of Sidi Barrani, eleventh Italian general to be captured in the British attack on Libya. For three days the general went on a hunger strike, then ate, wailed: "For all I care about this desert, you can have it! I myself am a poet...
...counter-blockade had taken hold in grim earnest, although Lord Woolton offered an explanation: "There were excellent reasons for this [reducing the meat ration twice in a single week], among them the diversion of shipping to Libya. Would you rather have a little less meat . . . would you rather have Bardia...
Fortnight ago in the flaming Battle of Bardia the bewildered Italians learned something of the attacking power and spirit of Australian infantry. As the Australians did their dirty work on that screaming morning they reminded observers that although Anzacs numbered less than 10% of the British troops in the last 1918 push of World War I, they captured one-quarter of the Germans and one-quarter of the territory taken by the Empire's armies...