Word: bardia
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...characters entered the southern war theatre last week-"Long Lizzie" and "Bardia Bill," so named by the ever jocular British. Both were big naval rifles, emplaced ashore and manned by seamen from the opposing fleets. Lizzie was Italian, Bill a Britisher.* Savagely they hurled huge shells in & out of the besieged Italian stronghold of Bardia, Lizzie occasionally lobbing a few 15 miles along the coast toward Salum, which until Bardia should fall was the British column's sole supply port...
Bill's advantage over Lizzie was that he was supported by at least 250 lesser cannon which the British kept crowding in on a semicircle about eight miles deep around Bardia, while other naval guns fired inland from fleet units standing at sea. Lizzie's support was Italian bombing planes which, massing their attack, tried to blast the tightening ring of British force. But the R. A. F. was present, too, with eight-gun fighters against two-gun crates. Mussolini, far away in Rome, decreed that his troops in Bardia must hold out to the end to permit...
...Bardia lies in a deep, winding wadi (river gorge) whose walls are honeycombed with stone caves. But for those caves, many more of the 20,000-30,000 Italian soldiers trapped there last week would have died. Enough died as it was under a ceaseless inferno of bombs from the R. A. F. and shells from the Royal Navy. For five days many units of the latter lay to offshore, grimly pouring broadside after broadside into the flaming town. In an extraordinarily daring exploit, one British "light vessel" (possibly a destroyer) penetrated Bardia's inner harbor...
...Bardia were two Italian divisions, remnants of a third, and escapists from the Battle of the Marmarica.* They lay in their wadi, behind a semicircle of concrete pillboxes, land mines and artillery emplacements, 15 miles in perimeter. After the British mechanized units, commanded by Major General Michael O'Moore Creagh had pinned them in, the encircled men tried to run for it, thousands at a time. As they fled on the coast road around the rim of Cyrenaica toward Marshal Graziani's main fortified base at Tobruch, 70 miles west, the R. A. F. and the mechanized British...
...heavily the Italians had planned to travel, and also at curious shortages in the equipment, especially steel helmets, barbed wire.) Graziani, in explaining himself to Mussolini, put the blame of his defeat on a shortage of tanks. While Graziani worked desperately to reform his Army, the British surrounded Bardia with artillery and infantry. The R. A. F., ranging even more widely, rained bombs on Tobruch. Derna, even on the main Italian air bases across Libya at Benina, Benghazi, Castel Benito. Graziani had some 200,000 men left and possibly-just possibly-he was lying back to let the British extend...