Word: beaching
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...land to shroud the sun rising over Normandy. he Wreckers. Under the fiery canopy the engineers and Army & Navy demolition units had crawled ashore. Hidden by the sea at high tide were concrete piers, pointed steel and wooden stakes. At low tide, they were visible. On the beach itself were great tripods of steel rails, braced steel fences, all of them ingeniously mined. The demolition units went to work clearing paths while German shells fell among them and German machine gunners hidden in tunnels and six-foot-thick concrete pillboxes raked them. An assault engineer said...
...fierce battle that was joined when Allied troops hit the beach, there was also the renewal of a historic personal conflict. General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, Cromwellian conqueror of North Africa, was in command of all the Allied ground forces. Across from him was the canny, brilliant German field marshal he had met and beaten in North Africa. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the "Old Fox," was readying his forces (under Germany's Supreme Commander, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt) to strike back again...
...ungainly motley of fishing trawlers, old coal-burners and new, specially designed craft. Their dirty, dangerous chore: to sweep the waters clear of mines. They moved with care, ploughing the Channel in straight furrows towards the coast, where midget submarines for the past three days had laid out beach markers. They went to work...
...hour Attack manages to give a remarkably clear picture of the whole task of invading bejungled beaches. Not even the great Desert Victory (TIME, April 12, 1943) has made so articulate the tremendous collaboration of men and machines which is required to put fighters in position and to keep them there. No film except Tarawa (TIME, March 20) has given keener images of what jungle fighting is like. Attack's images of vast messiness and spine-cracking effort as men move tanks, guns and ammunition from the beach into the jungle's boggy fantasia are even more impressive...
Sometimes the men write because some thing in Italy or Australia reminds them of something at home. More often they are reminded of home because things are so different where they are. Sometimes they write apropos of nothing: "How I would like to be back at Virginia Beach in October's bright blue weather, to scruff through the flaming new fallen leaves with a gun under my arm." "I remember Grandpa's study with its old leather chair." Where They Went. War scattered them in all directions. It picked them up out of their home towns...