Word: command
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Dusty trucks, with drivers' rifles in holsters alongside the steering wheels, rumbled along rocky roads and through field and wood without traffic tie-ups. Supply functioned without a major hitch. Motorcycle dispatch riders, powdered with dust that turned their blue denim white, clattered into well-hidden command posts with battle messages that got prompt handling. In forward areas, tireless doughboys, in superb physical condition, moved forward, retired, swung down the roadsides with a minimum of stragglers...
...that while the Nazi armament bases are only a few days from the Middle East, the British must send most of their weapons, including crated airplanes, around the Cape of Good Hope-thus keeping them "out of action for the best part of three months." Apparently the British command had judged it unwise to spare for so long a time many of the weapons which might have fortified Crete. There was little to cheer about in this revelation...
...characteristic flourish, the Prime Minister failed to quell a widespread uneasiness. He had not accounted for the fact that Britain's naval losses at Crete were greater than the Italian losses at Matapan (see p. 32). He had not satisfied many of his listeners that the British High Command was up-to-date as to military brains. And many hearers had found the Prime Minister's thrusts at his critics bitter beyond all reason...
...Here the "known loss" was 15,000 men, against 17,000 evacuated, nearly 50% (at Dunkirk losses were 12%, in Greece 25%). Winston Churchill, as a palliative to rising British anger over Crete (see p. 24), estimated that the Germans had lost 17,000 men. But the German High Command, whose claims if not admissions have usually proved unfailingly accurate, last week admitted losing only 5,893 men (1,353 killed, 2,621 missing, 1,919 wounded). Of these admitted casualties, 4,761 or 80% were Air Force and parachutists. The Germans said that...
Sinking or even crippling her as she set out to raid Britain's supply lines would be a victory. It would be particularly pleasing to the Coastal Command of the R.A.F., for previously all the spectacular British torpedo-bombing had been done by the Fleet Air Arm with Fairey Sword-fishes-rickety biplanes trussed up with as many outside stays as grandma's corset. (These "string bags" nicked the French battleship Strasbourg as she fled from the Battle of Oran, had crippled three heavy units of the Italian Fleet at Taranto, slowed the Vittorio Veneto in the Battle...