Word: commando
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Shadow of Violence. Unable to carry the day by parliamentary means, the extremists coldly set out to create an atmosphere of near civil war, reminiscent of the May 1958 uprising that toppled the Fourth Republic. At midweek, Gaullist Lucien Neuwirth, World War II underground fighter, publicly charged that a "commando of killers" had crossed into France from Spain with orders to assassinate leading ministers, government officials, and newspaper editors. Police pooh-poohed the warning until Left-Wing Senator François Mitterrand, who supports negotiations with the F.L.N., narrowly escaped death in the heart of Paris, when unidentified machine gunners...
...city (pop. 120,000) slept comfortably in the knowledge that, despite nearly five strife-torn years of war, the F.L.N. had never dared attack a big town. But less than three miles away, bivouacked in a French orange grove midway between the city and Bone's airport, a commando force of 47 rebels waited tensely for dawn...
Robert Rogers of the Rangers, by John R. Cuneo. An able biography of the deadly bushfighter who made his commando-like Rangers the most feared unit in the French and Indian War, only to die years later in undeserved disgrace...
Bush Fighters. As the woodsman became bolder, his sorties changed from mere reconnaissance missions to raids in force. The commando warfare was brand-new to the British and confounding to the French. A Rogers raid against Ticonderoga in December 1757 was typical of his methods. In weather that would have clogged ordinary troop movements, Rogers led 150 men through the untracked forest, ranged them about the fort, and, when the French refused to stir outside, slaughtered their cattle and burned their wood supplies, leaving a receipt for what he had destroyed...
...longer is Moslem support of the French confined to the docile, despised beni-oui-ouis (yes men). One village mayor switched sides abruptly after the brutal 1957 Melouza massacre by the F.L.N. Another convert was hardy Mohammed ben Chickh, only a year ago top sergeant in a crack F.L.N. commando outfit. Last September he rode into a French army post on a mule, explained he had grown disillusioned with the war. "We've got to put an end to this," he says, "because only then can we start building a new Algeria and recover our dignity...