Word: convoys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bronx Cheer. Next day in Palestine a dozen engagements between Jews and Arabs were fought. At El Kabri on the north coastal plain 250 Arabs ambushed a Jewish convoy, killed over 40. In another engagement a mile and a half from Bethlehem, 3,000 Arabs attacked another convoy, killed a score of Jews in a 30-hour battle. Both attacks occurred in areas which would have gone to the Arabs under the partition plan. The ambushed Jewish convoys had been carrying badly-needed supplies to isolated Zionist communities...
...Damascus last week, two Chevrolet pickup trucks and two black sedans pulled up before a plaster and stone bungalow. Arab soldiers piled in bedrolls, crates, map rolls. Then a redhaired, blue-eyed man, who looked more German than Arab,* climbed into one of the sedans. The convoy filed out of Damascus, swung southward into Palestine. The Teutonic-looking man borrowed a phrase from General Douglas Mac Arthur. Said he: "I have returned." Ahead of Fawzi Bey Kawukji had come some 10,000 Arab volunteers. About one thousand more are entering each week. The Arab "rescue" of Palestine had begun...
Before the war, Johnny Littler was a China coaster, sailing offshore and threading the tricky passages of the Yangtze. Through the war, he was one of the Royal Canadian Navy's ace navigators. On Atlantic convoy duty, said he, "the Admiral thought nothing of going to sleep while I took the squadron through the Smalls" (reefs at the entrance to Bristol Channel). With Littler as navigator, Canada's first cruiser, the Uganda, steamed 80,000 miles and never missed a rendezvous. Littler gave radar much of the credit, called it the most valuable...
Then the fighting took an ominous turn. Soldiers of the Trans-Jordan Arab Legion, who have been expected to keep peace in Arab districts, fought with a convoy of Jewish vehicles which passed their camp. Fourteen more Jews died. Palestine was being in effect partitioned, in a way not planned by U.N., as armed forces on both sides dug in at fortified positions...
...Beauty. Occasionally Professor Morison interrupts his hurried pitching of facts to write lovingly of his subject: "A convoy is a beautiful thing. . . . The inner core of stolid merchantmen in column is never equally spaced, for each ship has individuality. . . . Around the column is thrown the screen like a loose-jointed necklace, the beads lunging to port or starboard and then snapping back . . . each destroyer nervous and questing, all eyes topside looking, ears below waterline listening, and radar antennae like cats' whiskers feeling for the enemy...