Word: desertic
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Encirclement. They knew just about what to expect, for geography canalizes desert warfare. Some of the enemy's drives were already either under way or poised to strike. Month ago Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, Italy's expert in African warfare, led the spearhead of a drive from Libya into Egypt. After his first crushing spurt, he had pegged in at Sidi Barrani (see map), and his forces had been consolidating themselves there ever since. The British were 80 miles east at Mersa Matruh, the outpost to which they had decided to retire, with tip & run tactics, whenever the drive...
Well he knew that the British had prepared a reception for his troops as hot as the man-killing sun which danced off his pith helmet. Not without a fight would the British relinquish their airport, their desert training post and railhead of their vital line curling back 165 miles along the coast of Africa's eastern horn to Alexandria. Middle East Commander Lieut. General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell was handicapped by having far fewer troops than Graziani. Even so, they were not spear-hurling Ethiopians nor rock-rolling Albanians but a hotchpotch of crack British units, Punjabis...
...Libyan naval base of Tobruch, where Graziani's main supplies were concentrated, the British claimed their bombers smashed barracks, wharves and massed trucks. British planes cracked at Sálum, others attacked Sidi Barráni. On the alert for planes, forced to keep up a desert "guerrilla-artillery" battle, Sidi Barráni also awoke last week to find the British Fleet off shore. As the sun nosed over the desert mesas, warships nosed out of a shroud of morning haze. A moment later their guns belched salvos pointblank into the heart of the city. Observers...
...desert, British and Italian tanks and armored cars scuttled in and out of the oases, "islands of the blessed," in the modern version of Lawrence of Arabia's strike-and-run stratagem with camel raiders. The British kept a lookout for an overland thrust southeast across the ancient caravan trails to Cairo or Khartoum. Having once accomplished the impossible, in forced marches and road building in Ethiopia, it was not inconceivable that Italy might pit her legions against both nature and the British, in a gamble to sever the British Empire's jugular...
Reports that British planes were bombing and ranging wide over such scattered points as Hargeisa and Berbera in Italian-held British Somaliland, Agordat and Gurá south of Asmara in Eritrea, and, more particularly, over the oasis of Siwa deep in the desert near the Libyan frontier, and at Metemmeh in Ethiopia near the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan border, indicated the British were keeping their air eyes open for signs of any new thrust toward the heart of the Nile Valley...