Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Last week General Richardson, his officers, his men, his horses toiled like mules, trying to wangle more than their allotted two divisions in the new Army. The Eighth Cavalry's Troop A night-marched into the desert, taught raw recruits to find their way by moon and stars across the trailless land. Commanding officers slaved at newfangled exercises, learning to use radio and motorcycle communication, use also the squadron of reconnaissance tanks which will be part of each new cavalry division. On the chill, white expanse of the drill ground or in the dank corrals, recruits learned the manual...
...remarkable rush, from Matruh the day and night before, 60 miles in one haul, and now they settled down on the cold sands for a valuable nap. Mechanized forces had deployed earlier in a sharp curve to the south and west, using the moonlight to dodge scrub and big desert boulders...
...Frenchmen, 40,000 men at most. They manned little tanks, big cruiser tanks, and cruel little balloon-tired armored cars capable of 40 m.p.h. and carrying six machine guns each for killing. Winston Churchill called them The British and Imperial Army of the Nile, but scattered on the dark desert, they looked insignificant. The well-armed Italians slept in their camps...
...coldness of daylight spread. At the assigned hour, all units moved. Motors roared. The force facing Maktila and Sidi Barrani made a great noise of gunfire and show. More quietly, holding fire, the second force to the south of Sidi Barrani swung in to attack Italian camps on the desert flank. A third force farther west headed hard for the coast near Buqbuq...
Rout. The fighting was taking place on the coastal plain, which the Italians call the Marmarica. Some 30 miles inland from Buqbuq an escarpment juts suddenly above the desert, 300-600 feet high. This escarpment runs diagonally towards the coast and meets it at Salum, hard by the Libyan border. Were it a man-made barrier like China's Great Wall, the escarpment could be no more effective as a wall against land warfare. At Salum just two precipitous gullies run from the plain to the top of the plateau and Libya. Into those bottlenecks the British chased...