Word: dunkirks
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Last week the British seemed to know too much. They knew that hundreds of self-propelled barges, speedboats and other light craft had been concentrated in Stavanger, Bergen, Antwerp, Ostend, Flushing, Dunkirk, Dieppe, Calais, Boulogne, Brest and all the way down to the Bay of Biscay. That big convoys of merchant supply and transport ships had been port-hopping into the Channel under cover of dark and big guns. That a nest of these big guns festered at Cap Gris Nez, where the Channel is narrowest. That behind the vessels and guns thousands of troops were being moved...
...Dover, now a way station on Hell's Corridor from Dunkirk to London, tall (6 ft. 5 in.), eccentric, Harvard-bred Guy Murchie of the Chicago Tribune, a onetime seaman, chauffeur, section hand, longshoreman, gravedigger, author (Men on the Horizon), was standing by a window in his top-floor hotel room while a squadron of German bombers droned overhead. He was talking with two naval officers and his assistant, Australian Stanley Johnstone, when there was an explosion. The whole side of the hotel collapsed. Down through four floors dropped Newsman Murchie in a shower of timbers, bricks, soot, debris...
...neglect other objectives. Like farmers at their fall planting of death, pilots plowed the fields of Nazi airmen at Schiphol and Ypenburg in the Netherlands, around Calais, at Dunkirk, Abbeville, Antwerp; sowed seeds in the fertile congestion of Berlin; weeded out Channel gun emplacements near Boulogne; fertilized with grimness barges on the coast, oil tanks and rail sidings throughout the German areas, and special objectives like the Bosch spark-plug factory at Stuttgart, the docks at Hamburg, Marelli magneto plant near Turin, an aluminum factory at Bitterfeld, huge power plants at Genoa...
...little Berbera, capital of British Somaliland, last week went down in the annals of World War II on the same list as Andalsnes, Namsos, Narvik and Dunkirk. Another "strategic withdrawal" was performed there by the British after only two weeks of fighting against Italy's mechanized invasion. To Italy went 344,700 new subjects in 68,000 square miles of new territory which, while far from rich or productive, rounded out her total hold on Africa's northeast shoulder, rid her of a rear threat to further operations against the British in Egypt, Suez, Palestine, the Sudan...
Conspicuous by their absence from air-battle dispatches were Britain's Boulton Paul Defiant fighters, whose revolving fire turrets fooled not a few Germans and carried off top honors in the fighting over Dunkirk-one place where R. A. F. gained local command of the air. Report was that the Defiants were found wanting after all, their manufacture discontinued. Germany was reported to have a fast new Heinkel 113 single-motored one-seater ready for the finals, specially equipped for night work and with extra-wide under carriage designed for rough landings. Guba and Mercenaries. Busy little Lord Beaverbrook...