Word: libyan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Benito Mussolini was on the run last week, but he had not quite reached the end of his diplomatic tether, although disasters less terrible than the Libyan rout have toppled regimes in every century. With bases in the Balearic Islands, in Spain and in Spanish Morocco he might still retrieve his position in the Mediterranean; with Ceuta in Morocco he might even make Gibraltar untenable and cut one of Britain's supply lines...
...battle cruisers, two carriers, eight to ten light and heavy cruisers, plenty of destroyers, at least two flotillas of submarines, the Navy calmly undertook a most complicated double problem. One part of the problem was shelling: Each time the British and Australians ashore attacked an Italian fort on the Libyan littoral, the fleet submitted the place to a terrible shellacking from the sea, lazily drifting along the coast and lobbing hundreds of tons of steel into the enemy's back. For this purpose the monitor Terror, mounting 15-inch guns, and certain shallow-draught gunboats were brought...
...olive trees, and arable fields which yield a hard wheat suitable for macaroni. But even this more fruitful country seemed hardly worth taking. The British had made it certain that Egypt would not be attacked again. They had insured Suez from the West. They had destroyed the Italian Libyan Army and taken new ports for the Fleet...
Four days after Tobruch, Dérna fell. The British and Australians had expected duck soup at Dérna, but they found the toughest meat of the Libyan campaign...
...main British worry was whether they could wipe Bengasi out before German serial assistance should become really effective. The presence of German planes in Sicily and Libya had effected the whole Mediterranean situation. Late in the week German planes bombed the entire British-held section of the North-Libyan cost, claiming a 10,000-ton ship at Bardia, three other sunk and three damaged elsewhere. This week the British admitted that one ship had been bombed, but said that a "large number" of Italian prisoners aboard her had been killed. Despite this new element, the British were confident that...