Word: oran
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From Britain came Will Lang with the "center force" of the American troops which landed at Oran-and Line Barnett, who sailed with the British forces and landed near Bone on the Tunisian border...
...flyers had been recorded. In a brush with the French they lost two Spitfires (one pilot was saved), downed three Dewoitines. Lieut. Colonel F. M. Dean destroyed five French tanks near the interior Algerian airdrome of Sidi-bel-Abbès. Lieut. Thomas Taylor attacked a gun post near Oran, got two bullets in his plane, then got a tank...
...much fuller account of how last fortnight the A.E.F., building on that groundwork, had swept to a quick, clean victory. Within four days of the first landing, all official French resistance had ceased on orders of Admiral Jean Francois Darlan, chief of Vichy's armed forces. Algiers, Oran, Rabat, Casablanca and the rest were in American hands. So was Admiral Darlan...
...than Hollywood. The most diverse flying team of World War II went into North Africa with Jimmy Doolittle. His own 12th Air Force, spawned and trained by Major General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz's 8th in Britain, toted a battalion of U.S. parachutists 1,500 miles from Britain to Oran (previous paratroops record: the Luftwaffe's 325-mile hop from Namsos to Narvik). U.S. fighter pilots in British Spitfires took off from British carriers, strafed Vichy columns and airdromes, met a few French Dewoitine fighters in Algeria. British Fleet Air Arm pilots in Albacore torpedo-bombers also fought...
...when the French Navy was limited to approximately one-third the size of the British. With the fall of France in 1940, he made a complete about-face, and became one of the outstanding collaborationists in the Vichy regime. The attack by the British on the French fleet at Oran solidified his dislike of England, and he became a distinct Anglophobe. His capture in Algiers by the American forces put him in an uncomfortable position, but he squirmed out of it with another rat-like twist by promising to cooperate with the Allies...