Word: plain
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...line of Army scout cars rolled out of Fort Bliss, down a rutty road, and out on the Texas plain. Beyond the stubby noses of the cars stretched wave on wave of "bondocks" (sand hummocks, topped by sage and greasewood) and deep arroyos. Behind the scout cars, a mile across the twisted land, stood file after file of horsemen, half-hidden in the brush. The U. S. Cavalry was about to have some...
...officer's voice crackled in the scout-car radios. The four-wheel drives bit into the sand, and the cars lunged side by side over the plain. Where the bondocks were low, the light-armored cars, carrying three-man crews and two machine guns, could do 10 m.p.h. Where the hummocks were four and five feet high, 4 m.p.h. was the top. The cars were slow, but the bondocks did not stop them...
Where the desert abruptly broke and dropped down a pitted, 40-foot slope to a lower plain, the scout cars had to stop. But the horses did not. Over the brow of the slope, down the sandy ridge they leaped and slid. All along the ridge poured a river of men & horses, breaking at the edge, spilling downward and riding on. Half a mile beyond, they clustered again. Riflemen dismounted, jerked guns from holsters. Machine-gunners ripped at their packs, vanished into the brush with the guns. Within five minutes the squadron was deployed for battle, the horses had disappeared...
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...
Last week Nazi workmen removed the remains of L'Aiglon from the dingy cellar of Vienna's Capuchin Church, placed the plain lead casket aboard a Paris-bound express. Adolf Hitler and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop left Berlin for a secret destination. Pierre Laval, Vice Premier of France, left Paris for Vichy. He arrived there late one afternoon...