Word: platoon
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...conspicuous gallantry during his first encounter with the enemy. Last May, near Cisterna de Littoria, he had knocked out two Nazi machine-gun nests singlehanded by killing four Germans (with five shots) and capturing seven more. Then he had repeatedly set himself up as a decoy target while his platoon surrounded an enemy strong point and captured 22 prisoners without suffering a casualty...
Nevertheless they held their strongholds in the central district. They even attacked German positions, destroyed half of a battalion, captured a platoon. From somewhere, it seemed, they had got a mysterious transfusion of new strength...
...General looked down on a platoon of French air cadets and three squadrons of U.S. airmen, rigid at attention while the 94° heat wilted their khaki and soaked their hats. He stood there for a long moment, looking about him, blinking under the sun of a land he had never seen before. Then slowly Charles de Gaulle moved down the ramp, looking even taller than his 6 ft. 4 in., even thinner than his pictures. As his foot touched the ground, the 17-gun salute to a general roared into the hazy heat (four guns less than the salute...
...platoon sergeant, he put his men first, himself last. But in battle he was not self-effacing. One night in October 1942, he bore the heavy brunt of a Jap attempt to retake Henderson Field. When the 19 men in his section had been shot down, Mitch Paige hefted a machine gun, and, scribbling the night with fire, played lethal tag with the enemy. Reinforced, he led the fresh men in a counterattack. At battle's end, no Japanese lay dead before Mitch Paige's sector. Said he: "I did what I could...
...Germans kept them in units no larger than a platoon, watched them carefully, used them to man prepared positions, where they did a generally tough job of fighting. A relative few were Nazi-indoctrinated, like the fanatically pro-German, anti-Allied quisling troops mustered in every occupied country...