Word: rout
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...eastward. The High Command did not stress the fact that they were running westward, farther and farther into Libya. The prisoners were not British, they were Italian-31,546 of them (so far counted), including 1,626 officers. It was not a Roman victory, it was another shocking Roman rout, a fierce continuation of last fortnight's Battle of the Marmarica in which, after slicing through Capuzzo (in the line of forts guarding Libya's eastern border), savage little squadrons of fast British tanks and Bren gun-carriers whipped around the port of Bardia, outflanking it as they...
...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...
...rout was terrible. While British mechanized columns pruned and hacked, the R. A. F. poured bombs and machine-gun lead on motor transport, camps, supply depots, airdromes, and on the soldierly runners. The fleet moved along, throwing everything but the gun turrets at the coastal road. At Bardia some vessels edged in just a half mile from shore and pumped their biggest shells into the town. The fleeing Italians abandoned everything, leaving large supplies of tinned food, oil, water, Chianti, mules, lorries, truckloads of documents, new tanks, guns...
...Those who actually saw the game were even more dumfounded. With Sid Luckman, onetime Columbia star, calling the plays with the genius of a clairvoyant, the Bears were a perfect football machine. By the end of the third quarter, the game had become an undignified rout. At the end of the last quarter, it was a massacre...
...Yardlings also face the boys from Medford in what will probably prove a rout. Their team was pretty weak last Saturday, and Bobby King, the only man to pin his opponent, is out with a broken collar-bone...