Word: spanning
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...stretch of road winding through steep gorges. Moving at 3 m.p.h., the column halted several times while engineers filled shell craters in the road. At one point there was a four-hour stop while the engineers built abutments on both sides of a chasm so that a bridge span would reach across. The airplanes silenced much of the enemy fire, except on one agonizing day when the air cover was grounded by a driving snowstorm...
...they been members of any other army the marines and soldiers would have made the detour and perhaps been annihilated in the process. As it was, even before the crucial crossing was reached, eight spans of a 16-ton bridge had been parachuted down out of the sky to the U.S. troops seemingly isolated in the midst of the enemy. Eight C-119s of Major General William H. Tunner's Combat Cargo Command, each hauling a single span, had carried out the world's first airdrop of a bridge. The retreating column was free to move ahead, vehicles...
...were three bad ones in '44-'45. Two in '43 and the others go back to '18. People think they come from carelessness. But they don't. At least none that I remember did." James Thurber estimated "I have four-fifteenths of my life span left . . . Just like you, I expect to be blown up, but hope that I won't be." Historian Arnold Toynbee felt that "One of the traps into which modern scholars seem to me to fall is that they spend their working lives preparing for an imaginary last-judgment examination...
...Another link in the Massachusetts Highway System" will be forged by the middle of December when the Eliot Bridge is completed. This new span over the Charles is located just below the Cambridge Hospital, across from the House football fields...
Although the bridge will do much to case the flow of Saturday football traffic, the main purpose of the span is to link the north and south sides of the river; to connect Boston with its western suburbs. By next year it is hoped that traffic moving down the south side of the Charles will be able to use the Charles River Embankment Parkway now under construction...