Word: targeted
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...caught the defenders completely by surprise. Bomb bursts blanketed the sprawling plant where an estimated 400 Messerschmitts were hatched each month. Scores of hits were seen among some 400 finished fighters parked in neat rows on fields adjacent to the plant. The crews of the last bombers over the target reported flames gushing 500 feet into the air and smoke thousands of feet above the ruined buildings. During the entire twelve-hour flight the Liberators encountered no more than 15 enemy fighters, one of which was shot down. Over the target anti-aircraft fire was slight. Delighted U.S. air officials...
...clock our planes dived one by one on some target behind Troina. Because-there was no flak, we figured the enemy might be withdrawing. The sounds of battle grew less, and finally, when a heavy formation of B-25s struck at the town at 7 o'clock, we stood boldly up on our ridge and watched. All firing seemed to have ceased, as if both sides were watching the blasting of Troina, which, though only a mile away, vanished again behind the curtain of black smoke...
Quick Murder. Most spectacular development is time fire. By 1941, with 105s replacing 75s, field artillery had abandoned shrapnel for a more effective, more easily controlled shell which could be regulated to explode directly above its target. Bursting at a height of 15 yards, a 105 time-fire shell sprays an area 40 yards wide and five yards deep with razor-sharp, saw-toothed shell fragments. No gun is completely accurate, but with massed time fire blanketing huge areas pinpoint accuracy is no longer a problem...
Massed artillery fire was old in World War I (Napoleon used it first), but standards set at Sill are incredible to oldtime two-percenters.* Twenty-five seconds after the target is pointed out, shells from a dozen 105s are on their way-an hour would be comparable 25 years ago. In routine exercises more than 100 guns obliterate targets 800 yards square less than five minutes after they are assigned-incredible by the standards at Soissons or Saint-Mihiel. Some of this speed-up comes from having changed the firing unit from the battery of four guns to the battalion...
...less than five minutes, Fanny Rouge had located and directed the destruction, with eleven shells of a target that would have demanded a flight of medium bombers plus more than an hour of communications, preparations and operations...