Word: afrika
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Although pickers made good money (12½? a box; a crack picker can make $22 a day), there were still not enough of them when the harvest started. The Government sent in 1,000 German prisoners of war, from the late Marshal Rommel's Afrika Korps. The P.O.W.s lived in special camps, were paid 80? a day in scrip if they met the easy standard of 65 boxes...
...Afrika Korpsmen, cocky and arrogant, regarded any kindness as a sign of American softness; one group staged a sit-down strike until they were given coffee; two other squads took to shaking trees and thumbnailing apples. Going lightly on the Nazis, the Government cut their individual daily quotas down to 40 boxes. But generally, the P.O.W.s made little trouble, and their work meant saving the entire crop...
Hitler, who sometimes knew a good soldier when he saw one, gave Rommel a free hand with the "Plan Sud"-the Rommel scheme for securing an African-Middle Eastern German empire. On the Baltic shores Rommel simulated desert conditions, trained the Afrika Korps with superheated barracks and artificial sandstorms. By March 1941 he went to Libya, to pull the faltering Italians out of defeat...
Trail of Defeat. Then Rommel and his Afrika Korps began the downhill trail which many a good general has trod. He was soundly defeated at El Alamein by an even abler general-Sir Bernard L. Montgomery-and by a superiority of power. Even so, his 1,500-mile retreat across North Africa to Tunisia was masterly. Had his career ended then, he might have been one of military history's heroes...
...this German song. He forecasts its future in a long gliding panoramic shot of London's postwar dockside market streets, where a honkytonk version creates an obbligato for a children's merry-go-round. There are adroitly timed stock-shots (best: the men of the supremely confident Afrika Korps riding through the ecstatic farewells of civilians). There are bits of irresistible comedy (best: the florid, juicy Italian-tenor version of the song; the whooping refinement of its rendition by Frau Hermann Göring II, re-enacted at Berlin's Kroll Opera House). There is intelligent characterization...