Word: anzac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thomas decided that historic Thermopylae pass was the spot. He ordered the chosen few: "Every man must now do his job with strong determination. Select positions with care, and so prevent the enemy from coming down on you from above or infiltrating along mountain tracks. . . . I call on every Anzac to grit his teeth, and be worthy of his father...
...settling smoothly into British rule, with Lieut. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson as the new military governor. Shops were reopening. Looting and sabotage had been stamped out by a 6:30-p.m. curfew, the watchfulness of British patrols. Civilian-clad Italian officers on parole amicably elbowed British and Anzac soldiers on the streets of Bengasi. In the strange calm General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell was obviously collecting his forces for a new drive, but in complete secrecy. Best guesses:1) that they might press on to Tripoli or 2) cut over to Greece as the Balkans threatened to explode...
...their neatness the destructive bombardment of a fortnight ago, swept a train of British armored cars, tanks and infantry trucks one day last week. It wriggled onto the coast road, penetrating still farther into the African empire of Benito Mussolini. From the desert to the south another spearhead, fresh Anzac and Moslem Indian troops, poked north and west. Before mop-up units in Bardia had finished prying the last pockets of Italian Terribili from their wadi hideouts, the two points were encircling Tobruch...
Then, at dawn on Jan. 3, backed by the R. A. F. and a barrage of heavy artillery, the Australians struck. Big, husky, uncontrollable men. they, like their Anzac fathers before them, had for months made their officers' lives hell. They had taken the war as a vast, rowdy picnic. On the way to their battle stations they had made themselves more feared than the enemy wherever they stopped, made a shambles of Army discipline. When they were refused permission to land in Ceylon they swam ashore in their shorts, frolicked about half-naked in the streets...
...some 9,000 casualties, but the man mostly blamed was Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, then as now First Lord of the Admiralty. Turkish and Allied troops, now fraternizing in the Near East, observed the occasion last week by exchanging salutations, especially Major General Bernard Cyril Freyberg, chief of the Anzac Command,* and Marshal Fervi Cakmak, Chief of the Turkish General Staff...