Word: bardia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Italy's heel. Another detachment swept northeast as far as Durazzo, Albania's second-best landing spot. Sir Andrew was on his flagship, had brought his fleet up on a quick run from the African coast, pausing to contact supply ships, after pounding the daylights out of Bardia and points west. While he was busy at Valona his light forces made it clear to all the world that the Adriatic was no longer Benito Mussolini's "pond." At no point did the British encounter any Italian resistance...
...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 had outflanked Sidi Barrani and Salum...
...Bardia lies in a deep, winding wadi (river gorge) whose walls are honeycombed with stone caves. But for those caves, many more of the 20,000-30,000 Italian soldiers trapped there last week would have died. Enough died as it was under a ceaseless inferno of bombs from the R. A. F. and shells from the Royal Navy. For five days many units of the latter lay to offshore, grimly pouring broadside after broadside into the flaming town. In an extraordinarily daring exploit, one British "light vessel" (possibly a destroyer) penetrated Bardia's inner harbor...
...Bardia were two Italian divisions, remnants of a third, and escapists from the Battle of the Marmarica.* They lay in their wadi, behind a semicircle of concrete pillboxes, land mines and artillery emplacements, 15 miles in perimeter. After the British mechanized units, commanded by Major General Michael O'Moore Creagh had pinned them in, the encircled men tried to run for it, thousands at a time. As they fled on the coast road around the rim of Cyrenaica toward Marshal Graziani's main fortified base at Tobruch, 70 miles west, the R. A. F. and the mechanized British...
This week Italian communiques admitted that the British had crossed the border, and that there was fierce fighting in the Salum-Bardia-Fort Capuzzo triangle. Italians tried to break up British naval bombardment of the area by sending in the submarine Naiade. Destroyers screening bigger vessels closed in on the Naiade and sank her at once. The R. A. F. carried on tirelessly, and the bag of Italian planes grew into the dozens...