Word: barrani
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...Sidi Barrani the assault took three days. At Bardia it took two and a half. This time, at Tobruch, the job was done in one. The pattern was familiar by now. First the thin semicircle of defense around Tobruch was surrounded. Day before the attack, by way of feint, heavy concentrations of vehicles and men were massed east of the town, near the sea. In the night they were stolen away to the point of real attack-a place just by the Bardia road where the Italians, in digging their tank traps, had come to solid rock and dug down...
...disappeared into a coastal cave. A British sergeant called a colonel from his swim, and while the colonel, clad only in his slippers, stood guard with revolver at the entrance, the sergeant wriggled into the cave, shooting. Out crawled the Italians, among them Francesco Argentina, erstwhile commander of Sidi Barrani, eleventh Italian general to be captured in the British attack on Libya. For three days the general went on a hunger strike, then ate, wailed: "For all I care about this desert, you can have it! I myself am a poet...
What Next? Although Bardia fell it had given the British their first real check in their four-week campaign. After the storming by surprise of the positions around Sidi Barrani, the British had romped ahead to Libya over the road which the Italian invaders had conveniently built. When Bardia proved too tough a problem for motorized troops with air and naval aid to solve, the British had to spend a fortnight strengthening their land forces and hauling up heavy artillery, while Graziani gained precious time for reorganization at Tobruch...
...last week. Marshal Rodolfo Graziani's "Terribili" legions in Libya had turned terribly on their British attackers and terribly smashed them to bits. They had taken 50,000-100,000-150,000 prisoners. They were marching triumphantly eastward again along their Via Vittoria (Victory Road) to Sidi Barrani in Egypt. Roman history had been made...
...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...