Word: basra
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...British appointed a transport expert, Brigadier General Sir Godfrey Rhodes, as director of transportation through Iran. Within a few days complete plans had been drawn up. It was decided to improve two Persian Gulf ports, Iran's Bandar Shahpur and Iraq's Basra (see map). Road and rail links with Teheran and Tabriz would be improved or completed as soon as possible. Auxiliary lines, from India via Baluchistan or Afghanistan, and from the Mediterranean via Syria or Palestine, may also be developed. But all this would take a long time...
Finally the enemies brushed in Iraq. First-line German planes, Heinkel bombers and Messerschmitt fighters hurried to attack the British at their Habbannia airport. German cadres of officers headed Iraqi troops for new infantry attacks near Basra. The British counter-bombed the Luftwaffe bases. The Fleet Air Arm planes flew 160 miles up the Tigris to bomb oil tanks at Amarah. R.A.F. fliers caught convoys of French motor trucks carrying Arab volunteers from Syria to Iraq...
...British were beating the Iraqi. With reinforcements newly arrived at Basra they were breaking up troop concentrations, destroying the Iraq Air Force. But the British had not yet pacified the country-and Iraq's Defense Minister Naci Cevket was in Ankara, waiting to have a word with Franz von Papen...
...fields where they had been established under the treaty for years: Habbania, on the west bank of the Euphrates, 65 miles from Bagdad, a huge airdrome with cantonments for about 5,000 men, but equipped only with small guns and some 50 antique biplanes; and Shaibah, near Basra, basing a bomber squadron and an armored-car section...
...heights, where they dug trenches, placed artillery and opened fire point-blank on the Habbania field. The British, though badly outnumbered, replied. The Iraqi claimed destroying 26 planes on the ground, but other planes took off and bombed the Iraqi guns. The same day the British in Basra warned the Iraqi troops there to withdraw. They agreed to, but did not. The British seized the Basra airport, dock area and power station. This week the British began a systematic bombing of Iraqi airports, claimed to have destroyed most of the Iraq Air Force...