Word: battalion
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...third day the battalion's plight seemed hopeless. Up the hill, under a white flag, came a shiny-booted SS officer. His ultimatum to the battalion's gaunt, lanky, black-bearded commander, Captain R. A. Kerley: surrender by 8 o'clock that night, or be destroyed-totally. Texan Kerley's reply: "Go to hell." Then he amplified: "I will surrender when every one of our bullets has been fired and every one of our bayonets is sticking in a German belly...
Salvos of Mercy. The hillside took an awful going-over that day & night. There were many more wounded. U.S. shells also began to fall plunk in the battalion's lines. But the big 155-mm. projectiles did not explode. They were salvos of mercy: smoke shells stripped of powder, cotton-packed with sulfas, plasma, morphine...
...Inquiry. Details were meager and evidence undisclosed. But it was known that the murders had occurred at Pavie, on the Caen-Bayeux highway, two days after Dday. Thirteen of the victims had been machine-gunned in a group. The Germans responsible were "members of the 12th SS Reconnaissance Battalion of the 12th SS Panzer Division." (The SS murderers, reported Canadian Pressman Ross Munro, had been Hitler Jugend-most of them less than 20 years...
Marines' Homecoming. By week's end the peninsula battle was finished. Orote airfield, the Sumay base of Pan American Airways and pre-Pearl Harbor Marine Barracks were in U.S. hands. Crack fighters of the ist Marine Provisional Brigade (veterans of Edson's ist Raider Battalion, Carlson's 2nd and Liversedge's 3rd) had still to clean out snipers in the jungle around the airfield...
...Nazis and the Officers' Corps? Most Germans did not know. The Nazis still withheld the names of all but four of the Wehrmacht officers who may have had a hand in the attempt on Hitler. But Dr. Goebbels did not hide the fact that Berlin's Guard Battalion had had to seize the Ministry of War in the Bendler-Strasse, where the Army High Command makes its headquarters, carry out impromptu executions in its courtyard...