Word: battalion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...picked our way up the hill until we came out by a road culvert where Lieut. Colonel Hugh Matthews had set up his battalion headquarters. Weary, grey and pinched-looking, he was whittling nervously on a stick...
...said Troina had been captured," a lieutenant said. "We must have taken Troina; our broadcasters never lie." By now it was dark and we prepared for our nightly attack on Troina. On the opposite side of the road at the other end of the culvert, Major Chuck Horner, whose battalion was to put in the attack, had set up his phones...
...Louisiana. Then artillerymen exploded after futile searches for hills high enough for observation posts or long waits for observation planes from the Air Corps. One West Pointer, Major (now Colonel) William Wallace Ford, a private flyer for seven years, knew the solution: light planes attached to each field-artillery .battalion. Wallie Ford made little headway until the next summer when light plane manufacturers lent a dozen puddle jumpers for the 1941 maneuvers. A new colonel named Dwight Eisenhower was impressed. So was Lieut. Colonel Mark Clark. Flying observation posts soon were standard in the field artillery, ten to each infantry...
...anti-aircraft crews who did not recognize puddle jumpers. One was potted by a U.S. gun guarding the field where it was to land. It was months before grasshoppers got a second chance. But by Tunisia's final battles, there were 90 grasshoppers in action. Battalion commanders learned that they were worth their weight (800 lb.) in gunpowder. And pilots learned that they could escape from enemy planes by turning and twisting to the ground. One flipped away from four Stukas on his first combat mission...
Carrying lightweight portable radios borrowed from the U.S. Forest Service, fire-control parties went ashore in the first waves, one party to each assault battalion. With them were Army Signal Corps officers...