Word: beach
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just a statistic; now we see it. We hear the blast of the big guns and the ripping-silk sound of the heavy shells sailing to their targets. We see the warships with halos of yellow smoke and the bursts of fire and black smoke back of the beach...
Rockets and Planes. Through glasses we can see every detail of Red Beach. A line of LCLs has now moved up nearer, to deliver rocket fire. As the minutes tick by, the warship barrage is rising to a steady drumming. The concussions are uncomfortable. A very young, very redheaded ensign staring at the beach mutters: "If I was a Jap in there and I wasn't scared, I'd get scared...
...ahead and to the left of the first wave of amphibious tanks. Those LCLs are firing like coked-up gangsters in a grade-B movie. Rockets go thump, thump, thumping out of them and bursting along the shore. The big rockets, taking off with a coughing roar, scorch the beach and plow up vegetation behind them. Many 20-mm. autoguns are hammering like runaway riveters and weaving red lines of tracer shells alongshore like thin angry fingers prying and poking into every patch that might shelter an enemy...
...helpless. A plane, too, goes down. These are the finest shots of this stage of battle which have yet been released. Those which follow, ashore, are hardly less fine, made very close to the ground as marines, heroic in size and movement on the screen, rush across the open beach against everything the Japanese can throw at them. A hit man stops short, falls wounded before the lens. The cutting-away from such bits is swift, perhaps overtactful toward civilian audiences; but the difficulty and danger of such an assault have never been shown more frankly...
...beach of Eniwetok, one of the Marshall Islands, where U.S. troops fought and died a few months ago, now stands a Navy officers' mess, in front of it a stern notice: "There will be no drinking by anyone on the pier and all skylarking and needless pushing and pulling must be stopped...