Word: beachhead
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They threw heavy, sudden attacks around the rim of the beachhead, probing for a soft spot, using tanks and assault guns as mobile artillery. Where they found the going reasonably good they poured on the pressure ruthlessly. From the beachhead, N.Y. Herald Tribune Correspondent Homer Bigart radioed...
...week's end the German attack slackened a little. Mud and weariness had taken their toll. Troops who had battered at each other almost without pause for two weeks got a breathing spell. The greatest assault yet had been beaten off. But no man in the beachhead doubted for a moment that there would be more...
Inch by Inch. Throughout the week the spectacular fighting around the beachhead almost obscured the main Italian battlefront, 53 miles to the east and south, where Fifth Army troops were grinding away at German strong points in and around Cassino. There too, howling storms of rain, sleet and snow gave the Germans an advantage. U.S. troops were battering their way into Cassino, house by house, but the Nazis still controlled at least two-thirds of the town, and were fighting back from the cellars even as tanks pounded the houses down around their ears...
...long as that battle was stalemated, no decisive result could be reached at Anzio (except for the dire possibility of a German victory). From the first, the beachhead landing had been planned not as an independent thrust at Rome (the available force-six divisions-was not adequate for such a task) but as a bold flanking attack calculated to make the Germans pull back hastily from their positions along the so-called Gustav Line...
This week the weary men at Anzio got fresh encouragement. Lieut. General Mark Wayne Clark, U.S. Commander of the Fifth, sent his troops a message of commendation, told them that heavy reinforcements were reaching the beachhead, predicted that the two forces would meet for "a victorious march into Rome." Best of all, the weather broke. Allied air power went back into the battle...