Word: beachhead
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...heading for the beach, troops are helplessly exposed to fire from shore. By sudden descents initial landings may be made, but then they must be quickly widened and deepened to five miles or more to keep the field artillery of the defenders from pounding the landing parties on the beachhead. Next, to land heavy equipment including larger guns and tanks as well as men in numbers for a major invasion it is necessary to bring large vessels into shore. To protect these a penetration of 15 to 20 miles is necessary so that heavy artillery cannot hammer the landing facilities...
There was little left of what had been a tidy fishing village. All around the fjord's beachhead, where quays, warehouses, railroad station, freight sidings used to be, now lay a charred, twisted, upheaved destruction left by repeated showers of high explosive and incendiary bombs. As the German advance force ran up their flag and piled up stacks of abandoned Allied equipment, Nazi warplanes still winged high over, out to sea, looking for the fugitive enemy to punish him some more. He had escaped in his boats by night, after pretending by day to deploy for rallies and counterattacks...
...ndalsnes was only the curtain raiser for the abandonment by all Allied forces of three-fifths of the land and six-sevenths of the people they had only a fortnight before gone to save. What Mr. Chamberlain did not say was that from the Allies' other main beachhead, Namsos, north of Trondheim, the balance of the Northwestern Expeditionary Force fled Norway that same day and night. The Allies had intended to pinch Trondheim from north and south. With the south prong of the pincers demolished, to press with the north prong would have been only a waste...
...London, this Gallipoli Day was another bad one for Winston Churchill and his war colleagues in the Chamberlain Government. For out of Scandinavia crackled a story which, on a smaller but similarly bloody scale, charged another blunder like that of the Gallipoli beachheads. It was a story written at white heat by white-haired War Correspondent Leland Stowe of the Chicago Daily News, after he visited the Northwestern Expeditionary Force near its beachhead at Namsos, Norway (see p. 22). Mr. Stowe wrote, in indignation, of two advance battalions of raw British troops, without artillery, antiaircraft, supporting planes or even white...