Word: bengasi
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Dates: during 1941-1941
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...with Lieut. General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson as the new military governor. Shops were reopening. Looting and sabotage had been stamped out by a 6:30-p.m. curfew, the watchfulness of British patrols. Civilian-clad Italian officers on parole amicably elbowed British and Anzac soldiers on the streets of Bengasi. In the strange calm General Sir Archibald Percival Wavell was obviously collecting his forces for a new drive, but in complete secrecy. Best guesses:1) that they might press on to Tripoli or 2) cut over to Greece as the Balkans threatened to explode...
Against this ground lull, air action grew to new vigor on both sides. The British pounded Italian bases in Rhodes seven nights in a row, firing hangars and crumpling grounded planes. The Germans attacked British motorized transport in Libya, hit at Malta over & over, dropped huge parachute bombs onto Bengasi. The R. A. F. came back with an attack on the Nazi Stuka bases in Sicily. For five hours they shuttled past overhead, wheeling and diving on gasoline stores and bomb dumps. German reconnaissance pilots returned from a flight over Suez with photographs showing two vessels sunk in the channel...
...were taken, including General Annibale ("Electric Whiskers") Bergonzoli, the little general of tremendous appetite and temper whom the British thought they had at Bardia, but who escaped by motorboat. Recalling the old saw about the British being a nation of shopkeepers, an enthusiastic BBC announcer telling of the Bengasi victory' exclaimed: "The British are rapidly becoming a nation of wop-keepers...
...Beyond Bengasi the only remaining British goal was Tripoli. At first it looked doubtful whether the British would go on to take it. The way was long: 600 miles. The first 300 to Sirte were across blank desert, broken only by occasional airfields marked with white stones very much like gravestones. After Sirte the land was more hospitable, goat and camel country where the determined Italians had planted 3,500,000 date palms and 2,000,000 olive trees, and arable fields which yield a hard wheat suitable for macaroni. But even this more fruitful country seemed hardly worth taking...
...British apparently saw advantages in pressing on. At week's end they announced that advance forces had already taken el-Aghéila, 170 miles beyond Bengasi and half way across the Sirte desert. There were hints that mechanical units would press on along the coastal highway, that troops might be transported...