Word: cambrai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bring some of the earth's blackness and dourness with them when they go home from the pit heads. Through this region, in the Pas-de-Calais, the wallowing armies of World War I swayed back & forth in the mud, and all around are historic names: Arras, Lens, Cambrai, Douai, Vimy Ridge. No flowers grow in Sains, but in season they can be picked from the fields and hedgerows outside, and there are usually some around the wayside crucifix at the top of the hill...
...fated 1940 British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium; after an operation; in London. A wearer of the Old School. Tie but a tough professional soldier, he won the Victoria Cross in World War I for directing from a stretcher an attack across the Canal du Nord near Cambrai. In World War II he led the British in one of their finest hours (the heroic retreat from Dunkirk), held Malta through the racking bombing of 1942. A soldier on the Dunkirk beach recalled the brash bravery of the B.E.F. Commander: "Capless, his head cocked, he watched the dive bombers. Then...
...slight fog, at 6:20 on the morning of Nov. 20, 1917, the tank entered modern warfare. At that moment 378 steel monsters rolled toward the German lines on the Cambrai front. The armored vehicles, traveling at three miles an hour and closely followed by British infantry, ripped through the Germans' intricate barbed-wire defenses, slithered across their wide trenches. The surprised Germans bolted before the tanks' machine-gun fire. In ten hours 10,000 German soldiers surrendered. The Allied command lacked the wit or experience to make Cambrai a decisive victory, but the tank had made...
...make good in the mining game; one of the best geologists in the West, and when the War broke out he was earning big money. He enlisted as a private in one of the first engineering regiments going over. Was made a sergeant, got in the mix-up at Cambrai. He says for an hour they had rail connections to Berlin, having connected their track to the German track in their advance. Assigned as Master Engineer, instructor in our line of work and now is first lieutenant. They had to drag him into an officer's uniform. The boys...
When the Belgian surrender fatally exposed their left flank, the British, who were falling back from Arras-Cambrai to Lille, crossed the Lys River to Ypres and formed the east wall of an escape corridor along the Yser Canal to the sea. The flower of their Army, the proud Guards regiments-Coldstream, Grenadier, Welsh, Irish, Scots-had to let their line fold back from the southeast while their artillery and remaining armored units covered the rear...