Word: crafting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...retired General and President Dwight Eisenhower, who had commanded the invasion. Ike suddenly asked Ambrose if he had known Andrew Higgins. Ambrose had not. "That's too bad," Eisenhower said. "He is the man who won the war for us. If Higgins had not designed and built those landing craft, we never would have landed over an open beach. The whole strategy of the war would have been different...
Commissioned as an ensign in May 1943, Rubinwas assigned to a Landing Craft Tank (LCT), whichcarried six Sherman medium tanks in a convoy boundfor Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands...
Eisenhower stayed behind, alone, as his commanders rushed out to transmit the order that commenced Operation Overlord, the invasion of Western Europe. His own duty was done for the day. He went down to a pier in Portsmouth to watch British soldiers board their landing craft. The biggest fleet in history -- 59 convoys strung over 100 miles, led by six battleships, 22 cruisers and 93 destroyers -- set sail toward the beaches of Normandy between 60 and 100 miles away...
...hour on the beaches, code-named Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah, came at 6:30 a.m. Thousands upon thousands of infantrymen packed into 1,500 boxy, flat-bottomed landing craft called Higgins boats churned toward shore. The weather had cleared, as predicted, but the wind still kicked up heavy waves that made most of the troops violently seasick. As the coastline appeared in the gray, misty light, the soldiers, each laden with almost 70 lbs. of wet battle gear, jumped neck-deep into the waves and scrambled ashore...
...eager American warriors were getting ahead of themselves. The Allies had neither the troops nor the landing craft needed to carry out Operation Sledgehammer or Roundup or the other code-named plans to invade France in 1942 or 1943. Yet to boost morale and reassure their voters, both Churchill and Roosevelt were determined to mount an offensive somewhere against the Germans before 1942 ended. They decided to invade North Africa to drive out the Italians and the German Afrika Korps, though Marshall and Eisenhower opposed the move as a diversion of resources...