Word: dakar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...risks at Dakar were bigger than Charles de Gaulle figured. It was a harbor inside a bay, terribly confined for naval action. It was a town guarded by four forts and three regiments of about 7,000 French and Senegalese-wide-eyed Negro troops, some of whom had come back from France with bogy tales of German soldiers with wings that no Senegalese could reach so as to cut their ears off. The place was strengthened by five newly arrived pro-Vichy warships. Of the six which had escaped from Toulon and through Gibraltar without so much as a cough...
When General de Gaulle and his force (identified by the defenders as the battleships Barham and Resolution, four cruisers, six destroyers, six transports, but probably including three French gunboats taken by the British after the fall of France) arrived at Dakar, they got the surprise of their lives. The commander dispatched two airplanes ashore with an invitation to surrender. The planes did not return. General de Gaulle and some aides-including Captain Bécourt Foch, grandson of the late Marshal-boarded a launch and made for the basin, waving a white flag and a tricolor. They were greeted...
...landing on Rufisque beach across the bay, but each time machine-gun fire drove them back. The commander of the supporting British squadron threatened attack unless the town gave in. Governor General Pierre Boisson, who lost a leg fighting the Germans in 1917, signaled in reply: "France has confided Dakar to me, and I shall defend it to the end." British guns spoke. Their conversation touched the Governor General's house, the town radio station (so that for several hours Vichy heard nothing), the French and native cities, Wakam airport, the railroad line to St. Louis, the city...
...British later explained that it be came clear that Dakar could not be taken without "a major military operation," which Britain did not wish to undertake against the former ally. But this rationalization was not enough for the rest of the world to swallow. No explanation would make Dakar anything but defeat. Furthermore, it was a serious defeat. Dakar, being the westernmost point on Africa's bulge, potentially commands the Atlantic. It is the terminus of airlines from Europe and interior Africa. It is only 1,700 miles from the tip of Brazil. In German hands it would play...
Italians retaliated by bombing British defenses in the Sudan, flew over Cairo for the nuisance value of air-raid alarms. Bombs splattered on Buna, south of Moyale in Kenya. From the Dodecanese Islands they bombed Haifa and Tel Aviv in Palestine. The debacle of Dakar did not help the British cause in the Near East. Nightly the Italian short-wave station at Bari urged the Moslem world and particularly Egyptians to "throw off the yoke" of British Imperialism...