Word: dakar
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...tradition that Britain's frigate captains of one war make her fighting admirals in the next. His latest post was in the Mediterranean as No. 2 to Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, whose recent exploits have been strong tonic to Prime Minister Churchill and the entire nation. The Dakar fiasco, after which Mr. Churchill mentioned "accidents and some errors . . . disciplinary action," afforded excuse for a high command shakeup and it was wholly probable that Sir Charles Forbes took the rap for his underlings...
General de Gaulle had gone to the Cameroons, which had declared for him along with most of French Equatorial Africa, straight from his failure at Dakar. Despite that fiasco, he still had hope. Said he: "I cite Hitler's words from Mein Kampf that a people may be beaten, but when a people and their leaders accept defeat, then they are forever lost. On the other hand, if a handful of men do not accept defeat, everything is to be hoped for. The Cameroons will have a place in the history of this war and the history...
General de Gaulle did not specify the "everything" for which he hoped as he arrived at the Cameroons. It appeared that he would have a worse time at Dakar if he tried again to take it. A German mission was almost certainly in control of the harbor, and last week General Maxime Weygand, who has a genius for dissolving opposition to the Nazis, was reported on his way there...
...French vessels outside the Mediterranean. The order was sent to let the Frenchmen out, but if they turned south, an M Squadron (light craft) was to keep them above Casablanca. Instead, during dark and perhaps stormy hours, the M Squadron lost the ally-enemy, and the Frenchmen reached Dakar...
...well, and one of the qualities which make his words reverberate with heroism is his ability to tell bad news and make it seem somehow good-to make gloomy sentences add up to buoyant paragraphs. Last week he spoke of casualties, property destruction, difficulties-of production, the flub at Dakar. His doom-ridden peroration was a bright passage in the literature of hope...