Word: desertic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After so many evil tidings, the news looked a little better. Germany's Rommel had chased the broken, retreating British 325 miles in eleven days, had rammed his armored spearheads down the coastal desert from Matrûh, taking the flyspeck towns on the railroad to Alexandria like peas ripped from a pod. Now for four days Rommel had not advanced...
...line with reinforcements as fast as careening trucks could take them forward, the Auk hoped for time to prepare for the blow. Some of the reinforcements were seasoned brown soldiers from the British Ninth and Tenth Armies in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran. Others were pink-skinned newcomers to the desert-due for a bad beating from the sizzling sun, if from nothing else. At last it was officially disclosed that U.S. tank troops had been fighting with the British, under Major Henry Cabot Lodge of Boston...
Around fallen Tobruk the man-made sandstorms, kicked up by tanks scouring the desert, died down in little dunes beside the gridded tracks. Torn barbed wire marked the silent graves of Knightsbridge, El Adem, Acroma. Germany's Erwin Rommel was 200 miles to the east, rolling into Matr...
...ever been near it. In this book he tells how he did it. In London he ran into Harry Hopkins, cracked wise with Winston Churchill, battled bugs and censors in Russia, discovered that Russians are human, went through a cowboy-and-Indian melodrama of tank warfare in the Libyan desert, ended up in London having a post-Pearl Harbor Christmas dinner with Ambassador Anthony Drexel Biddle...
Later, at the dead center of the stifling Libyan desert, he learned that a single can of beer can be worth its weight in gold. Reynolds' hard, racy report of what it is like to be stuck in the middle of one of General Rommel's blitzes is the best piece of reporting in the book. Almost as good is his dithyramb on Russia...