Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...whole Axis foothold in Africa is likely to collapse. Allied troops can attack Triopoli by the easy route from Tunis. In that event Rommel, running before the British, cannot use the 600 miles of virtually waterless desert between Bengasi and Tripoli as a refuge in which to recover his strength-as he did last year...
...Philippeville, 210 miles east of Algiers, and by the end of the second day were within 60 miles of the border of Tunisia. The U.S. ground forces, once they were ready to move eastward, had direct rail and road routes to southeastern Tunisia and its "Little Maginot Line" of desert forts and pillboxes pointed the other way-toward Libya...
...coastal end, but farther south, near the Hill of Evil Men, Montgomery's 51st Highlanders streaked across the moonlit, wreck-strewn desert. What was left of Rommel's artillery tried to hold them back. The British infantry swept on. Dazed and shell-shocked Germans surrendered, turned and ran, or died in the sand beside their 88-mm. guns. Rommel's dam had burst...
...came in to drop the first stick, trucks careened madly off the road. It looked absolutely crazy. I saw one overturn and troops run like cockroaches-colliding, jumping headfirst into patches of scrub or any hole they could find." Said General Auby Strickland, chief of U.S. bombers in the desert, who led one formation of planes in pursuit of the German columns: "[Our bombers] turned and sailed down the road, spilling their bombs on vehicles and men. I never saw such a scene of destruction...
Past Daba, past Fuka, the Afrika Korps fled. At Daba they left their dead strewn across an airfield. German and Italian transports and gliders, not yet unloaded, lay on the ground, smashed by the machine guns of Allied planes. At Fuka dead Germans began to turn black in the desert sun. Beside the road that was pocked with bomb craters lay the ruined trucks and cars in which the Germans tried to escape. From the air, from the flanking desert, the British chased and harried as the whole terrible cavalcade of attackers and attacked rolled still farther westward...