Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rommel was well known to be a demoniac master of desert war, but neither the British nor the U.S. public was prepared for Tobruk's fall. For it followed weeks of such cheery headlines as these: Planes pound Axis units in Libya. . . . British in Libya mopping up. . . . Heroic stand at Bir Hachéim foils Rommel. . . . Axis road to Egypt barred. . . . Even two days after Tobruk fell, the New York World-Telegram still bleated: R.A.F. Blasts Nazis in Libya...
...that Rommel had plenty of planes. The British were also confident that their ground forces matched the enemy. One thing Rommel did, apparently, was to let the British exhaust themselves winning their "victories," then throw in his reserves to take the real victory. Moreover, he changed the pattern of desert warfare by stepping up the role of artillery. Before Tobruk's fall, when the British, confident of equal armor and equal or greater air strength, attacked Rommel's line south of the port, the German surprised them with a massive assembly of 88-mm. anti-tank guns...
...London Evening Standard's correspondent cabled from Cairo: "This is the story of Britain's regression in the Western Desert. . . . It is a story partly of faulty leadership, partly of our war machines, partly of our men who guide those machines to battle...
Somewhere west of Cairo, about two weeks ago, a few U.S. airmen and bombers appeared at an R.A.F. airdrome. Under Colonel Harry A. Halverson of Boone, Iowa they moved into stone quarters in the desert, shared an R.A.F. mess, labored mightily in the heat to prepare for their forays. First their long-range, four-engined B-24s (Liberators) struck across the Mediterranean and Turkey at Rumania's oilfields, possibly at other targets in the Black Sea (TIME, June 22). Last week eight U.S. B-24s (including one flown by an R.A.F. crew) attacked an Italian Fleet which...
...Thermals. The school is in a mountain-surrounded piece of desert, hot enough to fry the traditional egg on a glider's duralumin fuselage. But the heated air rises, forming the welcome "thermals" which keep a glider aloft. The special glider dashboard instrument is a variometer, which shows a pilot whether he is in one of these upward thermals or in a downward air current...