Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last August, before the Italians made their initial, short-lived drive into Egypt, Britain's defense-minded military expert, Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart, wrote some extremely interesting words about defending the Western Desert of Egypt. The narrow coastal route, he said, was badly exposed to naval bombardment and concentrated air attack, and badly confined by its escarpment parallel to the shore. That later proved true...
...South of it, in the interior, lies the vast desert expanse. It is a perfect barrier against the normal kind of force. But more danger might arise if an invader applied a new mechanized technique, adapted from that which the Germans employed in France, and had really up-to-date means of carrying it out. We must reckon with the possibility. A wide-fronted advance by well-dispersed mechanized units, acting on infiltration methods, would be much harder to check than any old-style column...
...most effective answer would be the counter-manoeuvre of our own armoured forces. In such a mobile operation between modern 'ships of the desert much might depend on which side could bring into action the more powerful battle tanks...
...Oases, 500 miles south of the Libyan coast. The force was said to have been flown in, complete with air-carried baby tanks. Only British air reconnaissance could tell whether this was fact or fable. A Rome report, answering the British protest that no. soldier could operate in the desert's summer heat (as high as 130°), was that the German tanks were equipped with refrigeration pipes...
When courtly, magniloquent old Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst (Arizona's "Silver-Tongued Sunbeam") bowed out after his defeat last fall, he assured his colleagues that while they struggled on he would be "enjoying the ecstasy of the starry stillness of an Arizona desert night or the scarlet beauty of her blossoming cactus." Last week the genial self-styled Dean of Inconsistency became a member of the Board of Immigration Appeals. Headquarters: Washington...