Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...wriggled into the cave, shooting. Out crawled the Italians, among them Francesco Argentina, erstwhile commander of Sidi Barrani, eleventh Italian general to be captured in the British attack on Libya. For three days the general went on a hunger strike, then ate, wailed: "For all I care about this desert, you can have it! I myself am a poet...
...garden-edged streets of Bardia, belying with their neatness the destructive bombardment of a fortnight ago, swept a train of British armored cars, tanks and infantry trucks one day last week. It wriggled onto the coast road, penetrating still farther into the African empire of Benito Mussolini. From the desert to the south another spearhead, fresh Anzac and Moslem Indian troops, poked north and west. Before mop-up units in Bardia had finished prying the last pockets of Italian Terribili from their wadi hideouts, the two points were encircling Tobruch...
...rain, then at 6:45 p.m. happily down to a shallow lake on Richard King's Santa Fe Ranch near Edinburg, 80 miles southwest of Corpus Christi. The officers slept in the plane, were found next morning by two cowboys who led them out of the desert brush to the ranch house. Then Murray Hanson learned what happened to the men who had jumped at his order. One was killed; his parachute had been torn from his body. One was unhurt. Three were injured and in hospitals at Big Spring and Lamesa, Tex., 450 miles away...
This put new emphasis on the roundabout northern way-into Vladivostok, by rail to Chita or Verkhne Udinsk, thence by mechanical and animal caravan down the Mongolian desert to China, 3,700 miles in all from Vladivostok to Chungking. Links in the route were not exactly new; their origins as a pack trail predated Marco Polo, Genghis Khan and the mighty Chin. About three years ago the Chinese began to fix up the road, stringing repair shops, gasoline dumps and food stations across the tundra...
...dusk the British bombers began to thunder in from the east. Out in the desert the Australians lay hidden with their tanks. Offshore the main body of the Mediterranean Fleet was steaming into position...