Word: destroyed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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London had some new heroes last week: delayed-bomb-extraction squads. Londoners called them "fang pullers." The city buzzed with stories of these daring men who dug deep into the ground, lifted out the still-live explosives, and carried them off to destroy them in open places. One, looking down into a hole before climbing in, saw burst gas mains and cut electric cables and said: "I don't mind being gassed, I don't mind being blown up. But I don't bloody well like being electrocuted -are those wires SAFE?" Another sapper, sitting astride...
...night, for 96 tense hours, Lieut. Davies and his squad burrowed. No excitement of active combat, no military ends, no instinct to destroy the enemy urged them as they grubbed 27 feet into the wet, sandy soil. They were in constant expectation of a blinding, icy flash of death. As they dug, a gas main caught fire and began to broil the bomb. Twice on the way up the bomb slipped its tackles and fell to the bottom of the hole...
Last week the Berlin radio boasted that Germany has a superbomb which could kill men by concussion and destroy everything within a radius of 1,600 ft. The distance was incredibly great, but death by concussion is an established wartime fact. In an article by Dr. Solly Zuckerman, famed Oxford anatomist, the British medical journal The Lancet last week described the damage, often fatal, which may be done to lungs by explosions...
Jehovah's witnesses maintain that persecution has been directed against them by the Catholic Hierarchy. "The Roman Catholic Hierarchy, operating what they call 'Catholic Action', are carrying out a well-laid scheme to destroy everything in these world that publishes the truth...
This methodical craftiness was nothing new : it was the old story of Prussian military precision. The new element which was injected into last week's raids was the fury of Adolf Hitler. There was no more "armed reconnaissance" last week - the raids were to destroy, kill, retaliate a thousandfold. Night raids were no longer designed for insomnia - they were designed for the sleep of death...