Word: hach
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...released British prisoner climbed in the desert heat with a note in his hand. The hot place he had reached was Bir Hachéim, a four-mile-square, mine-necklaced plateau in the Libyan desert. The note was addressed to General Pierre Koenig, the Free French commander of this southern anchor of the Allied line. It was from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and it said: Surrender, or suffer the consequences...
Pierre Koenig and his 3,000 Parisians, Bretons, Moroccans and Hitler-hating Germans settled down to wait for the inevitable. It was inevitable that Field Marshal Rommel, having bypassed Bir Hachéim in the expectation that it would be a pushover, only to find it a stubborn thorn, would devote his full fury to the place. Every day for ten days there had been attacks by Italian troops, stiffened by a few Germans. Every day Koenig's band had thrown the attacks back with the old French favorite, the 75-mm. cannon...
...while, the R.A.F. was feverishly busy. Gaily, pilots flew out from a field which they called Tramride. Grimly, they flew back again and renamed it Tramraid. Their job was to cut Axis supply columns, and it was urgent. They had to try to stave off the fall of Bir Hachéin for, if that hot spot fell, Rommel would have clear lines of communications for an advance on Tobruk...
There was reason. After 13 days, Bir Hachéim, the hot place, Pierre Koenig's key post, had fallen...