Word: islanded
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...island might be strangled by blockade, if the Axis could stop the convoys, but the convoys are still getting through. Recently the Germans sent the Luftwaffe's Field Marshal Albert Kesselring-who blueprinted the razings of Coventry and Warsaw-to Sicily, already bristling with German airpower. Kesselring had a blueprint ready for Malta, too; he cocked his fist and let fly across the short gap of blue water...
...French come & go; they have not seen the British, who got Malta after Napoleon's hash was settled, go yet. Up to World War II, Malta's greatest siege was that of 1565, when Grand Master of the Knights Jean de La Valette, for whom the island's capital city is named, beat off the Turks under Dragut...
After that it was all bad. Somebody stole the milk and drank it all. They prayed for rain. Without water, they were afraid to eat the hardtack and chocolate. They ate seaweed and some of them drank sea water. Once they came within a few yards of a coral island, but the coral was so sharp that they could not wade ashore. Hunger, thirst and the Caribbean sun began to madden and kill them...
Admiral Halsey's force had taken no ground. But, as it had done in January in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands (TIME, Feb. 9), it had smashed the daylights out of two Jap bases. One of them was Wake Island, where 378 Marines had held out for 14 gallant days, second stop beyond Pearl Harbor in the reach to Jap-held Guam and Manila. The other was Marcus Island (Minama Tori Shima to the Japanese), only 1,150 miles from Tokyo...
Marcus. The task force sailed west and north. At dawn, eight days later, it stood off Marcus Island. Well down behind the horizon, the task force launched its planes and headed for home. The men on the ships had to follow the action by listening to the U.S. planes' radio. The Jap put up no fight, except from his antiaircraft, launched not a single plane. Marcus, important as a Jap supply base and link between Japan and the Mandates, got a pounding that should take weeks to repair...