Word: last-ditch
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...schedule they might be, but MacArthur's troops were still on the track, still rolling in the right direction. Last week on Leyte fresh infantrymen of the 32nd ("Red Arrow") Division (see ARMY & NAVY) cracked the Japanese strong point at Limon, took the town and neatly pulled the plug at the top of the north-south road along which last-ditch Japanese defenders are strung all the way down to Ormoc...
Pace that Kills. The grand total for two days: 440 planes, laboriously siphoned out of Manchuria and other northern bases for the last-ditch stand in the Philippines. No air force could stand this rate of attrition. The Japs knew it. But all they could do about it was to speed measures for evacuating eleven of their largest cities and improvising air raid shelters-to be planned within a week and finished within five days thereafter...
...hours, 12,800 passed the lines; in 36 hours, more than 17,000. But there were more thousands to go; a four-hour extension was granted. A score of German soldiers who had no stomach for the last-ditch stand Hitler had ordered tried to slip through, dressed in civilian clothes, but they were stopped...
...officer's salvation in retreat is in the interests of the country." (Lately there has been a low percentage of officers among prisoners taken.) There was other evidence that officer groups, cut off in Holland, were deserting their men, either to save themselves to lead an untried, last-ditch army of civilians and military misfits or to go underground to keep Naziism alive...
...Lorient and Saint-Nazaire took terrific poundings from land and air, but the Germans held on doggedly. For U.S. troops there was no choice but to fight their way in; the ports were needed by the A.E.F. and every day they held out was a day more for the last-ditch defenders...