Word: libya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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TIME'S primary reason given for such action was that U.S. combat forces together with Allied troops, navy and air force would be used simultaneously against Vichy and North Africa and coordinated with an attempt to turn back Rommel in Egypt and Libya...
...Germans are out of Egypt, but there still are some left in North Africa. There is some good hunting to be had farther to the west in Libya...
...thousands of U.S. troops landed along the 1,500-mile Moroccan-Algerian coastline. They picked up the cry: "Let's head east!" "East" meant Tunisia first, and after that a juncture with the British Eighth Army for the final mop-up somewhere in Libya of General Rommel's bedraggled Afrika Korps. Five or six fresh Italian divisions apparently are also intact and ready for battle somewhere in the Tripoli-Bengazi area. As long as the Axis was in Tunis, the way to Rommel's forces was barred...
...protect her African keystone, France strongly fortified the hills around Bizerte harbor. But the Allied forces are approaching Bizerte, fortified for a sea attack, by a backdoor land route. To face Italian aggression from Libya, France built the Mareth ("Little Maginot") Line of pillboxes and sunken cement forts in the hills at the eastern border. In hostile hands these fortifications would not be an impossible obstacle to the Allies. The Germans and Italians dismantled many of the fortifications after the French armistice in 1940; and the guns on the Mareth Line are set to point east...
...future. They had tried at one & the same time to placate Hitler and grab as much of France as possible for themselves. In this bargaining game they had sold out the French people by all manner of internal concessions, by making cargo shipments to the Axis in Libya, admitting German "technicians and importers" to Africa, deporting French workers and Jewish refugees to Germany, libeling Third Republican leaders who bravely threw the charges back in Vichy's face at the Riom trials...