Word: libya
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Axis air attack in the eastern Mediterranean, move material from Alexandria to Bengasi. At Bengasi supplies are picked up and transported by a fast fleet of more than 100,000 motor lorries,* which move some 2,400 tons a day along a 600-mile ribbon of road across Libya to Tripoli. To keep the lorries running is in itself a major problem. Every day 2,000 tires must be replaced...
...named the men with whom he said he had spoken-eight Italian generals and one air marshal. Properly dramatic, he saved the best name for last, throwing it in as an afterthought: hot-tempered General Annibale ("Electric Whiskers") Bergonzoli, photogenic Black Shirt commander captured by the British in Libya two years ago this month...
...terrain well-oiled in advance. . . . What happened? After three months, this obviously large and well-equipped army has done practically nothing. . . . We are told that it is raining terribly and continuously in Tunis and that the supply lines are enormously long. Obviously it did not rain in Libya, a few hundred miles farther to the East, and it does not snow during the Russian offensive. ... As regards the long supply lines, one cannot imagine that the difficulties are greater than those of Montgomery in his advance of 1,300 miles, especially as Algeria and Tunis have by far the best...
...Orders you gave me on Aug. 15, 1942 have been fulfilled,"* recently replied Sir Harold. "His Majesty's enemies, together with their impediments, have been eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya and Tripolitania. I now await your further instructions...
Until Tripoli fell, the Italian press and radio carried only vague reports of fighting moving west in Libya. When the capitulation could no longer be kept from the people, there were lame excuses that Tripoli was no longer strategically important. But the Italians asked: "Where was Rommel?" They remembered Winston Churchill's pledge of December 1940 to rip Mussolini's overseas empire into tatters. They wondered how long it would take before the tide of battle surged across the Mediterranean to their own shores...