Word: libya
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...return of three divisions sent to help Britain fight Germany. But the Australians said they would not insist if the U.S. promised troops and appointed an American supreme commander for the whole South Pacific. Churchill, unwilling to withdraw the Australians then battling Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps in Libya, suggested to Roosevelt that a general of MacArthur's eminence might prove valuable. In his sweltering cave on Corregidor, MacArthur received by radio on Feb. 23 a presidential order to get to Australia to "assume command of all United States troops...
...Soviets took some -- but not much -- comfort in British and later American operations in North Africa. Until the invasion of Italy in July 1943 and D-day in June 1944, the fighting in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt was the only major military distraction for the Third Reich...
North Africa was not originally Germany's theater of war. But the stunning defeat of 200,000 Italian soldiers in Libya by a force of 30,000 from the British empire forced Hitler to send reinforcements to the region in February 1941. The brilliant Erwin Rommel, who had helped lead German forces in the lightning conquest of France in 1940, quickly turned back the Allied advance in Libya and in April besieged an Australian division in the strategic seaside fortress of Tobruk as troops from Britain and New Zealand retreated to Egypt. Rommel called Tobruk's defenders nothing but rabble...
Reprisals could include a break in airline links between Libya and the outside world or an embargo on purchases of Libyan oil. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater even hinted at military action. But that might give only another spin to a long-running cycle of violence. To avenge the bombing, allegedly by Libya, of a German disco that killed two American soldiers, U.S. warplanes struck Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. Speculation is that Gaddafi ordered the Lockerbie bombing in retaliation...
...week voiced suspicion that Damascus was in fact involved but that its complicity has been overlooked as a reward for Syrian participation in the gulf war against Iraq and in the Arab-Israeli peace conference that started last month in Madrid. U.S. officials make a persuasive case, however, that Libya is solely responsible...