Word: libyans
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Graziani, who made his fierce reputation by fighting defenseless natives in Africa, was in a fair way to lose his lustre in the Libyan sands. To excuse himself, he last week issued a report to II Duce which was, to military historians, an amazing mixture of accusation, frankness and bombast...
...British & Imperial Army of the Nile, plus the R. N. and the R. A. F., had swept his country's desert fringe clear of Italians. But a man who awaited Graziani's further defeat with even keener relish was Seyyid Idris el Senussi, swart chieftain of the Libyan desert tribes whom Graziani "pacified" in 1930, executing their leaders, reputedly dropping their bodies into their camps from airplanes, then burning the camps and villages, impressing survivors into labor gangs and conscript regiments. Seyyid Idris was one of Commander in Chief General Sir Archibald Wavell's chief advisers...
Rout. The fighting was taking place on the coastal plain, which the Italians call the Marmarica. Some 30 miles inland from Buqbuq an escarpment juts suddenly above the desert, 300-600 feet high. This escarpment runs diagonally towards the coast and meets it at Salum, hard by the Libyan border. Were it a man-made barrier like China's Great Wall, the escarpment could be no more effective as a wall against land warfare. At Salum just two precipitous gullies run from the plain to the top of the plateau and Libya. Into those bottlenecks the British chased...
...Greece is the key to control of two of the three routes to the east : by land and sea through Turkey, by sea via the Mediterranean. Even the third route is controlled in part by Greece : the capture of Crete would help to safe guard Italy's Libyan route into Egypt...
Reports that British planes were bombing and ranging wide over such scattered points as Hargeisa and Berbera in Italian-held British Somaliland, Agordat and Gurá south of Asmara in Eritrea, and, more particularly, over the oasis of Siwa deep in the desert near the Libyan frontier, and at Metemmeh in Ethiopia near the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan border, indicated the British were keeping their air eyes open for signs of any new thrust toward the heart of the Nile Valley...