Word: marmarica
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...running westward, farther and farther into Libya. The prisoners were not British, they were Italian-31,546 of them (so far counted), including 1,626 officers. It was not a Roman victory, it was another shocking Roman rout, a fierce continuation of last fortnight's Battle of the Marmarica in which, after slicing through Capuzzo (in the line of forts guarding Libya's eastern border), savage little squadrons of fast British tanks and Bren gun-carriers whipped around the port of Bardia, outflanking it as they had outflanked Sidi Barrani and Salum...
...Bardia were two Italian divisions, remnants of a third, and escapists from the Battle of the Marmarica.* They lay in their wadi, behind a semicircle of concrete pillboxes, land mines and artillery emplacements, 15 miles in perimeter. After the British mechanized units, commanded by Major General Michael O'Moore Creagh had pinned them in, the encircled men tried to run for it, thousands at a time. As they fled on the coast road around the rim of Cyrenaica toward Marshal Graziani's main fortified base at Tobruch, 70 miles west, the R. A. F. and the mechanized British...
...Passengers of the U. S. liner President Garfield which docked last week in Manhattan told of seeing "6,000 or more" Italian prisoners (probably an exaggeration, for these Italian prisoners must have been taken before the Battle of the Marmarica) aboard the Cunarder Queen Mary in Bombay, en route to prison in Australia, whence the Queen will soon fetch 16,000 more Anzacs for the Middle East. In Bombay also they saw the He de France, idle; at Cape Town, the Queen Elizabeth, at anchor...
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...
...difference was that the British had lost nothing like 26,000 prisoners, as the Italians did last week, that the British retired in good order with their army intact. In the battle of the Marmarica the Italians lost all their advance forces. Probably nearly a quarter of their Army in Libya was destroyed as a fighting force. They had lost even more valuable supplies and equipment. It appeared that Egypt would be safe from Italian attack for at least months to come...