Word: massaua
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...naval officer, taking a breather in Cairo last week, perspired comfortably and wished that the Italians could see what had happened at the Red Sea port of Massaua...
...pressed on through the hills at once toward the capital, Asmara, as fast as sappers ahead of the armored-car spearhead could clear away land mines and landslides left by the Italians. Ahead of the sappers the R.A.F. continued its bombardment, destroying trucks and twisting bridges. Beyond Asmara lies Massaua, Eritrea's only good port, which the Royal Navy had tightly corked and hoped soon to possess...
British Empire forces, which had driven 70 miles into Eritrea from the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, last week took Agordat (see map, p. 23). This town, 2,000 feet up on the Eritrean plateau, is strategically placed at the junction of a railway to Massaua on the Red Sea and a new highway to Addis Ababa. Agordat was defended by one Italian division. In taking the town, the attackers claimed "many hundreds of prisoners," but the Italians were not entirely surrounded, and the main body retreated into increasingly mountainous country behind Agordat...
Last week the campaign in Eritrea began to look like another Italo-British speed contest (see above). From Kassala, a few miles inside Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, the British pursued Italians 68 miles to Biscia, head of a railway running down to the Red Sea port of Massaua. Operating here in rough foothills covered with dry six-foot scrub where lions and elephants are more at home than tanks, the British, although forced for the most part to hug the roads, kept so hot after the retreating Italians that the latter scarcely fought even rear-guard actions, until they were within...
...strait there is too wide to be blocked and the barren island of Perim, whence pirates once took toll, although in British hands, does not control it so much as the nearby ports. Along the Red Sea's African Coast the Italians held Assab, Massaua and got Djibouti on the Gulf of Aden when France surrendered. The nearest British base was Aden across the Gulf...