Word: matmata
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...Matmata is a small village nestled in the rocky hills of southeastern Tunisia in north Africa. Over the centuries, the town's Berber settlers developed an ingeniously simple way of beating the withering summer sun and cold winter winds. They fashion a village of pit houses, huge craters disguising a complex array of caves used as houses, granaries, and "barns...
General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had been thrown back at the northern end of the Mareth Line. In a 15-mile-wide gap between the Matmata Mountains and the seashore, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had stopped him cold and he had backed up, leaving the plain strewn with British dead around the hell of the Wadi Zigzau (see p. 17). It appeared that Montgomery had been stalled. It only appeared...
Rommel hoped he might throw his old enemy off balance. In the fine, slanting rain of an early Tunisian morning he sent the tanks charging south toward the little town of Médinine, which the Eighth Army had occupied. From the foothills of the Matmata Mountains, nest of the Mareth Line fortifications, Rommel's cannon laid down a barrage to cover the advance...
...Ivor Andrews watched 17 German tanks file up a slope, let the first four go by towards another gun crew, knocked out the next three. When Belden visited the battlefield after it was all over, he counted 52 German tanks left on the arid, rock-strewn plain between the Matmata Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. Some were blackened from fire, some were still splotched with green camouflage and black crosses. Turrets were torn off, fronts were blown in. They were casualties of Rommel's most earnest attempt to hit back at the British Eighth Army since the Eighth...
...Animal. Rommel, having earned a breather on the central front, had to turn south toward the so-called Mareth Line, where pillbox fortifications, barbedwire entanglements, gun emplacements and land mines are sprinkled thickly through the Matmata Mountains. Only ten miles away was the Afrika Korps's old enemy, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, gazing up at the 2,000-ft. heights of the range, patiently waiting the day when stores, ammunition, artillery, men were all accumulated to his taste and he was ready to make his massive assault. Already assembled were probably 100,000 fresh reserves and veterans...