Word: mortar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Neither combatant ever has acknowledged using gas, perhaps in fear of reprisals. The Red Army, however, accused the Nazis of using gas in the Kerch campaign, a charge stoutly denied by Berlin. Last week a German corporal* published a revealing, apparently uncensored article on the Nazis' "fog mortar...
...time of their departure neither unit [Winnipeg Grenadiers and Royal Rifles] had been able to give its men any training with the two-inch mortar. They had never fired a three-inch mortar. They had never fired an anti-tank rifle. They had never fired an anti-aircraft machine gun. They had never fired a submachine gun. They had never fired a rifle grenade. They had never thrown a live bomb . . . the Winnipeg Grenadiers had never even fired their Bren guns and, until just before their departure, had never fired service ammunition with their rifles...
...officers and privates had one of their frequent after-battle conferences swopping knowledge and correcting mistakes beside a campfire. There was Private Vyazmin, excitedly babbling to his officers instruction on how to improve trench-mortar fire; and Sergeant Smirnov, that joker among scouts, telling how he distracted and captured a German motorcyclist by tying a bunch of foliage to a long cord, dragging the foliage across the road...
...noise rose early on April Fools' Eve, with the full moon. It grew from a rattle to a roar, insistent, oncoming. It was mortar fire, machine-gun fire, rifle fire, dive-bombing, naval bombardment, all the powder in the powder...
Abolition of the automobile industry might well have closed down a midwestern auto specialties plant had not this foundry begun casting 60-mm. U.S. and 3-in. British mortar shells, a practice unthinkable in World War I. Mortar shells must be of precise dimensions and exacting metallic analysis so they will burst into fragments not too large & not too small to insure maximum bloodshed. Hence they had always been forged, and many an ordnance officer swore they couldn't be cast: cast steel is full of pores and bubbles, it shrinks in its molds to nonuniform sizes, its metallic...