Word: mortar
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...When the Senate War Investigating Committee set off its explosion of scandals about the Garsson brothers' string of 4.2 mortar-shell factories (TIME, July 15, et seq.), it also touched off a series of reports that many hundreds of U.S. soldiers had been killed or maimed by defective mortars...
...only lost a few men (who overindulged themselves in mortar fragments). We started to level the town with artillery fire, but the Wehrmacht hospital Kommandant and the Bürgermeister finally convinced the 55 that nothing could be gained by further resistance-beyond the possible execution of a few thousand bedridden German wounded...
...Henry used the letterhead of a reputable firm which employed him, represented on it to the War Department that he had a company and plant equipped to turn out 4.2-in. mortar shells. This company, the Erie Basin Metal Products Inc., did not then actually exist. But soon after Pearl Harbor the War Department gave Dr. Garsson's nonmachined firm a whopping order for shells. Meantime Henry Garsson had found two men-Allen B. Gellman and Joseph Weiss of Chicago-who had factories and machines but no war contracts...
From the dense fields of kaoliang lining each side of the highway came a spatter of small-arms fire. With a combat-developed reflex motion, the marines sprang from their vehicles, took cover in a ditch and fired back. Mortar shells and machine-gun bullets flushed the ambushers-Chinese riflemen, some clad in loincloths, some in the bluish uniforms of Chinese Communists...
Lieut. Cowin fell, fatally wounded. Under Major Fred. J. Freese, a U.S. Army Special Service officer, the marines dug in for an all-day fight. But, after four hours, they had run out of mortar shells. Major Freese seized on a lull, ordered his men to make a break. In Peiping that night the weary detachment completed its mission. Its casualties: three killed, twelve wounded...