Word: mortaring
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From two directions Major General Innis Palmer ("Bull") Swift's I Corps moved on Baguio, summer capital of the Philippine Government. It was hard slugging over tortuous mountain terrain dominated by Japanese mortar and artillery fire. Progress was measured in yards. Fighting was a matter of probing the resistance with infantry patrols, then falling back until artillery could soften the hard spots-and they were very hard...
...units of the Third Army's 87th Division crossed the Moselle in as sault boats. Weak enemy, mortar and machine-gun fire soon died out, and later that day Coblenz was in U.S. hands. The Nazis began shelling the city from the Ehrenbreitstein fortress across the Rhine. Some 500 prisoners rounded up in Coblenz were tatterdemalion survivors of 15 or 20 different outfits. They were angry at SS troops who had scuttled for safety across the Rhine and blown up the bridges...
...Erskine's 3rd Division) broke through to the northeast coast and slid down the cliffs to the beach. To General Schmidt, they sent back a canteen of sea water, marked "for approval-not for consumption." To the aid stations they carried back their wounded, caught in Jap mortar fire on the beach. Next day, the 4th made a second breakthrough, cutting the Japs into three pockets, one of which was soon eliminated. As this week began, it was time for formal announcement that the Pacific's nastiest exterminating job was done...
...Marine Division hospital was built low into the bulldozed hillside to afford maximum protection from Jap mortar and artillery fire. It consisted of two long dark green tents plus two operating rooms about 10 by 20 ft. which the Japs had built as concrete rainwater cisterns. The air inside was stuffy with stale cigaret smoke mingled with the smells of dirt and blood and sweat. But the rawboned Division surgeon, Commander Richard Silvis, was very proud of his operating rooms...
...engineers, under a rain of shell and mortar fire, worked feverishly all night. At dawn the German tanks began to move up. The doughboys across the canal began to yell for the bridge and for tanks. The engineers, now raked by a murderous spray of German machine-gun fire, coolly and swiftly worked on. Just as the German tanks struck, the last plank fell into place and U.S. tanks rolled across the bridge. They saved the bridgehead and opened the road to Cologne...