Word: mortars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...walked and crawled a mile under continuous rifle, machine-gun and mortar fire, then worked his way back with important information that the battalion was not there at all, and the Nazis had dug in strongly. Said Kelly...
...Retreat. When he had run out of rifles and the enemy was closing in, Kelly snatched up 60-mm. mortar shells, pulled the safety pins and threw them as hand grenades. One burst killed five Nazis. But that could not go on indefinitely. The detachment had to pull...
Captain Russell Comrie directed the fire of his mortar company on some of the enemy's red houses. Far down the road we could see a solitary German impudently walking to the road. "Five rounds now-drop 'em in," yelled Comrie over the telephone. Black smoke puffed all around the red houses. The German threw himself to the ground. "The last one got a machine-gun nest," Comrie whooped. "Shoot five more rounds...
...secret list. It is the Piat (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) and it fires a 2.75-lb. bomb which explodes on impact with a violence sufficient to penetrate four inches of tempered armor plate. But the Piat does not employ the bazooka's rocket principle. Its projectile, like a mortar shell, is propelled by the explosion of a cartridge in the base. Rear half of the tube houses a powerful steel spring which takes up the recoil, re-cocks itself and operates the firing pin for the next shot. In combat the 33-lb. Piat is handled...
...Hitlerian mustache. In 1940 this artillery expert helped to open a corridor into Leningrad, broke the Germans' partial blockade but did not-as accounts at the time wrongly indicated-actually free the city. Until this month, German shells tore daily into Leningrad's brick-and-mortar flesh, and its defenders rode to the front in streetcars. More than a million had died of cold and hunger since Field Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb's army first besieged the city in 1941. Last week, after their long torture, the survivors of Leningrad could hardly believe that the siege...