Word: mortars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...pursued. Meanwhile, LCIs (Landing Craft, Infantry) had filed in and were unloading. At sea bigger and clumsier LSTs (Landing Ships, Tanks, affectionately interpreted as "Large, Slow Targets"), their bellies heavy with mechanical equipment and troops, lumbered toward the harbor mouth. They suffered the indignity of being attacked by Jap mortar fire from the hillside, and a destroyer had to go to their rescue with an offshore barrage. At this point task forces had a look over the horizon to see how we were getting on. We were doing all right...
...delaying action. Mines under the firm roads forced Allied columns to flounder in the gumbo beside the highways. Demolition charges toppled bridges into angry streams. Shielded by low clouds from strafing planes, the rear guards huddled in orchards and behind stone walls, sniped viciously with rifle, machine gun and mortar...
...North Africa, the Nazis launched their Nebelwerfer (smoke thrower), a multibarreled, rocket-propelled mortar which U.S. and British troops dubbed "screaming meemie." Set off electrically, its rocket shells fling long fingers of metal...
...under German mortar fire, he picked a careful way behind stone walls up the limestone and pumice heights of the Sorrentine peninsula. From the ridge the patches of chestnut forest tumbled into the brown Campania plain. The General looked in the direction of the ashen ruins of Pompeii, the lava-scarred cone of Vesuvius. Beyond the volcano rose a huge shroud of smoke over the port of Naples. In that city of 900,000, rising in tourist times like a white amphitheater from the blue sea, the Germans were dynamiting and burning. It was clear proof that the Wehrmacht...
...than three weeks he gobbled up most of the Huon Peninsula. In twelve days he enveloped and captured Lae. Six days later he swept around Finschhaven, 70 miles beyond Lae on the Huon Gulf. His airborne Australians attacked inland. His seaborne Australians landed on the coast above Finschhaven, with mortar fire and bayonet established a bridgehead and seized Finschhaven airport. At week's end the fall of Finschhaven itself was imminent, and the Japs were reduced to a few last toe holds in eastern New Guinea...