Word: ortona
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Another Commander. To the east, three miles above captured Ortona (TIME, Jan. 10), the Eighth Army paused. A gale, whipping down from the Apennines, ripped away roof tiles, chilled men and mules, stalled movement. "Point 59," another pillboxed ridge, barred the nine miles yet to go to Pescara, Adriatic terminal of the shortest (125 mi.) trans-peninsular railroad and highway to Rome...
Like death's shroud, snow fell on Ortona. Over the town's rubble and corpses a chill Apennine wind keened. Ortona, for centuries alive and pleasant on a rocky shelf above the slate-colored Adriatic, now lay dead and hideous. The battle had surged...
...more than a week Canadians and Germans had grappled for every building stone in Ortona. Never before had the Wehrmacht chosen to slug it out for a town in the path of the British Eighth Army's long march up Italy's Adriatic shore. Most of Ortona's 9,000 folk fled as the Germans mined the approaches, built barricades in the streets, burrowed tanks into the cellars, brought up flame throwers, posted suicide rear guards...
Into the Gully. The death struggle began on the town's outskirts. Some hundreds of British guns, firing an average of 450 shells each, loosed two two-hour barrages on the last gully and ridgetop before Ortona. The first barrage covered one battalion advancing at the rate of 100 yards every five minutes into the gully. The second barrage sprayed the ridgetop, where a lateral road linked with a crossroads on the way into the town...
...week's end the victors had pushed two miles above Ortona, were ten miles below Pescara, Adriatic terminus of the shortest transpeninsular rail-and-highway to Rome. Theirs had been the most notable gain in another week of hill-by-hill advance up the Italian boot. Through dead Ortona, the Canadians trudged after the retreating, fighting Germans...