Word: pillboxes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...greatly things were upside down in the politically more important area between Shanghai and Nanking. Chinese leaders have been talking for weeks about how their troops would be able to hold "for six months" against Japanese onslaughts "the Chinese Hindenburg Line," Fushan-Soochow-Kashing. Its thousands of cement pillbox forts built upon hummocks in swampy terrain appeared most formidable, and bulwark of this Hindenburg Line was Soochow. Fortnight ago Chinese dignitaries appealed to foreigners to urge their governments to ask the Japanese to "spare highly cultured Soochow the horrors of bombing"-not that these Chinese doubted it could and would...
...Catholic families, refugees from Assyria and Mesopotamia and the largest group of their countrymen in the U. S.? In Mosul, Iraq the white-bearded Patriarch assented, chose his black-bearded onetime Vicar General, Rev. Francis Thomay. That 51-year-old cleric shaved off his whiskers, removed his shiny black pillbox hat, arrived in Manhattan last August wearing the dark mufti of a priest. In Chicago last week Father Thomay was laying plans to build the first Chaldean Rite church...
...battleships of 1905, bristling with pillbox turrets, it was impossible to depress gun muzzles sufficiently to beat off this new attack. A few coffee-grinding Catling guns were all the Russians had to oppose the little sea hornets. By next noon four battleships, seven cruisers, five destroyers and five auxiliary ships were at the bottom of the Japan Sea. Four more battleships and two hospital ships had surrendered. Four thousand Russians were killed or drowned and 7,000 more surrendered. Japanese losses were three torpedo boats, 116 killed, 538 wounded. The Battle of Tsushima Straits decided the naval mastery...
Aside from Verdun, Hackenberg and Hochwald, the entire Sarre-Rhine frontier of France is studded every kilometre (nearly five-eighths of a mile) with "pillboxes" and groups of pillboxes, each one a small fort 30 ft. by 36 ft. and rooted 60 ft. deep in earth so that poilus in the lower chamber can rest in comfort. "Comfort," as Marshal Pétain has said, "is of utmost strategic importance. The combative efficiency of the soldier is at least doubled when he can recuperate in comfort." Ergo, nearly every pillbox is equipped with electric lights, electric stove, a well, beds...