Word: pontoons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Though the Germans have established at least two bridgeheads across the Don in the Tsimlyanskaya area 125 miles east and slightly north of Rostov, late dispatches said, Soviet artillery has smashed a score of pontoon bridges there, as well as sinking several score rafts and rubber boats laden with thousands of enemy troops and equipment...
...Germans crossed the Don. On sunny days, Russian shells and bullets from the eastern bank and bombs from the sky raised bright geysers around the bodies of the dead. On a cloudy day, when the Stormoviks flew low at the pontoon bridges and rubber boats of the invaders, many a German trooper's last sight in life was the dappled carpet of rain on the river. Along the western bank, where bombs and shells clawed great gaps in the lines of trucks and tanks, Germans died by thousands, and hospital trains bore many more thousands to the rear...
...Army tank, nosing across a creek near Fort Knox, Ky. on a slithery pontoon bridge, slid off into water up to its turret top. That annoying accident suggested to Lieut. Colonel Thomas Henry Stanley (16th Engineers) that it was about time the Army developed a new kind of pontoon bridge for mechanized warfare. The old bridge of planks on boats had not been radically changed since the Civil War, although as early as 1846 the U.S. Army was experimenting with rubber pontoons...
Pioneer Equipment (Samuel Goldwyn) is a simple explanation of how to tie various hitches (mooring, rolling, cats-paw, half, etc.) for building pontoon bridges, moving materiel, securing tents. Best feature is the clarity of its explanations and the crafty way the camera has of keeping clearly focused on the role played by the rope...
...their primary soldiering in big doses, soon pass on to specialized training. Some will join combat regiments and battalions, will go into battle with infantry and artillery, lugging in motor trains a fantastic assortment of bulldozers, water-purification outfits, pneumatic drills, earth-borers. Some will join ponton (Engineer for pontoon) companies, will learn to sweat hip-deep in rivers, laying bridges for the infantry. Others will go to topographical (mapmaking) outfits, to railroad-operating companies, to general service regiments, to camouflage battalions, dump-truck companies, water-supply battalions, shop companies, depot companies...