Word: randazzos
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...strongpoint of the German rear guard was Randazzo, an ancient town built on the lava-strewn northern slopes of Mt. Etna in the most rugged countryside the Allied troops had yet encountered...
...Randazzo was the last fort of the Etna Line, a vital center of communications for the Germans. They fought for it like tigers-500 to 600 of them, forcing Italian soldiers to fight with them. They held it for the better part of a week while Allied bombers and artillery reduced its houses to a heap of rubble. The battle for Randazzo was one of the bloodiest in the entire Sicilian campaign...
...troops which took Randazzo were veterans of Tunisia: the U.S. 9th Division (not heretofore reported in Sicily) and the British 78th Division. The Americans, who had been fighting their way up the highway from Troina (see p. 30), were first to enter the town. They found it deserted and aflame, racked by explosions...
...Rearguard's End. The capture of Randazzo spelled the German rearguard's end. To north and east, along the coastal roads, they fought tenaciously against the U.S. and British forces knifing up the shorelines. But at week's end the remnants were fleeing. On the north coast a second amphibious flanking movement of the Americans cracked their line at Capo d'Orlando and opened up a downhill road to Messina. On the east shore the British pushed up past Riposto, past Taormina, to within artillery range of Italy itself. On neither front was any major contact...
...Allied forces, too, had fought far better than in the Tunisian campaign, had reached a new peak of efficiency in their cooperation. The U.S. forces in particular showed, at Troina, at Randazzo and in their amphibious flanking movements on the northern coast, that they could take the best the Germans had to offer in the worst terrain they had yet seen, terrain in which their advantage in numbers hardly counted because large forces could not be brought into action...