Word: redoubtables
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...North's best chances was lost at the battle of the Crater, outside Petersburg, the last defense post for Richmond. A bright young colonel on General Burnside's staff thought up the idea of digging a 500-ft. tunnel under the Confederates key redoubt, blowing it up and running a ground attack through the breach. The tunnel was dug, 320 kegs of powder were planted, and after a misfiring fuse was relit, the earth flew up, as one soldier wrote, like "a waterspout as seen at sea." A gap 500 yards wide opened in the Confederate line...
...fault. His relations with the government were reasonably trouble-free, he says, until Burma's Foreign Minister visited Red Peking last July and was pressured into a phony "peace" pact whereby Communist guerrillas in Burma would cease their depredations in exchange for a Burmese offensive against the Nationalist redoubt. Since then, says Li Mi, the Nationalist Salvation Army has been attacked on all sides by 1) Red Chinese regulars, infiltrating from Yunnan, 2) Burmese Communist guerrillas, 3) the Burmese army. In one incident, he says, the Burmans rounded up 100 of his men and turned 40 over to Chinese...
Washington and Taipei have repeatedly denied sending military aid to Li, but the evidence is mounting that in 1951 some U.S. supplies were airlifted to the Nationalist redoubt. More recently, the traffic has ceased, presumably because the State Department or the Pentagon became convinced that Li Mi's enterprise is doing more harm to Burma than it is to the Red Chinese...
...band of Mau Mau up the rain-rutted sides of a 9,000-ft. extinct volcano. A posse of Kenya planters threw the Mau Mau lookouts off guard by staging a mock polo tournament, then suddenly dropped their polo sticks, whipped out rifles and charged the Mau Mau redoubt. From the ridges above came the sweating Fusiliers; behind, the Mau Mau found their retreat cut off by tall, pig-tailed Masai spearmen, recruited by the British from the fierce nomadic tribes that roam Kenya's vast Rift Valley. A hundred Mau Mau were captured...
...Moves & a Jump. But it was later than Tom Pendergast thought. In three months the State moved in, and Bill Boyle was no longer police director. He moved over to the Pendergast redoubt at City Hall, became commissioner of street cleaning. A reform mayor fired him in 1940, and he moved again: this time to the job of assistant prosecuting attorney in the county courthouse, the last Pendergast citadel. It was dull work; his main assignment was to take confessed criminals before the court to enter guilty pleas. "To my knowledge," said Bill's good friend, Lawyer Shannon Douglas...