Word: riff
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...landing in Alhucemas Bay, any military expert will tell you is the biggest success yet attained in the Riff War, and it should be properly accredited...
Astute observers then went quietly away and reflected that Spain, after having poured out millions of pesetas during a desultory struggle with 25,000 Riffians which has lasted seven years, is now celebrating the capture of an insignificant village, the so-called capital of Riff-land. Belgians, Serbians and Rumanians, they pointed out, found it quite possible to do a deal of heavy fighting after Brussels, Belgrade and Bucharest had fallen to the Central Powers. Abd-el-Krim is still at large. And the Spanish attack of last week, crowned by the fall of his "capital" though it be, represents...
Concurrently with Spain's spectacular nibbling at the Riff from the north, the French forces under Marshal Petain made an advance, near Kifane on the southern war front, into virgin sloughs of Riffland never before occupied by Europeans. It was announced that last week's French offensive had gained all its objectives in record time. Then French officers discovered that their airmen, who had hastily made for them the only available maps, had mapped too optimistically. The French lines, when exactly plotted, proved to be a couple of miles short of the advance that had been claimed...
...whole character of the Moroccan war is one of high lights and shadows, corresponding to this last most picturesque of incidents. The daily press dispatches from the Riff should never bore anyone. The American soldiers of fortune with the French forces ignore the state departments' august disapproval and proceed to the day's fighting like bad boys playing truant. Unreasonable obstinacy displayed by the Riffians in refusing to be intimidated by the comic opera Spanish army precipitates a political crisis in Madrid. A French officer, perhaps a distant relative of General Nicholas Herkimer, directs his command from a stretcher...
...sausage, the French went into action, and there the fat was hottest and the frying was fiercest. After a heavy artillery barrage, the advance was begun. The trouble from the French standpoint was that they were advancing squarely towards the mountain ridge that forms the backbone of the Riff sausage and had to fight separately for every little foothill. Nonetheless, the losses apparently were not heavy, and an advance was made several miles deep on a 40-mile front. Thirteen of the blockhouses (the French advance posts before the campaign began and the Riffs took them) were recaptured. For three...