Word: rommels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rommel learned when he felt out the British positions in September, El Alamein was no place for the sweeping tank tactics of the open desert. To break either the Axis or the British line, the attacker needed artillery and more artillery, supporting and opening the way for infantry and tanks. Aircraft could-and did-function as flying artillery, but the Eighth Army's main effort in the preliminary stage was to build up its artillery strength. The Germans presumably did the same thing-with what success, the British were learning this week...
...R.A.F. and the growing U.S. bomber and fighter forces in Egypt concentrated on Rommel's airdromes for two weeks before the battle opened. In the last four days of preparation, Axis airports and grounded planes were continuously bombed. Result: at the zero hour, the British and U.S. flyers believed that for the first time they had more planes in the air than the Germans had. British, South African, Australian and U.S. flyers worked in perfect coordination; the teamwork between ground and air forces had also improved since the British retreated into Egypt last summer...
...hardly knowingly repeat their bitter experience of 1941, when the diversion of insufficient forces to Greece brought disaster to North Africa. Now British and U.S. forces piling up in Egypt have a better-than-even chance to hold what is left of North Africa, a growing chance to drive Rommel back...
...they fought off the latest all-out Axis onslaught. For five days swarms of Axis planes had swept over from neighboring Sicily, only 60 miles away. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, during the distraction, an Axis convoy had probably pushed through to North Africa with supplies badly needed by Rommel. But the Axis had paid heavily for the transports' passage. In the five days of almost ceaseless combat, Malta's ack-ack guns and the R.A.F.'s Spitfires had destroyed more than 100 Axis aircraft. This week Malta still stood, battered and bloody, with guns and planes ready...
Their targets were two ships lying side by side in Navarino Bay, laden with supplies for Rommel. The lead planes were almost in position. Grant Parr of the New York Times "crouched in a niche just behind the forward cabin, leaning out over the open bomb bay." It was deathly cold, but he was too excited to notice. "With a slight jar our bombs fell away, seemingly far wide of their mark. Then momentum and wind drift whipped them in toward the transports like a fast curve breaking over the plate...