Word: sahara
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These TIME and LIFE newsmen are not ploughing through Sahara dust or flying through African skies or dodging equatorial snakes merely to duplicate the headline news that comes flashing to TIME over our Associated Press wires at the same time that it goes to the newspapers...
From June through September western winds dump great rains on Dakar and the adjacent Senegalese coast. Then the harmattan (from the French-Arabic for evil) starts to blow from off the scorching Sahara. By November Dakar's lush greenery begins to parch. The sky is so blue that it looks black. Roads are heavy with dust, but passable for military travelers...
Africa is divided by two great military barriers: the jungles of the Congo, which isolate British South Africa from most of the continent, and the Sahara desert, which divides the Mediterranean littoral (now mostly Vichy-and Axis-held) from the more habitable portion of the tropics lying north of the Congo (see map). By cleaning out Dakar, Timbuktu and other small holdings, the United Nations would have this central belt within their grasp...
...keep Africa, the United Nations have more than Rommel and Madagascar to consider. Once the vast Sahara was considered a sufficient barrier to guard the heart of Africa from invasion by forces using Vichy-controlled Tunisia and Algeria as a jumping-off point. Mechanized warfare changed that concept. If the Germans conquer Egypt, they may turn south. French North Africa and Dakar, the continent's westernmost base, in the hands of Axis-enslaved Vichy can never be anything but a danger to the security of Africa as a great crossroads of the United Nations...
...only land link with her Pacific port. And the Trans-Siberian is perilously open to attack: by land and air from northwestern Manchukuo, by land across the wide but easily passable Gobi (which, for all its fearsome reputation, is more like Nebraska and the Dakotas than the Sahara). An alternate rail line, several hundred miles inside the Russian border, is far from completion. Itagaki's invaders, attacking the Trans-Siberian, will also be assaulting Russian Asia's key cities: Chita, a junction point on the Trans-Siberian; Khabarovsk, a new factory center which is also the headquarters...