Word: scorch
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Overlanders (Rank; Universal-International) is an Australian horse opera that has documentary force. In 1942, when Australia looked every day for a Jap invasion, the Australians decided to scorch their earth. The Northern Territory, some 520,000 square miles of land containing only 5,000 people and a million head of cattle, began to burn its houses, shoot its bullocks and head south...
...United States towards the Philippine Islands which will receive their independence on July 4, 1946. "It was this promise," he claimed, "which kept them fighting for us during the long years of war. It is the belief in this promise that made them destroy their homes, made them scorch the earth, and fight from the hills...
...slowly, just ahead and to the left of the first wave of amphibious tanks. Those LCLs are firing like coked-up gangsters in a grade-B movie. Rockets go thump, thump, thumping out of them and bursting along the shore. The big rockets, taking off with a coughing roar, scorch the beach and plow up vegetation behind them. Many 20-mm. autoguns are hammering like runaway riveters and weaving red lines of tracer shells alongshore like thin angry fingers prying and poking into every patch that might shelter an enemy...
Battle Lines, 1943. China's battlefronts now are fluid and generally quiet. Occasional outbursts scorch and blacken the countryside, but they always have a limited objective. In some sectors remote from the heart of Free China, the Japs and the Chinese even, fraternize at arms' distance. Chinese and Japanese officers sometimes share fabulous profits from the smuggling of tungsten, cotton, wool, tin, tung oil, U.S. bank notes. Chinese divisions in the war-quiet areas operate their own factories and farms, direct their energies toward a stable military economy. The Japanese rarely molest them. These activities cannot be judged...
...picture's action is not as expert as its characterizations. Towards the end it begins to fall apart. The escaped prisoners whip up a very well-filmed insurrection among French villagers and lead a retreat to join a highly fictional guerrilla army."Let's scorch the earth!" cries implausible Housewife Emma Dunn. They do-and a good deal of the picture's force and persuasiveness go up in smoke. Otherwise, The Cross of Lorraine (which takes its name from its undergrounders' Guallist password) is one of the best war films that has been made...