Word: sidi
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...situation was not at all like that at Sidi Barrani, Bardia and Tobruch. There were no rigid, prepared defenses around Dérna (see map), no circles of wire and ditch. But the natural defense was rugged: a deep, wide wadi, the eroded path of an ancient stream. With more spunk than they had shown in seven weeks' war, 10,000 Italians fought to keep many more attackers from swarming into the wadi. Italian aircraft were active, tanks gave fight, artillery answered stubbornly. But numbers and more efficient supply told in the end. The town capitulated...
...Sidi Barrani the assault took three days. At Bardia it took two and a half. This time, at Tobruch, the job was done in one. The pattern was familiar by now. First the thin semicircle of defense around Tobruch was surrounded. Day before the attack, by way of feint, heavy concentrations of vehicles and men were massed east of the town, near the sea. In the night they were stolen away to the point of real attack-a place just by the Bardia road where the Italians, in digging their tank traps, had come to solid rock and dug down...
Mussolini Cunctator. New York Times Military Expert Hanson Baldwin said last week that when the British attack on Sidi Barrani began Dec. 9, the troops had strict orders to withdraw if that town had not fallen in three days. By last week this tentative operation and the Eritrean push (see col. 3) had grown into a campaign of conquest covering a quarter of a continent. To the always confident British this was not surprising. But the only reasonable explanation for the Italians' hasty retreat on all fronts was either that the Italians had lost their military minds or that...
...Italians disappeared into a coastal cave. A British sergeant called a colonel from his swim, and while the colonel, clad only in his slippers, stood guard with revolver at the entrance, the sergeant wriggled into the cave, shooting. Out crawled the Italians, among them Francesco Argentina, erstwhile commander of Sidi Barrani, eleventh Italian general to be captured in the British attack on Libya. For three days the general went on a hunger strike, then ate, wailed: "For all I care about this desert, you can have it! I myself am a poet...
What Next? Although Bardia fell it had given the British their first real check in their four-week campaign. After the storming by surprise of the positions around Sidi Barrani, the British had romped ahead to Libya over the road which the Italian invaders had conveniently built. When Bardia proved too tough a problem for motorized troops with air and naval aid to solve, the British had to spend a fortnight strengthening their land forces and hauling up heavy artillery, while Graziani gained precious time for reorganization at Tobruch...