Word: soils
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...They had been blooded in the African campaign, tempered in the attack on Sicily, pounded into tough, battlewise, battle-weary veterans in the painful crawl up the Italian boot. As the third year began there was still the hard prospect of another winter on the bitter soil of Italy...
...Fatherland. But the soil of Germany was different from the soil of Russia and its neighbors. In the homeland the Germans had built deeper, more elaborate defenses, had strengthened them for the last year with more than a million men of the Todt organization. Swedish reporters talked learnedly of a new German "rolling defense" fathered by Field Marshal Heinz Guderian, eastern front commander, now fully restored to Adolf Hitler's fitful favor. Already emplaced in whole provinces, enormous masses of movable concrete bunkers of eight to 15 tons, called "scorpions," formed "tank landscapes." Before them were six or eight...
...stood off the British and Canadians on its approaches. They had ruined Le Havre, Marseille, Salonika. Hundreds of miles behind the main battle line, they still had no less than 100,000 troops in Dunkirk, Saint-Nazaire, La Rochelle, Lorient, the Channel Islands, and Royan (covering Bordeaux). Where German soil was threatened, they fought like wildcats...
Bugs, Crabs, Volcanoes. On Guadalcanal they found the thick, heavy soil covered with high, knife-edged kangaroo grass, had to use bulldozers borrowed from the Seabees before they could even begin to plow. On Kolombangara, in the Solomons, they planted a former Jap airstrip of coral, already well stirred up by bombs. As they moved on again, they met new gardener's curses: land crabs, wild pigs, volcanic ground that was hardly arable, odd varieties of scavenging bugs. But by the time they reached the Marianas, they had met and licked almost all the problems of tropical farming...
Contrary to appearances, the soil of the hot, jungle-lush islands is often far from rich, lacking especially nitrogen. G.I. farmers must use more than three times the normal amount of fertilizer, spooning it on a little at a time so that it will not all be washed away by the heavy rains...