Word: spitsbergen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Seaman Herman remembered it precisely. It was 11:30 in the morning, Sunday, Sept. 13, when the Germans opened their attack. The convoy was off Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Ocean...
...Nazi aircraft more time for reconnaissance. The southward drift of polar ice pinches the convoy channel dangerously narrow. Last week Germany claimed that the Luftwaffe had sunk a U.S. cruiser of the 9,100-ton Pensacola class and a U.S. destroyer, somewhere between Norway's North Cape and Spitsbergen, had scored hits on two more U.S. destroyers. Another Nazi news-bomb announced the sinking of a 2,000-ton merchant vessel and an icebreaker in a Spitsbergen fjord...
They could explain why raiding Spitsbergen was more effective than raiding the moon. It was not quite so easy to explain why they had not tried a raid on the Norwegian coast, when the Norwegians were so hopefully insurgent and when their own equipment and chances were so much better than the last time they made that rough trip. In an attempt to explain, War Secretary Captain David Margesson last week wrote his first newspaper article since taking office...
...Spitsbergen the British blew up the coal mines, fired the coal piles, destroyed the coal-loading machinery, burned the oil supplies, killed all the cattle. They also removed the entire civilian population, including the Russians who mined 500,000 tons of coal annually for the Soviet Arctic Fleet, and outnumbered Norwegians in Spitsbergen...
Said the liberal New Statesman and Na tion: "Moscow is not impressed by the expedition to Spitsbergen (see p. 20). . . . We have command of the sea; have we not the troops available even for 'beard-singeing' operations? Are there no bases worth denying to the enemy? Uneasiness is inevitable in view of the record of the War Office...