Word: staving
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Although black-browed Tom Kinkaid had received divisions of escort carriers and at least five battleships to fill out the contours of his normally skinny fleet, the Japs knew he would be hard pressed to stave off this assault. To make doubly sure, their southernmost force would charge through Surigao Strait. Either or both of these forces would strive for a chance to pot sitting ducks - the helpless transports off Leyte...
Only the 60-mile gap around Kweilin stood between the Japs and their immediate strategic objectives in China-a continuous 2,000-mile front and communications system from Siberia to the South China Sea. Chungking, desperately hoping to make Kweilin the Stalingrad of Free China, worked mightily to stave off disaster...
...When we hit Peleliu's sandy beaches we wondered if another Tarawa was developing," Martin cabled. "The Japs knew we were coming and threw everything in the book at us in a desperate effort to stave off annihilation. Two Jap shells made near misses on our amphtrack, pelted its sides with shrapnel. When we reached the beach another mortar a few yards distant spouted bloodily against the smoky island background, killed one Marine, wounded two others. We had to dig for cover in a ditch because our front lines were only 25 yards inland...
...northern France they faced a crushing defeat, tried to stave it off by witless, expensive gambits without hope of success. In Italy, where the battle stood temporarily in stalemate, they had latterly shown no tactic but to retreat, fight, retreat again. On the Eastern Front they fought as if salvation depended only on spending everything they had left...
...would talk away the hovering spectre of failure. He promised victory, threatened dire punishments to Germans who failed to respond to the crisis. He proclaimed total war as if it had never before been proclaimed on earth-not even after Stalingrad. The desperate measures he announced might stave off defeat for months. But to many, his threats must have seemed less like total war than total mobilization of the last broken cracker on the bottom of the barrel...