Word: thinly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...look like a Napoleonic commander, performing a miracle of military endurance. He was only a plain, lanky, thin-lipped American, with a weather-beaten face, a dour smile, a sunburned neck: he might have been a hunter in the backwoods of his native Florida. But like the plain, lanky Americans who hacked the nation out of the wilderness, "Vinegar Joe" had created an epic-out of sweat and weariness and malaria, of retreat and desperation and endurance. And last week what he was doing for China (see p. 37) was worth all the noble and encouraging talk in the world...
Into the headquarters of thin-lipped Junker von Bock, who has squandered men to win and lose some of Nazi Germany's greatest battles,* poured military dispatches that told him his foe was all but whipped in the northern Caucasus, that Timoshenko's main strength was apparently concentrated in a vast arc before Stalingrad, that German positions along the Don at Voronezh were safe for the moment. Bock might be on the threshold of an even greater victory. He could look with satisfaction on what his Panzers, shock troops, snub-nosed caterpillar guns and rank-on-rank...
They fly so low that their camouflaged wings are hard to see from above, land on small clearings or dirt roads and scurry under trees. Sometimes, landed on too small a clearing, they must wait like sailboats for a favorable take-off wind. The thin-skinned grasshoppers carry no machine guns; in the air they would be easy meat if surprised by a hedgehopping enemy fighter...
Though their riveted M35 sustained some shell hits, no rivets bounced about inside. Main fault in the tanks: an incendiary bullet, stuck in the pencil-thin crevice between the revolving turret and hull, froze the turret tight. The tankers unfroze the turret with an acetylene torch. (This defect has been corrected in the newer M-45, which have a collar over the crevice...
...readers who like their murder in large doses: The Complete Dashiell Hammett (Knopf; $2.50), five full-length novels beginning with The Thin Man, proving pretty conclusively that the worst of Hammett is several parasangs ahead of his closest runners-up in the tough school; Three Famous Spy Novels (Random; $1.98), showing how dated E. P. Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation seems in the company of Eric Ambler's streamlined Journey into Fear and the sinister subtleties of Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent...