Word: tobruch
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...full power of attack brushed past pillboxes, deployed back and crushed them from behind. That accounted for the outer semicircle. For the inner, the process was the same. By noon both had been broken. By sunset the attackers had pushed eight miles to the heights looking down on Tobruch...
...week (see p. 21) welled ominous indications that a new campaign was about to be launched-possibly in a matter of a few days. The big question was where. The war, slowing to a lull in the Balkans and in Greece, bogging down in a seven-day sandstorm at Tobruch, flaming fitfully in the ragged weather over Britain, gave little clue. But the British, sure trouble was coming, thought they knew the answer (see below). Meanwhile the important military news of the week was the story of the battle of the Illustrious (see col. 2), an engagement which may possibly...
...Siege of Tobruch. With this added tip the British went methodically to work on a repeat performance of the Bardia show. While heavy artillery went up, the R. A. F. started off with an attack on Tobruch, roared westward as far as Tripoli, hunting out Italian troop concentrations and airdromes. Off the harbor the British Fleet stood by. Advance land forces pushed on past Tobruch to cut off the Italian retreat, some of them reaching Bómba, 60 miles to the west...
...Tobruch's own air base of El Adem, constructed at enormous expense for a permanent airdrome, one British mechanized patrol counted the charred fuselages of 40 planes, burned and twisted by R. A. F. bombs. The runways were pitted with a lacework of craters. The hangars and machine shops were battered to rubble. The plush officers' quarters, completed down to tile bathrooms, were sagging ruins. At El Gubbi the story was the same. At El Gazála they found 35 more wrecked planes. The Italians had abandoned their air bases as far west...