Word: tobruch
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...British mechanized units, commanded by Major General Michael O'Moore Creagh had pinned them in, the encircled men tried to run for it, thousands at a time. As they fled on the coast road around the rim of Cyrenaica toward Marshal Graziani's main fortified base at Tobruch, 70 miles west, the R. A. F. and the mechanized British attacked them and occasionally fleet units shelled the road. At length the Bardia troops resigned themselves to being bottled up, praying for rescue...
...especially steel helmets, barbed wire.) Graziani, in explaining himself to Mussolini, put the blame of his defeat on a shortage of tanks. While Graziani worked desperately to reform his Army, the British surrounded Bardia with artillery and infantry. The R. A. F., ranging even more widely, rained bombs on Tobruch. Derna, even on the main Italian air bases across Libya at Benina, Benghazi, Castel Benito. Graziani had some 200,000 men left and possibly-just possibly-he was lying back to let the British extend themselves into Libya...
...Libyan naval base of Tobruch, where Graziani's main supplies were concentrated, the British claimed their bombers smashed barracks, wharves and massed trucks. British planes cracked at Sálum, others attacked Sidi Barráni. On the alert for planes, forced to keep up a desert "guerrilla-artillery" battle, Sidi Barráni also awoke last week to find the British Fleet off shore. As the sun nosed over the desert mesas, warships nosed out of a shroud of morning haze. A moment later their guns belched salvos pointblank into the heart of the city. Observers...
...harassing, guerrilla tactics along the Libyan border with light tanks and armored trucks stung the Italians, just after Balbo's death, into attempting a Blitzkrieg drive with a mechanized column of more than 1,000 men on the fortified British coastal base of Sollum, 75 miles east of Tobruch. The British broke up this effort with a flanking attack, and the survivors took refuge in the deserted adobe Fort Capuzzo. There they still were after a thirsty week, sucking stones to eke out their water supply, which the British cut off by removing many sections of the pipeline down...
...Correspondent Edmond Taylor of CBS, upon his return from Italy last week, said that Balbo was shot down while flying a party of friends on a sightseeing trip over Tobruch, just as Italy announced officially. But Italy's suppression of the bad news for two days or so gave the British a chance to say, truthfully, that no R. A. F. planes operated over Tobruch that later day, thus casting sinister mystery over Balbo's death...