Word: tobruk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...gives the readings his dramatic best, he has had enthusiastic audiences since he began. Last week he went from Dickens to Benchley, from a medieval carol ("From far away we come to you . . .") to Ogden Nash ("Epstein, Spare that Yule Log!"), to poems written by soldiers at Tobruk...
Their most important and spectacular campaign was against an estimated 30,000 enemy troops on Borneo. It was also their most successful. Under the Corps command of dapper, dashing Lieut. General Sir Leslie ("Holy Terror") Morshead, onetime schoolmaster and hero of the siege of Tobruk, the 7th Division had secured the vital Balikpapan area within three weeks of its invasion. Last week the 7th beat down bitter resistance to take another first-rate military prize: the Sambodja oil field, 28 miles northeast of Balikpapan and one of the three major producing areas of eastern Borneo...
...Captured at the sixth battle of Tobruk." (That flag hung on our wall for weeks until a stenographer in a neighboring building saw it from across the street, warned the F.B.I, that there was a "nest of Nazis" in the TIME & LIFE Building...
Aside from the spongy swamps, thick jungles and steaming heat, it was a walk over for the "rats of Tobruk"-Australia's 9th Division. The Japanese, as usual, left only rearguards around the beach, and pulled back into the mountains and jungles with 2,000 to 5,000 troops. On the first day the Aussies found only 61 enemy dead and took one prisoner; they lost not a single man in the landing...
...actual weapon advantage was still his. The Wehrmacht rode that advantage for 15 months, but the ride was no longer easy. The Wehrmacht now had to skimp. The results showed clearly in the Mediterranean: the Afrika Korps recovered Italian Cyrenaica but lacked enough power to crush beseiged Tobruk; then lost Cyrenaica again to Auchinleck; finally, reinforced, overran the British army to push across Egypt to El Alamein. At that point only a decimated British army which had lost most of its equipment stood between Rommel and Cairo...