Word: tobruk
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...R.A.F. and their U.S. and Empire allies looked strongest in the air. One day they knocked off 16 Stukas, eleven Messerschmitts and a lone Italian Macchi. Another day they wrecked 50 Axis supply trucks. Every night, on Tobruk, Bengasi, even Tripoli, British and U.S. bombers staged the most massive raids the desert battleground has ever known. One flyer compared the destruction in Bengasi to that in Cologne...
Rommel Remains. This was all very well, but the object of modern desert war is to destroy the hostile armored forces, or to cripple them so badly that they must flee. That was what Rommel had done to the British before Tobruk, and the resulting vacuum had made easy his drive into Egypt. As yet neither British guns, tanks nor air force had made a dent on Rommel's Army...
Censor Troubles. Last December, when a British offensive in Libya unexpectedly bogged down, the London Daily Mirror cried in anguish: "Can nobody dampen the airy-fairy optimism of the military spokesmen in Cairo?" Apparently not. Even after Tobruk, the Cairo censorship seemed determined to let only pink fog get through the screen-thus taxing the ingenuity of one sardonic correspondent who was bound to get a little acid out along with the fog. Chester Morrison of the Chicago Sun cabled his paper: "The delicacies of censorship are such that I was stumped in trying to devise a way to tell...
Most of the British were not quick enough in retiring; 25,000 of them holed up in Tobruk for a long siege. Rommel did not take even a day to organize and prepare his assault. He organized it, under his hat, in one evening. The next morning, before the British were ready, his tanks stormed the defenses of Tobruk, cut down to the town and began shooting up shipping in the harbor before the British had even begun to evacuate. Rommel had seen that Tobruk was a difficult town to take in an eight-month siege, would be much easier...
...Tobruk? In his humble vein, Winston Churchill confirmed the general diagnosis that Tobruk had fallen because the German High Command outsmarted the British, and because German equipment was better (TIME, July 6)-partly excusing it on the ground that quick manufacturing for British Isles defenses had put the premium in British material on quantity rather than quality. Many were his revelations, intentional or otherwise, of British military naivete...