Word: tobruk
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Around fallen Tobruk the man-made sandstorms, kicked up by tanks scouring the desert, died down in little dunes beside the gridded tracks. Torn barbed wire marked the silent graves of Knightsbridge, El Adem, Acroma. Germany's Erwin Rommel was 200 miles to the east, rolling into Matr...
...Tobruk was full of grinning, jabbering Italians. Rommel was cleverly using Italians to occupy captured ports, for salvage work, to count prisoners and booty-thus saving valuable German manpower for his thrust at the stepping-stones to Suez...
Terrible tales were told by the handful of British who escaped by sea from Tobruk: how swarming Stukas silenced the port's gun positions one by one, how Rommel's truck-borne infantry poured through and caught the defenders in murderous cross fire. A British truck driver named Downes, who escaped from both Dunkirk and Tobruk, said Tobruk was worse. Reaching the docks just as an artillery shell blew up a building behind him, he boarded a tug, which soon took two or three direct shell hits amidships. He jumped overboard, swam around patches of blazing oil, cried...
Outnumbered in tanks since their losses before Tobruk, the British gave...
...Germans will be in Alexandria by July 8 and in Cairo by the 13th, there are practically no signs of evacuation or panic. The American Embassy and Military Mission Headquarters function with the same cool efficiency which characterized them when the enemy was well on the other side of Tobruk...