Word: toehold
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...Eighth had an easy time in Calabria only because the Germans did not fight there. They would have been there, fighting hard, if they had not had to prepare for landings farther north, and the Allies might be struggling for their first toehold on Italy's tip instead of holding the Salerno area and the Sorrento peninsula. 20 mi. below Naples. The fact that the Germans expected the landing at Salerno cut no military ice; they presumably knew that the Salerno beaches, about as far north as the Allies could land and still be within fighter cover from Sicily...
...most poignant memory of our first day at Radcliffe concerns the ladders of Briggs Hall. On the first trip up to the fourth deck we labored with a load of luggage. The second jaunt was a struggle to keep a toehold under a four-foot stack of publications. Last cargo hauled by this Naval Transportation Service was fifteen pounds of bedding...
...with 35 bombers and 30 fighters. Twelve were shot down at a cost of only two U.S. fighters. The Marines managed to enlarge their three-by-six-mile territory on 25-by-80-mile Guadalcanal. At night the Jap landed more reinforcements on either side of the Marines' toehold. The Navy brought up a task force in an attempt to stop these landings; it sank a Jap cruiser, four destroyers and a transport, lost only one destroyer...
Closer & Closer. Early in the morning of Oct. 15 the Jap swept past little Savo Island, was able to make daylight landings for the first time on the northwest tip of Guadalcanal, only 15 miles from the Marines' toehold. He paid heavily. Haggard American flyers hit a battleship, fired three transports that still burned late that afternoon. But the Jap still came. He lost 17 more planes in one attack on Henderson Field. At week's end the Jap landed artillery and brought it close enough to shell U.S. positions, now under attack from land...
North from Tulagi lie Jap bases which the U.S. and Australian forces will need soon to clean out: all the airdromes, troop centers and anchorages in the upper Solomons, within easy range of the Marines' southern toehold. The job even then would not be finished. For the Japs' great concentration point at Rabaul in New Britain would still be dangerously close-660 miles from Tulagi, 200 from Bougainville. The Japs would even then still be in upper New Guinea, a scant 350 miles from Rabaul. Above Port Moresby last week, an Australian force (with some U.S. troops...