Word: tripoli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was a glamor about Tripoli. It was ancient Oea under Phoenician traders 1,000 years before Christ was born. It was a Roman colony after the fall of Carthage. It was the seat of Barbary coast pirates who waged a losing war against the U.S. Navy in the early 1800s. Since 1912, when the Italians wrested it from Turkish rule, it had bolstered the Italian ego. Since 1933, when Mussolini began exploiting its riches, it had inflated Italian pride. Losing it was a shock...
...Until Tripoli fell, the Italian press and radio carried only vague reports of fighting moving west in Libya. When the capitulation could no longer be kept from the people, there were lame excuses that Tripoli was no longer strategically important. But the Italians asked: "Where was Rommel?" They remembered Winston Churchill's pledge of December 1940 to rip Mussolini's overseas empire into tatters. They wondered how long it would take before the tide of battle surged across the Mediterranean to their own shores...
...piercing eyes, hawk's nose and cadaverous cheeks. General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had traversed half the continent of Africa, leading a victorious army on the heels of a beaten one. To his troops he had proclaimed: "Nothing has stopped us. ... Nothing will." This week he was in Tripoli and driving...
...could see. When they moved a bright green flare went up and dripped down behind, then two more and then another, and in that eerie light all you could see were soldiers shuffling toward the enemy. . . . There was little left in doubt except the speed with which Tripoli would be reached...
...Erwin Rommel's once-great African army streamed on ahead. German artillery blazed away, rocked back, blazed away again from the mountains that surround Italy's loveliest African seaport. Futilely the Luftwaffe rose to ward off the blows of a superior enemy. At last they gave up. Tripoli fell in flames and smoke, much of its harbor facilities, many of its military installations demolished by the fleeing Nazis. They continued to flee as light British warships crowded in and shelled them from the sea; as Allied planes strafed them, turning wild-running trucks into long fiery columns...