Word: vitalize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...airports, aircraft plants, oil fields, refineries, aqueducts. Japs hold a flat, mile-square tract of semidesert land near Los Angeles which could be turned into a landing field for bombers in an hour or two. Japanese farmers cultivate most of the foggy shoreline of Palos Verdes (next door to vital San Pedro harbor), where landing parties could sneak in undetected, under the shadow of towering cliffs, on to a number of good beaches. Other sound reasons were suggested by the case of Alien George Makamura, in whose seaside home at Santa Cruz FBI men found 69 great crates of signal...
...Francisco's longshoremen and their waterfront employers seldom agree. But last week they loudly agreed that cargo space was being wasted, that ships steamed out through the Golden Gate with precious freights of airplanes, munitions, food dangerously and improperly stowed, that loading of vital supplies for Pacific outposts was being delayed and badly managed, and that Army & Navy officials in Washington were to blame...
...Trincomalee, Britain's secondary naval base, immensely important now that Singapore is gone. Trincomalee is now the Allies' only useful naval base north of Capetown and east of Suez. Whoever holds Trincomalee and Ceylon's airdromes holds the key to the Indian Ocean and all its vital sea routes between Africa, Australia, India and the Middle East. Without Trincomalee and Ceylon, the Japanese can make Allied transport in the Indian Ocean dangerous and expensive. With Ceylon, they could make it almost impossible...
...invasion road to Ceylon. And Ceylon, just 60 miles off southern India, is a way to invasion of India itself. It could even be a substitute for invasion. With eastern India bottled up, with ships and planes in position on Ceylon to raid even the Indian routes to the vital ports of Bombay and Karachi on the Arabian Sea, Japan could well let India soften and crumble under blockade...
...calls for 215 new vessels, an average of 18 a month. But even these promising figures could not overcome the chill fact that the onetime Allied trump card, oil, was no longer a trump. The submarines that smacked shells at the refineries of Aruba and California were probing for vital or gans, for these refineries produce high-octane aviation gasoline, of which the hemisphere has none too much. Grumped the New York Herald Tribune's old Columnist Mark Sullivan: "It is by far the greatest problem of transportation and supply -what experts call 'logistics' -ever faced...