10/18/2017 0 Comments Afrika Corps Vs Desert Rats VideosAfrika Corps Vs Desert Rats Videos' title='Afrika Corps Vs Desert Rats Videos' />The Leading Edge Americans at El Alamein.By Rachel S. Cox.Politics, World War IIBy October 1.United States had been at war with Germany for nearly a year, yet American ground forces still hung back from the field. Lyrics Of Hindi Movie Rockstar Songs For Kids . And in North Africa, where British and commonwealth troops had been locked since March 1.Field Marshal Erwin Rommels Afrika Korps, the British Eighth Army had its back to the proverbial wall.Rommel and his Italian allies had their sights trained on Cairoand beyond that the Suez Canal and vital British oil fields in the Middle East.As the Eighth Army, under Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery, dug in along the Alamein Line, a blasted stretch of desert just 6.Alexandria, Egypt, the United States was helping as it could.The Sherman tanks and self propelled guns that U.S. Army chief of staff General George C.Marshall had promised to British prime minister Winston Churchill were finally arriving, giving Allied tankers something like parity against German panzers.Overhead, 1. 00 American made fighters and medium bombers had joined the assault on Axis troops, airfields, and communication lines.And in the desert five young Americans were putting their lives on the line as platoon leaders with the Kings Royal Rifle Corps.In June 1. 94. 1, frustrated by their governments unwillingness to enter the fray, they had committed to the Allied cause all of America they could command themselves.They had survived crossing the North Atlantic in a convoy, trained for nine months in England and been commissioned second lieutenants, and had traveled by merchant vessel and troopship to the theater of war.After nearly two more months of acclimatization and training, of flies in their tea and dust nearly everywhere, they at last found themselves poised for combat.By the afternoon of October 2.Operation Lightfoot, the Eighth Armys latest attack on the Alamein Line, was about to start.Forces equivalent to seven infantry divisions and three armored divisions were poised for the advance.Near the southern end of the line, Jack Brister, a 2.Dartmouth grad from Ambler, Pennsylvania, went over orders one last time with the British soldiers he commanded.As part of the 4th Light Armoured Brigade, Bristers platoon of motorized infantry would advance with the 7th Armoured Divisionthe famous Desert Ratsas they strove to penetrate formidable defenses and establish a bridgehead for tanks.Not far away, Bristers college classmate Bill Durkee, of Balboa Island, California, prepared his platoon to do the same.The defenses truly were formidable the forward enemy positions were situated within a miles deep array of half a million antitank mines interspersed with antipersonnel devices, nicknamed Devils Gardens by the Germans who installed them.Afrika Corps Vs Desert Rats Videos' title='Afrika Corps Vs Desert Rats Videos' />Wasted money on unreliable and slow multihosters LinkSnappy is the only multihost that works.Download from ALL Filehosts as a premium user at incredibly fast speeds Top VIdeos.Warning Invalid argument supplied for foreach in srvusersserverpilotappsjujaitalypublicindex.Kilauea Mount Etna Mount Yasur Mount Nyiragongo and Nyamuragira Piton de la Fournaise Erta Ale.Rommels order to reinforce the Alamein Line had been his last command before returning to the Reich for sick leave on September 2.The 7th Armoureds advance was intended to divert Axis firepower from Operation Lightfoots main point of attack in the north.There, about 2. 0 miles behind the British front line, three other young Americans in the 1st Armoured Division girded themselves for the coming conflict.Chuck Bolt hailed from Connecticut, and Heyward Cutting and Robert Cox from New Jersey.Like Brister and Durkee, they had taken the extraordinary step of enlisting in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war.Bolt, too, was a Dartmouth man.Cox and Cutting went to Harvard.The five Americans at El Alamein were the first of 1.Yanks to serve with the Kings Royal Rifle Corps during World War II.The British regiment, also known as the 6.Rifles, was formed in the American colonies during the French and Indian War when the need for local knowledge and improvisational tactics inspired Parliament to allow colonists to serve as British soldiers.The regiment lost its American element, of course, with the War of Indepedence.But in 1. 94. 1 the British unit used its history as a precedent for enlisting Americans to fight.The five who signed up in June 1.Four had just graduated from college.Heyward Cutting, the exception, was only 1.Scion of an old and wealthy American industrial family, he had been raised in England after his fathers early death and was anxious to rejoin friends there in their hour of peril.Rob Cox had grown up on family stories of his ancestors patriotic servicefrom founding father Roger Sherman to New York senator and secretary of state William M.Evarts see Finding Uncle Robbie, below.Of more immediate concern, Coxs draft number was near the top of the list.He had little appetite for joining an army that might never enter the war, and when he heard that he could join the British he jumped.I love America, and I could not sit mediocre while America was being attacked, Cox wrote in a letter to his mother, to be opened in the event of his death.For America is a faith and because it is a faith must be dynamic or perish.In spring 1. Dartmouth men had been high profile supporters of intervention on campus, where debate raged about Americas role.On April 2. 4, infuriated by news photos of the Nazi flag flying over the Acropolis, Chuck Bolt penned an open letter to President Franklin D.Roosevelt with the ringing refrain, Now we have waited long enough.The Dartmouth daily newspaper ran Bolts letter on page one, interventionist papers across America reprinted it, and New Jersey senator William H.Smathers read it into the Congressional Record.Bolts friend Jack Brister was a writer of stories and plays, a man who, as a friend later said, believed in the job of finding the truth, and that it was an important job.Senior year, he helped found a sophisticated campus magazine, The Pictorial.Bristers passionate but nuanced conviction shone through the commencement issue editorial Four months ago we wrote a bitter satire on war.We wrote it because war offends our most deeply rooted and most sincere emotions.Now we realize that we do conscientiously object to war.But we realize too that America must fight Hitler.Were ready. Ready to fight.Ready to destroy.Ready, if necessary, to be destroyed.Bill Durkee was less literary his interests were economics and politics.He saw clearly the catastrophe that would result from Nazi victory.And he shared with the others a belief in the Allied cause, a conviction that Hitler must be stopped as soon as possible, and a desire to place himself at the leading edge of history.Since the Battle of Britain began in 1.Americans had joined the Royal Air Force see The Few Among the Few, NovemberDecember 2.But as the five Rifle Corps volunteers met in New York on July 1.British Embassy official, and boarded a train to Halifax, Nova Scotia, they became the first American men to join the fight against Germany on the ground.In England, the five Americans often found themselves objects of curiosity.By then many people knew about the Yanks in the RAF, but these men were something new.Britons emerging from the Blitz thanked them, and feted them as harbingers of a time when America at large would share their mortal struggle.The American ambassador to the Court of Saint Jamess, John Gilbert Winant, befriended the quintet.They received guided tours of Parliament and the Times of London, and were entertained by British families with American tiesincluding Colonel Waldorf Astor and his American born wife, Nancy Langhorneat their palatial country house, Cliveden.They chafed with embarrassment as they posed repeatedly for photographers with the British Office of War Information, which acutely understood the volunteers propaganda value as symbols of American support.The Americans endured the same rigors as every other rifleman in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, forced to master the brutal choreography of marching and rifle drills.But much of their traininglearning to maintain and shoot rifles and Bren guns, driving trucks and motorcycles, acquiring map and compass skills, and practicing maneuvers and bivouackingseemed to be all the most wonderful boys games, as Cox put it in a letter home.When at the end of June they prepared to ship out, Ambassador Winant arranged a farewell dinner at the smart London hotel Claridges.Winant and British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden joined them in the private dining room for coffee and brandy.In peacetime the 2,0.
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