Sublime

Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Wrangel Clarke was forty-one that late 1940, having been born in Johannesburg on April 27, 1899.

But the heroic stand of the U.S. 30th Division outside Mortain, which Collins called “one of the outstanding small-unit actions of World War II”75—combined with the round-the-clock bombardment from the air—forced the Germans to fall back.

Churchill was badly shaken by the fall of Singapore (“the Gibraltar of the Pacific”), and fretted about the fate of Australia and New Zealand.