Britain sent General Braddock with 1,400 British regulars and 450 colonials — including Washington — to capture Fort Duquesne (modern Pittsburgh). A French and Indian force of 900 ambushed the column on a forest road. The disciplined British formations were devastated by fire from men they couldn't see. Braddock was mortally wounded; two-thirds of his force was killed or wounded. Washington had two horses shot from under him and four bullet holes in his coat.
The worst British military disaster in North America to that point. It exposed the fatal weakness of European linear tactics in forest warfare. Washington's cool conduct under fire made him famous throughout the colonies. The destruction of Braddock's force left the entire Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier undefended.
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Allied forces invaded Sicily on July 9, 1943, then crossed to the Italian mainland in September. Mussolini was deposed and Italy surrendered, but Germany occupied and fiercely defended the peninsula. Kesselring conducted a masterful fighting withdrawal through a series of defensive lines — the Winter Line, Gustav Line, Gothic Line — forcing the Allies to fight for every mountain and river. The battles at Monte Cassino, Anzio, and the Gothic Line ground on for nearly two years. Germany surrendered in Italy on May 2, 1945.
The Italian campaign knocked Italy out of the war and forced Germany to divert 25 divisions from other fronts. The capture of Rome on June 4, 1944 — two days before D-Day — was the first Axis capital to fall. Though the 'soft underbelly of Europe' proved anything but soft, the campaign drew German strength that might otherwise have stiffened Normandy's defenses.
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When the first UN ceasefire broke down in early July, the IDF — now equipped with Czech artillery and aircraft — launched the 'Ten Days' offensive. Israeli forces captured Lydda and Ramle, towns of 50,000 people each. After a brief Arab Legion counterattack, Rabin (under Ben-Gurion's authority) ordered the expulsion of the towns' Arab populations. In summer heat, 50,000–70,000 people were forced to march east toward the Arab lines. Several hundred died from the conditions. The march was later confirmed in Rabin's memoirs.
The Lydda-Ramle expulsion was the largest single forced population transfer of the 1948 war. It demonstrated that Israeli military operations had a systematic displacement effect — and that at least in this case, the expulsion was deliberate military policy rather than a byproduct of fighting. The survivors became refugee camp populations in Jordan and the West Bank. Yitzhak Rabin's later memoir admission of the expulsion order created political controversy when it was published.
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