Word: abbeys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Germans were using the famed 1,400-year-old Benedictine abbey as an artillery-observation post. This seemed well established, as hundreds of young Americans died on the slope below. Collier's War Correspondent Frank Gevasi reported: "I saw 800 [Americans] go out and 24 come back, because the Germans could see every move and turn their fire on them." And the Germans, after noting heavy, bloody U.S. losses, laconically reported in a communiqué that Indian Gurkha troops had replaced "the worn-out Americans...
...slaughter grew too great. After weeks of soul searching and delay, the Allies decided to bomb and to shell the abbey. They followed a Dec. 29, 1943 order of General Dwight Eisenhower: "We are fighting in a country . . . rich in monuments which illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows. If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men's lives count infinitely more, and the buildings must...
...howitzers pumped shells up the hill. The mountain seemed to jump and quiver, like a great bear twitching in sleep. Observers counted 200 men, some allegedly in uniform, scurrying out of the devastated monastery. As the next-to-last wave of 20 Marauders dropped a cluster smack on the abbey, an American soldier yelled: "Touchdown...
...week's end the Allies were reported to be bombing the Nazi-occupied 6th-Century Abbey of Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict founded the Benedictine order of monks, 1,415 years...
...Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. invented the word anaesthesia (1846); Jane Austen gets credit for the first recorded use of baseball, in Northanger Abbey...