Word: anti-tank
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...third week ended, the French reported severe German counterattacks on the Blies Valley salient to relieve French pressure on Zweibrücken. A mass of fast light German tanks was said to have been smashed up at the French wire by anti-tank fire, the wreckage of 20 of them blocking the passage of heavier German tanks. German counterattacks in the Bienwald east of Bitche were evidently more successful. At the northwest end of the line, the French advance from Perl in the direction of Trier progressed yard by yard. Then, this week, along the 80-mile Rhine front from...
...first comes the barbed wire; then huge anti-tank teeth and a "carpet" of mines; then the self-sufficient machine-gun and anti-tank gun emplacements, some firing by remote control. Saar-brikken lies within this defensive zone, six to 18 miles deep packed with hidden anti-aircraft gun pits. Then come the bunkers and major fortifications. The average over-all depth of the Siegfried Position is 30 miles and it embraces 22,000 separate fortified positions (see cuts...
Straightforward military technological improvement has proceeded apace in some fields, especially the speed and versatility of tanks, the accuracy of aerial bombing, the range and speed of airplanes. Yet the most effective innovation of the Spanish civil war was a crude anti-tank weapon- bottles of gasoline wrapped in burning rags which were hurled at Insurgent tanks by Loyalist infantry. And the record for long-distance artillery fire is still held by the monster guns with which, during World War I, the Germans shelled Paris from a wood 70-odd miles away...
...forget fancier phases of close-order drill, concentrate on teaching men how to shoot. Majority of French ordnance is old; but, like a skilled automobile mechanic with a battered jalopy, French marksmen get the most out of 1914 Hotchkisses, 1897-model Seventy-fives. The French are short on good anti-tank guns, way behind in the air (nationalization of the aircraft industry was a flop under the Popular Front), well-fixed for heavily-armored tanks...
...Germans have more anti-tank guns than the French, and learned the value of heavy armored tanks after the debacle of the light tanks in Spain. But Germans are way ahead in production of planes, build them with speed and without gadgets, "to fight in . . . [not] to live in." Since kudos goes to Nazi airmen, morale of air force is excellent. Göring's policy is to produce pilots in short order, then turn them loose and depend on the survival of the fittest...