Word: attackable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Each triumph filled Hitler with ever greater confidence in his invincibility, in his political instincts and in the irresolution of his antagonists. Having easily conquered Austria, he decided in the spring of 1938 to attack Czechoslovakia. Like Poland, Czechoslovakia had been carved out of the Habsburg Empire by the mapmakers at Versailles, and its boundaries included an awkward mixture of roughly 6.5 million Czechs, 3.3 million Germans, 2.5 million Slovaks and about 800,000 Hungarians and Poles. Unlike Poland, it was a genuine democracy with a large and well-equipped army; it also had signed a treaty that pledged France...
...grotesque misstatement of the ugly reality. Five months earlier, the secret plan known as Operation White had declared, "The task of the Wehrmacht is to destroy the Polish armed forces. To this end, a surprise attack is to be aimed at and prepared . . . any time from Sept. 1, 1939, onward." If anything more was needed, it was the neutralization of Poland's other big neighbor, Soviet Russia, and Hitler had achieved that just the previous week by suddenly concluding a treaty of cooperation with his supposed archenemy Joseph Stalin. And so, at the appointed hour of 4:45 a.m. (Poland...
Blitzkrieg and deception. In disputed Danzig, the once German port administered by the League of Nations since the end of World War I, the attack had begun half an hour before the invasion, when local Nazi Storm Troopers seized several key buildings and intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where 51 postal workers barricaded the doors...
Though Hitler had made no pretense of declaring war on Poland -- with which he had signed a ten-year nonaggression pact in 1934 -- the British and French response to his attack was glacial in its formality. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summon the German charge d'affaires to ask if he had any explanation for this "very serious situation." The charge admitted only that the Germans were defending themselves against a Polish attack...
...from everything, was Poland's military high command. If the Poles had adopted a more cautious strategy in the first place, pulling back to form a defensible perimeter, they might have lasted longer. But the Poles refused to abandon an inch of their land, and the Germans' surprise attack across the unfortified frontier threw the defenders into confusion. Military units got separated and cut off; refugees jammed the highways; communications systems broke down; the Germans not only knew Polish codes but also broadcast false information on Polish radio frequencies...