Word: backed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...they were located, each pill box, block house, tank trap or tank obstruction was shelled, then rushed by light tanks and infantry. One after one they were destroyed, the beleaguered German advance squads often blowing them up before scuttling back to their heavy forts. Behind them they left land mines which, when the French artillery did not find them in time blew up the advancing tanks. Also encountered were robot machine guns, operated electrically by remote control. Swarming through the Warndt Forest between Saarbrücken and Saarlautern, the French found the woods "full of destruction and traps...
When the French retreated to the Marne in 1914, their strategy proved shrewd and salutary. For the Polish armies to fall back from the Corridor and East Prussia to a primary defense line from Loruń south through Lódź and Kielce to Cracow, and after that to the angle between the Bug and Vistula Rivers in the north and the Industrial Triangle (Cracow to Lublin to Lwow) in the south, was the strategy approved for Marshal Smigly-Rydz by his Allied military advisers (see map, p. 16). He need endanger only 15 Polish divisions by this plan...
...seized Kielce, Radom, Lódź (the textile centre). The entry of one motorized unit, traveling far ahead of its support, into the heart of Warsaw, led to premature announcement of the capital's invasion on Friday. Snipers at windows, machine gunners on roofs, drove the invaders back to Warsaw's southwestern suburbs, but there the main German forces soon arrived, too, and Warsaw was hemmed in on at least two sides. To its defense from the west came Polish divisions retreating in good order out of the big pocket formed around Poznan, where the Nazi attack...
...they could form their mass of maneuver, as the French did around Paris, and strike at the separated advancing German armies, they might accomplish a master counterblow. If that did not work, there were still the rains to hope for and the Allied pressure at Germany's back...
Before German pursuit could get into the air the raiders had crawled back into the overcast and headed for home, after a lively half hour or so with every machine gun and anti-aircraft cannon in the area whanging away at them. Next day Britain announced that severe damage had been done to a battleship lying alongside the mole at Brunsbüttel, that hits had been made on a second man-of-war off Wilhelmshaven. Few days later an unconfirmed dispatch from Switzerland said the 26,000-ton Gneisenau had been sunk. Germany denied it, said its anti-aircraft...