Word: backed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...from sin (Gustavo Rojo) to sin (Dennis King). Crowd scene follows crowd scene: theaters, bullfights, battles. She finds her dragoon again at the side of the "Iron Duke" just before the Battle of Waterloo, which is thrown in for good measure. In the end, of course, she goes back to the convent, and at this point it becomes painfully apparent that the moviemakers intend, even at the risk of sacrilege, to have their unleavened bread and eat it too. But after more than two hours of claptrap, audiences will probably be too tired to care, except about just one thing...
...luckiest augury was a pair of women's grey suede shoes, size 5½. They nestled in the command car of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as he sped away from his Normandy headquarters on the morning of June 4, 1944, D-minus-two. Rommel, charged with throwing back any invasion attempt, planned to ask Hitler for reinforcements during his visit to Germany, but something more personal sent him on his trip. June 6 was his wife's birthday, and the Desert Fox planned to surprise her with the grey suede shoes...
...surprise, of course, was on Rommel, who was caught notably out of position; and he was to keep muttering through that fateful invasion day, as he rushed back to Normandy: "How stupid of me, how stupid of me." It is the number of fortuitous errors and outright bungles on the German side that lends fascination and suspense to Author Cornelius Ryan's reconstruction of The Longest Day. Author Ryan, onetime senior writer for Collier's, has dug assiduously into the histories, war diaries and personal recollections of all the D-day fighters he could find on either side...
...enemy landing in Normandy. On the very eve of Dday, the Seventh Army, guarding Normandy, was taken off alert because the weather was bad and all previous Allied landings had taken place in fair weather. The 124 planes of the 26th fighter wing stationed near the coast were pulled back on June 5. The only daylight action of the Luftwaffe on D-day was one two-plane air strike. For twelve hours, Jodl refused to release two Panzer divisions that might have been thrown in, and feared to interrupt Hitler's pill-drugged sleep with news of the invasion...
Booth Led Boldly. Vachel began in Jacksonville, Fla., provisioned with a packet of poems and no money. For two months he wandered to the Northwest, trading poems and talk for food, announcing to startled householders that "I am the sole active member of the ancient brotherhood of the troubadours." Back in Springfield, townspeople snickered; later he was to say, "People thought I fought for fame, but I only fought my way through from being the town fool and the family idiot.'' It was a long fight; Lindsay was 33 when Harriet Monroe printed General Booth (with its parenthetical...