Word: balkans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...week the Germans in Rumania lost the rich oil fields of Ploesti; Constanta, Rumania's chief port on the Black Sea; Bucharest, the "little Paris" of the Balkans. Worst of all, by choosing to fight for the Wallachian plain, Adolf Hitler had lost the better part of 30 divisions -which might otherwise have pulled back to defend Germany proper. Moreover the Russians, now heading for a junction with Marshal Tito's forces in Yugoslavia, threatened to cut off all the remaining Wehrmacht divisions-estimated at 15 to 20-in the southern Balkan peninsula...
...Balkan foundations curmpled; its eastern ramparts shook before the battering of Russian might that could not be denied...
Disaster Compounded. As the week began, there had been inspired rumors that Bulgaria was about to desert the Axis. But before the Bulgars could act, the Rumanians beat them to it. King Mihai himself jumped on the Allied bandwagon and, for once, a Balkan king's act represented the will of the people (see FOREIGN NEWS). For the Wehrmacht, defections in the Balkans meant disaster at astronomically compounded interest: 22 German divisions on the Rumanian front were doomed to defeat, most of them to death or capture; 25 Rumanian divisions which had been helping the Nazis turned against them...
...anniversary exultant with victory, jubilant with the hope that the war was nearing its end as the Allies harried the Germans through France, the Russians smashed through the Galati Gap and Hitler's Balkan outworks began to crumble. It was also a moment for glancing at the war's score...
Officially We Know Nothing. Another Balkan monarch, Bulgaria's seven-year-old King Simeon II, may also owe his tottery throne to the Soviet Union. Said the same official: "Moscow should have informed us of an understanding with Bulgaria. It did not. So, officially, we do not know anything about it. But several indications have come to us, mainly from Ankara, pointing to the probability of the existence of a Soviet-Bulgarian understanding...