Word: bend
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Along Africa's western hump and inward bend ran a current of news and rumor...
...such a cost had Marshal von Bock thrust into the Caucasus and heaved his tank-bristling lines to the Don bend where, with seemingly inexhaustible waves of men and weapons, he was making his greatest bid for a breakthrough to Stalingrad and the Volga. At such a cost had Marshal Timoshenko kept his Red Army virtually intact, with supply lines still open to the Caucasus oilfields and munitions centers to the east. Whether the awful costs had been worth it to either, whether they could afford such expenditure of human life and weapons would be tallied only after the battle...
...bend the struggle reached a crisis. For three weeks the Germans had inched forward, slowly cleaning out the last Russian resistance west of the river. Now they had bridgeheads across the Don where it crooks within 47 miles of Stalingrad. Two new footholds were won, the sprouting prongs of a pincer designed to squeeze off the lower Volga's key industrial city. One prong thrust northeast from Kotelnikov in great force, the other southeast from Kletskaya, in relentless progress that the Red Army was unable to halt...
...tremendous cost and with the possibility that the Wehrmacht's blue chips soon might be stacked too high for the Red Army. It was on this sector that the Germans had massed their greatest strength. They hammered forward last week to occupy most of the great eastward bend of the Don, where it comes within 48 miles of Stalingrad and the Volga, Russia's next line of defense...
Eyes on Astrakhan. As the Germans hammered east from Rostov, it apeared that Nazi strategists might be planning to by-pass Stalingrad, whose defense lines for three weeks have remained relatively unchanged in the Don bend. Cutting the Volga at Astrakhan would be just as effective as servering it at Stalingrad. Between the German forces bulging east from Rostov and their river objective lie only rolling steppes, covered with slivery feather grass, ridged with few hills, marked by few towns. It is terrain eminently suitable for mechanized warfare. Part is scorching desert now, particularly as it slopes down...