Word: blows
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
July had seen Field Marshal Fedor von Bock set in motion his great 1942 offensive for the conquest of all southern Russia and a mortal blow at the Red army. By early August, advancing with seven-league strides, he was within sight of his first objective...
...heaviest initial blow had fallen on Timoshenko's central and southern wings in the Volchansk-Voroshilovgrad region. Badly smashed up, the Russians had retreated, opening the way for Bock's first big advance of the year...
Once across the Volga, Bock's armies could well rest, counting 1942 a year of victory. The way would be clear for Germany to strike another body blow at battered Russia, perhaps in the far north against supply lines from across the seas, perhaps at Moscow, where proud Fedor von Bock has a haunting defeat to sponge from his Prussian escutcheon...
...enemy, too, stepped up his aerial activity. He struck his hardest blow at Port Darwin on Australia's northern coast. In his first big night raid he sent over 27 bombers escorted by 22 Zeroes. Allied fighters met them, knocked down nine planes, lost only one. Again, Australia's defenders sent up no shouts of victory. Pared down to a minimum of equipment, they feared the implications of the big raid. It must mean that Japanese air strength in the South Pacific was on the rise. And on the future they looked with a strange, foreboding pleasure: there...
...South was, in sum, violence, cruelty, humiliation, poverty, despair, sorrow, murder, a confusion between self-interest and selfless patriotism, of which Author Richards can write like a blow between the eyes, and which sometimes he overdoes. If corpses dropped less often than ripe plums, in less tricky postures of amazement at death, and if fingers moved less automatically to triggers, this would have been a better novel. Even as it is, a queer cross between a Freudian dream and a Grand Guignol shocker, it is good enough to suggest that it will almost certainly sire a better...