Word: bocke
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When the Germans launched their second supposedly final attack on Moscow a fortnight ago Berlin military spokesmen called it a "do-or-die" drive. It was planned and commanded by Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, who because he loves to lecture his men on the glory of dying for the Fatherland, is called der Sterber (the Dier). By this week many a German had died before Moscow, and the Dier was still doing. But the city still stood...
...Battle. German Intelligence had also studied PU-36. Reconnaissance had looked over the Smolensk area. In posthumous tribute to Marshal Tukhachevsky, the German commander in this area, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, decided to abandon the fundamental pattern of Blitzkrieg -cutting as if with a knife through one strategic spot (as at Sedan) and then encircling. Instead he dug in, as if with a gigantic fork, sending five parallel prongs into the defense area. Each pair of prongs had to reduce island after island between them...
Against France the team was together again: Leeb on the left, Rundstedt in the center, Bock on the right. In Russia, Leeb is attacking Leningrad in the north, Bock has been assigned Moscow in the center, and Rundstedt is working on the Ukraine to the south...
...there is a type of top-ranking German general, these three are it. They look almost exactly alike (see cut}-heavily lined face, aquiline nose, snapping snake-eyes, lips tight and bitter. They are old: Rundstedt is 65, Leeb will be next month, Bock is 60. They are stiffly aristocratic: all three sport vons. None of them thinks much of the Nazis: Leeb and Rundstedt both retired temporarily in 1938, reportedly for political reasons, and ascetic Bock hates sensuous Goring. But all of them love soldiering and have a consuming sense of patriotic duty...
...Bock is the most fanatical. His fanaticism is military, not political. Leading an army into the Sudetenland, he took his twelve-year-old son, dressed in a sailor suit, along in his car "to impress on his son the beauty and exhilaration that lie in soldiering." German officers call him der Sterber, the dier, because of his great fondness for holding forth on the glories of dying for the Fatherland. It used to be generally said in Berlin that he had Russian blood in his veins. But it was blue blood...