Word: bridgehead
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Russia. Between the Pripet Marshes and Leningrad, the Red Army smashed into the enemy in a new offensive, moved 19 miles on a 50-mile front in five days. At Kherson, 640 miles to the south, it drove the enemy from his bridgehead on the Dnieper's south bank. Question for Germans: Where would the big blow fall...
...from the Eighth. Montgomery attacked in the Montgomery manner. On a bridgehead across the swollen Sangro River he massed his British, Indian and New Zealand troops, some still bearing the tan of Africa and Sicily. Then he lined up his artillery. All one day the guns thundered; between breakfast and tea 50,000 shells gouged the Germans crouching behind mines and barbed wire on the ridge above the valley. Clearing weather enabled the Allied Tactical Air Force to help: nine waves of light bombers, 50 formations of fighters and fighter-bombers raked the enemy positions...
Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson appeared for the defense. "The War Department is proud of Canol," he declared. As for its exorbitant cost, "one might as well criticize the cost of capturing the Salerno bridgehead by stating that the land acquired was worth only a few dollars an acre...
Hastily, the German Command threw tanks into a counterattack. The Russians were dislodged from a village they had already occupied, and driven back into the forest. But what they were meant to do, they had done; while the German attention was diverted, Russian infantrymen crossed the Dnieper, seized a bridgehead between the areas where the Red Army broke across the river in the last month. On to this foothold poured reinforcements of airborne and parachute troops...
What Price Audacity? The Cherkassy bridgehead was one of the Ukrainian chessboard squares on which the two armies played their complex game of blood and wits. It was a game of thrusts, traps, flanking attacks. It was a game in which the player with more patience and stamina, greater reserves, better supply lines stood the better chance...