Word: bridgehead
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...bridgehead is untenable, perhaps it should be made tenable immediately. If the concept of holding a bridgehead is now antiquated, the concept of abandoning a whole continent is certainly brand new strategy: could this be a supreme glorification of the strategic retreat...
...bridgehead in Europe: probably untenable, anyway an antiquated concept...
Three arguments have turned up most frequently in support of the program. A group of high officers, including General Omar N. Bradley, have been supporting it from a military angle, claiming that strengthening the treaty countries would give us European bridgehead in case of war, that "abandosing these countries with a promise of later liberation" is militarily unsound. Bradley and his colleagues believe that the arms aid could enable Western Europe to hold on until the U. S. could "funnel in forces...
None of these arguments is particularly impressive. It is very doubtful whether the strongest possible Western European forces could do much to slow down an invasion from the east; even a completely equipped "Uniforce" would be terribly overmatched by whatever the Russians threw against it. The "Bridgehead" concept is getting more and more antiquated as the pace of modern war picks up; military strategists like to think that if we must fight a war, we should be able to pick a better operating area than historically vulnerable Western Europe...
England, which had trouble in Spain during the Peninsular Wars and never seems to have forgotten it, has been strongly suggesting the country as a made-to-order bridgehead and military base on the continent, "secure behind the Pyreness." Many military men disagree. Air and naval installations on the Iberian Peninsula would be under constant short-range bombing attack and exceptionally tough to supply; the Pyrenees are a poor barrier against airborne invasion, and nowhere near as impregnable as the Spanish like to think. Spain is fundamentally an unattractive place from which to flight a European war. There...