Word: cherns
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Dates: during 1944-1944
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...ears of Russian civilians. They enjoyed the report of a Red Army correspondent, who described deserted German houses "with doors swinging in the wind to reveal tables set with meals which the escaping owners had no time to eat." But in East Prussia, the soldiers of young General Ivan Chern-yakhovsky were discovering, as their Allies in the west had already discovered, the almost epileptic ferocity with which the Germans fight for their own soil...
Around Gumbinnen, the first sizable town on the rail line to Königsberg, Chern-yakhovsky ran into progressively stronger defenses-trenches, minefields, barbed wire. Every settlement was a fortress, every house and hillock a gun position. Heinrich Himmler's Home Army units were easily killed or captured, but the Wehrmacht traded punch for punch...
...Nazis took too long to tire, General Ivan Bagramyan's army group, poised on the banks of the Niemen on Chern-yakhovsky's right flank, could help things along by a breakthrough from the north. On Chernyakhovsky's left, Colonel General Georgi Zakharov was reported by the Germans to be attacking in the Masurian Lakes region with hundreds of tanks and planes, behind a "drumfire of artillery" (the usual German phrase indicating a breakthrough assault...