Word: clamping
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Clamp. The millions of Berliners who could not fight, those who did not want to fight now that doom was on the doorstep, milled in panic. They surged to the Ringbahn, fought each other to get on the last trains to anywhere. They massed in the air-raid shelters, choked the Unter-grundbahn platforms and tracks. Stunned, they huddled wherever they could find shelter and waited...
Zhukov's men did not wait. Like a multi-toothed clamp, the Red Army sent piercing thrusts into the outer districts, tightening the pressure all around. Suddenly the Russians were everywhere in the ring of industrial districts and workers' suburbs to the north and east. The first deep piercings were among the wreckage of the rows of dark, ugly brick and stone houses of Wreissensee and Pankow. Here had lived the hundreds of thousands of Berliners who had known the kicks and cuffs of the little Nazi bosses. These were Berlin's onetime centers of Socialism...
...clamp closed on a dozen districts. Then suddenly the Russians seemed to be everywhere at once on the south. Cavalrymen from Siberia, Cossacks from the Don raced west behind the armored thrusts, galloped into woods to slash out German gunners-and the Germans touched off fuel to set the woods ablaze. Soon shells fell on Tempelhof airdrome. Berlin was three-quarters encircled...
Dusty History. By this week it appeared that Berlin's envelopment and destruction would have to be total. Fear-crazed men fought beside the fanatics as the teeth of the clamp bit deeper by the hour. Now the Russians were on the main spokes of the wheel of Chaussees and wide Strassen that led to the hub at Alexander Platz. From Weissensee and Pankow they bit in toward the big Sportspalast, where Adolf Hitler had recited much of the history that now had turned to bitter dust...
...less than two weeks General Chernyakhovsky and Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky had done what Russian armies in 1914 failed to do: clamp a bear hug on the province of East Prussia. Chernyakhovsky had struck from the east and north, Rokossovsky from the southeast. They ripped through historic forests, the hunting grounds of the Kaisers, through cities rich in Prussian military lore-Tilsit, Gumbinnen, Tannenberg, Allenstein...