Word: commandeer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...century's turning point, the turning point of the war was D-day. The Normandy landings might have been thrown back if the German command had not been so thoroughly surprised or so unusually slow to counterattack. But once the Allied forces were successfully ashore, Hitler was doomed, caught between armies advancing against him from the west and the Soviet east...
What really lay behind the complaints of Montgomery and Brooke was their belief that Britain was the senior partner in the Alliance and ought by rights to command its armies, even though American troops soon outnumbered their own. Britain's generals longed to preserve the waning strength of the Empire and postpone America's rise to dominance. But by the end of the war, the U.S. had 61 combat divisions -- more than 1 million men -- in Europe; the British, who had been fighting for five years and exhausted their reserves, never had more than...
Eisenhower, now a lieutenant general based in London, was chosen to command Operation Torch, which went ashore in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942. His forces then moved into Tunisia to link up with Montgomery's Eighth Army, freeing all North Africa from the Axis. By the time the U.S. persuaded Churchill to undertake a Normandy attack, Eisenhower had commanded two more seaborne invasions during 1943: Sicily and mainland Italy. They were sideshows in his eyes -- and the Italian campaign quickly bogged down into a bloody mile-by-mile struggle up the peninsula -- but they taught him a great deal...
...night of pea-soup fog in January 1944, Eisenhower arrived in London as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force that would invade the Continent. Roosevelt had decided he simply could not spare Chief of Staff Marshall, the man everyone assumed would command D-day. Instead the order signed by Britain and the U.S. went to Eisenhower: "You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces...
Montgomery argued that the best approach was to send the bulk of the forces north through Belgium and into the Ruhr under one commander -- himself. "This is a whole-time job for one man," he said. He was determined to avoid handing over command of the Allied ground forces to Eisenhower, as planned, on Sept. 1. In a direct challenge, he told Eisenhower that "to change command now would be to prolong the war." He was convinced that "one really full-blooded thrust toward Berlin is likely to get there and end the German...