Word: diethelm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...question of the week was: should France have a big, expensive army or a small, inexpensive one? Puffy-cheeked War Minister André Diethelm thought the army should be a whopper, chiefly as a matter of prestige. Lean, hardheaded Finance Minister René Pleven insisted that a small, tight, mechanized force was all that was necessary: in tomorrow's atomic war a massive array of manpower would be silly. Last week the Cabinet met in Paris, listened for five hours to the williwaw of conflicting opinions. The man who does France's bookkeeping finally...
...would the grande armée be? War Minister Andre Diethelm spoke of 650,000 men. They will include some 70,000 troops trained in North Africa and one F.F.I, division now fighting in Alsace, most of the remaining 300,000 men of the F.F.I., recruits from an estimated 200,000 21-year-olds to be conscripted this month...
| 1 |