Word: direful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...tunes on a battery of peep-peep horns, bobbed from one brassy note to another, burping warnings. The German Elite Guards with "new arms" had marched through Paris in "a westerly direction." An invasion of Europe was "bound to have disastrous results for the U.S. and England. It threatens dire calamity to the Anglo-American conduct of the war." In Vichyfrance, Pierre Laval chimed in, proclaimed to Frenchmen that any aid to invaders would be drastically dealt with...
...army still stood. But the valiant Russians were yielding step by step the greater part of their European soil. They were falling back ever closer to Asia. Each backward step brought the United Nations closer to facing the awful question: What if Russia fell? Whatever the probabilities, that dire possibility had to be faced. How would Russia's defeat tip the scales toward the Axis? How many men, how much oil, how many planes, what raw materials would be left to fight the Battle of the World...
...Butylene fell to Rubber Reserve Corp.; toluene (for TNT) to Army Ordnance; aviation gasoline to the Office of the Petroleum Coordinator. Something at last began to happen about six weeks ago. Its foundation was the sober recognition on everyone's part that 1) the rubber situation was so dire as to threaten the war effort itself; 2) the raw materials situation as a whole (particularly in steel) was so dire that the rubber program had to be frozen, and on a strictly string-saving basis at that...
There was dire need for the risks they ran, and for the trickle of supplies that was slowly becoming a tiny but continuous stream. China was desperate for all they could carry, and for the combat planes and ground crews that other pilots were ferrying over northern Burma. The Chinese still had 50 miles of railroad in east China, which denied the Japanese the use of the line between Shanghai and the south. But the Jap had taken the last of three fine airfields prepared by the Chinese in Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces against the day when the Americans would...
...still talking last week of a reduction of cars in use-for lack of rubber-from 27,000,000 now (v. 20,886.000 in 1932) to 23,700,000 at year's end, to 9,000.000 at the end of 1943 and to none by 1945. If that dire prediction comes true, whatever the civilian may suffer in loss of convenience will pale beside the terrific consequences to the war effort itself...