Word: dunkirks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Fontenoy, Waterloo and Dunkirk. The Coldstream Guards were organized by Oliver Cromwell's famed henchman, Colonel Monck, who taught them "to keep a line, stay unbroken, hold [fire] until the word of command." Nearly a century later, at the Battle of Fontenoy, Coldstream muskets wiped out the entire front line of the French Guards in a single volley. The Guards served with distinction at Waterloo, in the Crimea and in the Boer War. In Nieppe Forest in 1918, a handful of Coldstreamers were ordered to stand up to the great German advance at all costs, and were wiped...
...British ground armies as a whole have come a long way since Dunkirk. They were ill-trained and vitiated by appeasement when war came, not unlike the "Old Contemptibles" which the Kaiser scorned in 1914. But they have learned and grown in the hard school of battle...
...Military Cross. Since then some wits have called him "Empsey Dempsey Empsey" (M.C. Dempsey, M.C.). Like many another aloof and quiet man, Dempsey has perversely acquired nicknames. Samples: "Bimbo" and "Lucky." In 1940 Dempsey went to France with the 13th Infantry Brigade and took it out again over the Dunkirk beaches. In England he rose rapidly through command and staff posts, learning about tank warfare and amphibious operations. He got into the last stages of the Africa campaign commanding the XIII Corps (he considers 13 his lucky number), took it into Sicily and Italy, fought several highly successful and highly...
Killed in Action. Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay, 61, General Eisenhower's naval commander in chief, topnotch amphibious-operations officer, who organized the evacuation from Dunkirk, planned and executed the naval phases of the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy; in a plane crash near Paris. A quiet, aloof man (nicknamed "Dynamo" by admiring associates), Ramsay refused to let Churchill watch the landings in Normandy, on the grounds that he and his men would have enough to do without worrying about the Prime Minister's security...
Britain learned it first, in the black days after Dunkirk: even the old men had to be prepared to fight. Germany was deep into the fifth year before it had to dig so deep...