Word: falkenhorst
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...nation through me expresses thanks. As an external sign of recognition and of this gratitude, I decorate the Commander in Chief in Norway, General von Falkenhorst, with the Chevalier's Cross of the Iron Cross...
...Falkenhorst means "falcon's eyrie," and it was his use of winged killers that swept Germany's new hero to his fame. Blond, blue-eyed, smallish Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, 55, had proved himself a pitiless war lord. His soldierly qualities came to him from a line of professional fighters and from the same military academies-at Wahlstatt and Lichterfelde (oldtime Prussian West Point)-that turned out Germany's Hindenburg and Ludendorff. From the age of twelve, in school and at home in Breslau, he was shaped strictly for membership in his father's regiment, the crack...
...That Falkenhorst did not brilliantly distinguish himself then is suggested by the fact that he came out of his first war only a captain. In planning the Finland expedition, as General von der Goltz's operations officer, he learned about embarking troops, transporting them overseas, disembarking them for action in rough, cold country, effecting naval cooperation to feed and supply them...
...Adolf Hitler's blueprints for the Polish push were complete and Falkenhorst was given the job of raising and organizing, from scratch, an entire new division (32nd Infantry) with headquarters in the hick town of Köslin on the Pomeranian plain. Cheerfully he moved his wife and two daughters to their first real home after years of nomadic army life: an old castle just off the Köslin market place. He added municipal cares to his army work, became a military potentate. As sleepy Köslin came to life with martial activity, recruits and war materials...
...only major slip-up occurred. The destruction of the cruisers Emden and Blücher by unquisled Norse in Oslo Fjord so seriously disrupted matters that no more Nazi troops landed in Oslo Fjord by ship for two and one-half days. Without batting an eye, General von Falkenhorst, who had meantime alighted on the Oslo airport with a battalion, proceeded to bring more troops into the Oslo district the same way he got there: by Junkers transports, under cover of menacing demonstrations over the city by bomber and fighting craft. Experts now know that a score...