Word: fallings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hitler's impulsive attack on Yugoslavia had delayed his invasion of Russia by a month -- which was to become critically important when the first snows began to fall. But the Germans expected little trouble when they rescheduled Operation Barbarossa for June...
Hitler had hoped to attack the Low Countries in the fall of 1939, as soon as possible after the conquest of Poland, but the plan was delayed first by objections from the German generals, then by bad weather, then by a bizarre twist of fortune. A Luftwaffe major who carried a set of the invasion plans in his briefcase was sitting in an officers club in Munster and bemoaning the long train trip to a planning conference in Cologne the next day; another major, who was getting too old for active duty, offered to fly him there so that...
...last days before the fall of France, Churchill had summoned up his most heroic eloquence to rally his beleaguered people. "We shall go on to the end," he told Parliament on June 4. "We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." And again on June 18: "Let us therefore brace ourselves...
Just as Hitler had thought that Britain would give up after the fall of France, he now thought that nightly bombing would make the English rise in revolt against Churchill's pursuit of the war. (It was a miscalculation that the Allies were to repeat in their subsequent bombing of German cities.) Londoners instead took pride in their ability to endure the blitz, to spend long hours in the subway bomb shelters, to put out the fires and go on with their lives. "I saw many flags flying from staffs," Edward R. Murrow reported to America one night over...
Even before the Battle of Britain, Hitler wanted his generals to start planning an invasion of Russia in the fall of 1940. They managed to talk him into delaying until the following May. Germany signed a trade agreement with the U.S.S.R. as late as January 1941, but a month earlier Hitler had told his commanders, "The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign." The battle plan called for some 148 divisions -- more than 3 million men -- to attack in three main drives along a 1,000-mile front. One army group would strike...