Word: festung
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Heroic Snafu. To smash Festung Ploesti, U.S. air planners came up with a novel plan : a daring low-level attack that completely violated the high-level strategic bombing canons of most top Air Forces brass. The planners reasoned that a rooftop raid would give the striking B-24 Liberators an element of surprise, limit the effectiveness of the Luftwaffe, and throw off the accuracy of flak gunners primed for high-level raiders. How they miscalculated is the core of Authors Dugan and Stewart's taut and gripping tale of a disastrous yet heroic snafu - pieced together from letters, diaries...
...flyers bombed Ploesti 20 more times in fleets of up to 485 aircraft. But at war's end, Festung Ploesti was still producing at 20% of capacity...
...that time, the battle was won. Along a 30-mile front, the forces of freedom had secured their beachhead on Hitler's Festung Europa. The price was dear: 10,724 casualties, including 2,132 dead...
...months before Allied soldiers breached Festung Europa at Normandy, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt stubbornly argued over who would occupy the industry-rich Ruhr. After the invasion, Churchill's claim was reinforced by the top-level political and military decision to give Field Marshal Montgomery command of the sweep along the lowlands toward northeast Germany. Roosevelt finally yielded, let Churchill have the Ruhr...
There is every likelihood that in such a case, Churchill was prepared to retire to other parts of the Empire to carry on the war. But if Britain had been lost, there would have been small chance that the U.S. could ever have launched a successful invasion of Festung Europa. For that enterprise, a huge unsinkable aircraft carrier-was almost essential. The none too practical route through Africa would have been far less practical had the Germans not had to divide their defense between the English Channel and Mediterranean...