Word: festung
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Italy's surrender was of highest military, political and economic significance to the U.S. The Mediterranean was now an Allied lake. Militarily, the Allies were not now pacing fretfully around Festung Europa- they were on the drawbridge of Hitler's fortress. And since the fortress has no roof, the whole of the German heartland lay exposed to constant attack...
...people, surrender came as a national shriving, a chance for national redemption. For the United Nations, Italian surrender brought an hour as high as the hour of French surrender at Compiègne had been low. They had ripped the southern rampart of a Festung crumbling in the east, flung the certainty of defeat at Adolf Hitler and his panicky satellites, put themselves a long stride toward the heart of Europe and final victory...
Order from Berchtesgaden. The Germans were in Sofia to bolster the Festung's uncertain Balkan battlement. Once the Allied invasion armies overran the Italian heel, they would stand 50 miles from the Balkans' Adriatic flank. Chafing Allied forces waited to spring from eastern Mediterranean shores into the Aegean. Inside the Balkan Peninsula 50,000,000 people, hopeful or frightened, stirred...
...time to think of the last three years and wonder. The King had said he would step down if the Cabinet yielded to German demands. The members stood firm, were now, like their King, in "protective custody." The military was in full command. Denmark, like the rest of the Festung, was occupied territory...
London's News Chronicle felt a "sense of big events to come." Britons remembered Winston Churchill's prophecy of last June: "Very probably there will be heavy fighting in the Mediterranean and elsewhere before the leaves of autumn fall." From within and without Festung Europa, men scanned the pattern...