Word: french
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Dawn: Dark enough to strike without giving too much away, light enough to set the victim up in silhouette. It was to be a simple operation. All the Admiral Graf Spec had to do was warn the plodding French freighter not to send out radio alarms, take off her jittery crew, shell her or set some TNT below, and give her a one-way ticket to Davy Jones. Then get away...
...refuel-evidently on their way to Montevideo. The 31,100-ton battleship Barham, and the French battleship Dunkergue-it and the Renown two of five Allied ships which can both outrun and outgun German pocket battleships-and the 10,000-ton cruiser Cumberland were rumored to be waiting just over the horizon...
Urbane, witty Jean Hippolyte Giraudoux, playwright and novelist, is always irritated to be called a propagandist. He insists he is simply the chief of the French Commissariat General de I'Information. Another pet annoyance is to be told that France and Britain are fighting a "phony war," and last week, in a speech of high literary quality before the American Club in Paris, M. Giraudoux set about to correct any such notions held by transatlantic strategists...
Already in this war, said M. Giraudoux, more British sailors and French soldiers have been lost than in those "battles to save the world- Thermopylae and Valmy."* Moreover, "even if it means boring the world to tears," the Allies are not going to bother about giving a "performance packed with box-office appeal for the reading and listening audiences. . . . Our Army is intact and ready, but fighting as we are for the principles of life against the principles of death, we would be contradicting ourselves if we sacrificed a single man to the pageantry...
...Thermopylae, a Greek beach with a cliff on one side and the sea on the other, was held by Spartan King Leonidas' Army of 300 in 480 B. C. against Xerxes' large Persian forces. Valmy in Northeastern France, was held by French Revolutionary Armies in 1792 against the Duke of Brunswick's German forces...