Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ironically, the success of the rangers has driven the poachers into banditry of the kind that killed George Adamson. During similar attacks in July, two French tourists and an American woman were shot dead. Nevertheless, the animals are still more at risk than humans. Friends of Adamson say even some of the lions he raised and set free have fallen to poachers' bullets...
Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day), the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire, and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified...
...nine days, often under heavy fire, the ships steamed to and fro as the great evacuation continued. By June 4, when it ended, some 200,000 British troops had been rescued, along with about 140,000 Allied forces, mostly French. British losses: 40,000 left behind, dead or taken prisoner. To many of the French, the evacuation was a British betrayal, a flight, the abandonment of an ally. To the British, it was a miracle and the only route to national survival...
With 60 remaining divisions, the French tried to form a new defensive line along the Somme, but after having lost about 40 divisions plus almost all British forces, they were seriously outnumbered, as well as outgunned and outgeneraled. The Germans had not only their panzer units but also 130 infantry divisions. On June 7 the French commander Maxime Weygand told the government, "The battle of the Somme is lost," and advised it to ask for an armistice. Premier Reynaud declared, "We shall fight in front of Paris," but the government itself fled to Tours and then Bordeaux...
...still revered as the man who had defended Verdun during World War I under the watchword, "They shall not pass." But on June 17 he asked Hitler for an armistice. Hardly noticed in the debacle was an appeal from London one day later by an obscure French general named Charles de Gaulle, who, in a speech that was to become the rallying cry for the Resistance, asked all Frenchmen to fight on under his leadership: "France has lost a battle! But France has not lost...