Word: gamelin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Therefore, when the force and scope of the German penetration was realized and when the new French Generalissimo, General [Maxime] Weygand. assumed command in place of General Gamelin, an effort was made by the French and British Armies in Belgium to keep holding the right hand of the Belgians and give their own right hand to the newly created French Army which was to advance across the Somme in great strength...
...technical means for rapid and decisive counter-attack." He urgently demanded "an Army of shock troops with lightning-like speed and formidable power in artillery . . . modern tanks which will go 40 kilometres an hour in flat country." But those defenders of the realm, Blum, Daladier, Gamelin, would not listen...
...Gamelin? asked Frenchmen last week on the boulevards of Paris and in the wineshops of Auvergne as under a new leader French Armies regrouped themselves along the Somme. Maurice Gustave Gamelin, once acknowledged "the world's foremost soldier," had seen his theories of stand-and-take-it warfare ground beneath the tread of German tanks and blasted into extinction by Nazi dive-bombers. While his predecessor and successor Maxime Weygand sweated under the gigantic task of constructing a new front, the morbidly curious speculated on the fate of the former generalissimo...
...Washington came five reports from, dissimilar European sources, each stating that Gamelin had been executed, as had also General Andre Georges Corap, who had commanded the French Ninth Army at the vital Ardennes sector of the Maginot Line extension when the Nazis broke through...
Best bet was that Gamelin had been put on the shelf, joining the spiritual company of his old chief General Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre, who in World War I bungled at Verdun, and General Charles Louis Marie Lanrezac, who boggled at Charleroi...