Word: gamelin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Reynaud paid Mr. Churchill a visit in London and presently a new Chief of the British Imperial Staff was announced, replacing General Sir Edmund Ironside, who was put in charge of home defense (see p. 27). In a switch strategically parallel to the Weygand-for-Gamelin move, Mr. Churchill called on General Sir John Greer Dill, who was brought home from his command of the B. E. F. First Corps in France in April to be Sir Edmund's Vice Chief and standin. Sir John, 58 and Irish, is accounted the British Army's master of strategy...
With that order, Gamelin, never able to get along with the politicians of the French Government, admitted failure, and a shake-up in the High Command became inevitable. Prime Minister Churchill (who named the fight then raging "The Battle of the Bulge") flew to Paris for a meeting of the Allied War Council. Premier Reynaud announced that the moment had come for "a change of men and methods." He called Marshall Pétain, hero of Verdun, to be his adviser, himself took charge of the Defense Ministry...
...Allgemeine Zeitung, to be a flamethrower which generates 2,000° Centigrade. This heat, blasted into gun ports and ventilators from 70 yards, melts gun muzzles and sears their crews' lungs. With it, claim Nazis, the Maginot Line can be "melted." -General Joffre (whose chef de cabinet was Gamelin) on Sept. 6, 1914 before the battle of the Marne: ". . . . The time for looking backward has passed; every effort must be devoted to attacking and driving back the enemy. Troops that can no longer advance must hold on to the ground won at any cost and die in their tracks...
Said Allied Generalissimo Gamelin in his last pronunciamento before being relieved: "The British Air Force, like the French, is fighting to the last man." Actually the R. A. F. was fighting not only to the last man but to the last plane and past the point of physical exhaustion. The pilots of the R. A. F. had to make up for lack of numbers by making flight after flight and taking off on new tasks as swiftly as their planes could be refueled and remunitioned. Day and night, from end to end of the Flanders Plain, hell reigned above earth...
...took over supreme civil and military power. To Maxime Weygand, the great Foch's Chief of Staff and "Savior of Warsaw" (1920), he gave supreme command of the Army (see p. 23). Edouard Daladier, who as Minister of Defense since 1936 had worked with supplanted Generalissimo Maurice Gustave Gamelin, became Foreign Minister...