Word: generalizes
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...badly fed and all but naked. . . . Before you are great cities and rich provinces; there we shall find honor, glory and riches." Thus spoke young General Bonaparte to 30,000 miserable French troops at Nice one day in March 1796. The shoeless Army with half-starved horses drawing the scant artillery marched past the Alps, through Piedmont, and onto the lush plains of Lombardy. An unbroken series of victories-Lodi, Arcola, Rivoli-and Northern Italy was Napoleon's first conquest...
Dictator Benito Mussolini has given this task to the "Army of the Po" under General Ettore Bastico. Its 50,000 men are divided into three corps; "armored" divisions equipped with heavy tanks and mobile artillery; four "swift" divisions of fast tanks and light guns; "motorized" troops which can travel at high speed over open roads. Theoretically, after the armored corps has made a breakthrough, the other divisions will keep the enemy rolling back without an opportunity of reforming its lines...
...advanced like a vast hinge whose outer point traveled 180 miles, smashed through Belgium, through Mons and down the Oise, occupied 14,000 square miles of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. The French plan of an offensive through the German centre had been abandoned. At Paris, in the headquarters of General Joffre, commanding the French forces, the shock had bereft most officers of any plan except continued retreat...
Kluck continued southeast. Early in the morning of September 4, General Galliéni, military governor of Paris in France's greatest emergency, saw that Kluck was still moving southeast of the city and exposing the German right flank. He rushed his troops into position, telephoned Joffre asking for permission to attack. At six that same morning Colonel Gamelin, inconspicuous in his dark chasseur uniform, mysterious to other officers in his influence on Joffre, saw the same opportunity. He left his lodgings, crossed to Joffre's Operations Section, where officers were arguing over huge military maps scaled...
Reputation. The War made no big military reputations at the time. "Papa" Joffre was kicked upstairs as early as 1916 and General Foch was bitterly criticized for misjudging enemy strength and strategy. The British high command shifted from Sir John French to Sir Douglas Haig. The Germans fired Moltke, then tried Falkenhayn and finally brought from the East old Paul von Hindenburg, who lost his war. But a few younger men in secondary posts came through the ordeal with reputations not only untarnished but so brightened that now, a quarter of a century after Armageddon 1914-18, it is they...