Word: german
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Overhead, another new German weapon seized control of the skies: the Junkers-87 Stuka dive bomber, which plunged down to blast road junctions and railroad lines; it also had a device that emitted screams to spread terror among its victims. And then there were the heavy bombers. General Wladyslaw Anders, who would eventually lead the Polish exile army through the battles of North Africa and Italy, heard the ominous drone of Heinkel-111s overhead and later remembered that "squadron after squadron of aircraft could be seen flying in file, like cranes, to Warsaw." At 6 a.m. those deadly cranes began...
Blitzkrieg and deception. In disputed Danzig, the once German port administered by the League of Nations since the end of World War I, the attack had begun half an hour before the invasion, when local Nazi Storm Troopers seized several key buildings and intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where 51 postal workers barricaded the doors...
...Poles were amazed at the speed of the German successes -- even the Germans were surprised -- but the defenders counted on two allies to save them. One was General Mud, who traditionally emerged from the September rains that regularly converted the Vistula River into an impassable barrier and the vulnerable fields of central Poland into a morass. The other ally was the Anglo-French partnership, which bound the two great powers of the West to defend Poland by armed force...
Though Hitler had made no pretense of declaring war on Poland -- with which he had signed a ten-year nonaggression pact in 1934 -- the British and French response to his attack was glacial in its formality. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summon the German charge d'affaires to ask if he had any explanation for this "very serious situation." The charge admitted only that the Germans were defending themselves against a Polish attack...
...British insisted on that, however, and so, after several anxious telephone calls between London and Paris, the two Allies' ambassadors in Berlin finally requested an interview at 7:15 p.m. with German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. They told him that unless Germany immediately stopped its invasion, they would "without hesitation fulfill their obligations to Poland...