Word: germanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...area by air, call up all its 5,000,000 reserves, sit tight behind its Maginot Line and see what happened. A hint in favor of the last course comes from a remark General Gamelin made when asked if the French had considered making an early drive on the German Limes: "What! I do not propose to start the war by a battle of Verdun...
...Babies v. War Orphans. Before German troops marched into Belgium the tramp of their boots could be heard in neutral stock exchanges. Investors in Great Britain and France in a financial panic dumped securities indiscriminately. On July 31, 1914, four days before England declared war, the New York Stock Exchange closed its doors to keep the bottom from dropping out of the market...
...peasants who owned woodlots found they had a good market for fuel. Electric power derived from Swiss waterfalls was sold to both sides for use in making explosives. Meanwhile, the Swiss did a curious broker business. Germany needed French carbide-cyanamide for saltpeter, French bauxite for aluminum; France needed German iron and steel for emergency railroad tracks and barbed wire entanglements. Swiss dummies arranged the exchange of these commodities, with the tacit consent of the belligerents. The governments did not care whether German soldiers died on barbed wire that originated in a German factory, or whether British ships were torpedoed...
...florins in 1913; 141,147,000 in 1916. Gold flowed into Dutch banks (as it also piled up in Swedish, Norwegian, Swiss and Spanish banks). But taxes went up. It cost the Dutch $600,000,000 to keep half a million men idle for four years along the German and Belgian frontiers and to intern prisoners from both sides...
...influenza contributed to raising the death rate in Sweden by a third in 1918-19. Norway did well with fish and lumber to export to the belligerents. Norwegian steamship lines cashed in, paying big dividends and purchasing about a million tons of new shipping from the U. S. as German mines and submarines sent 829 Norwegian merchant vessels to the bottom...