Word: germanic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Admiral of the Fleet, Earl Mountbatten of Burma was born at Frogmore House, Windsor, in 1900, just as the sun was passing over the yardarm of Empire. His father was Prince Louis of Battenberg, a German kinsman of Czar Nicholas II of Russia and later Britain's First Sea Lord. Queen Victoria held him in her arms as he was christened Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas. The Battenbergs called their baby son Nickie, but its Russian connotation at that time prompted them to change the nickname to Dickie, much as the family name was later anglicized to Mountbatten...
...joined the Royal Navy as a cadet at Osborne, a rigorous officer-training academy on the Isle of Wight. He was soon seared by an event that is thought to have directed the course of his life: as World War I broke out his father was hounded by anti-German hysteria and forced to resign as First Sea Lord. The tears that ran down the cadet's face, according to a biographer, instilled a burning ambition to rise in the military establishment and avenge Prince Louis' humiliation...
...served at the Battle of Jutland, the young lord soon married a beautiful heiress named Edwina Ashley. By World War II he was a captain in command of a destroyer flotilla; the fearless skipper's own ship, H.M.S. Kelly, was mined off Newcastle, torpedoed off the German coast and finally sunk by German dive bombers off Crete. "Abandon ship or I'm going to sink you!" his admiral signaled when he refused to leave his bridge at one time. "Try it and I'll bloody well sink you!" Mountbatten replied. Mountbatten's later direction...
...that they are driving Western Europe even further toward the Arab camp. West Germany and France, in particular, are hoping to secure from the Arab oil states some kind of agreement guaranteeing oil supplies and are impatient with Israeli intransigence. Before leaving for the Middle East last week, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher emphasized his government's support of Palestinian self-determination and its disapproval of the Israeli tactics in Lebanon. Privately the West Germans are furious that the Carter Administration has backtracked on its recent hints that there should be U.S. contacts with the P.L.O., which...
...earned a reputation as perhaps Europe's most successful society. With alarming swiftness, though, the Federal Republic is now outstripping its neighbors in a far less enviable category: the nation of achievers has become the Continent's biggest market for illegal heroin. So far this year, West German police have seized 116 kilograms of heroin, a higher figure than was reported by all the other countries in Western Europe combined. At least 430 people died of drug overdose in West Germany last year, more than an eightfold increase since 1970. This year promises to batter all previous records...