Word: germanism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...next day, Saturday, Sept. 2, while the German tanks kept pressing forward, Hitler made no response. The British Cabinet met in the afternoon and decided that Hitler was stalling and that Britain and France should deliver an ultimatum to Berlin at midnight, to expire at 6 a.m. the following day. When Halifax proposed this to Paris, however, Bonnet said the French military commanders needed another 48 hours to mobilize...
That very night, Britons learned of the first such sacrifice: 200 miles west of Scotland in the North Atlantic, the unarmed British liner Athenia, carrying 1,400 passengers from Liverpool to Montreal, was hit and sunk by a torpedo from the German submarine U-30; 112 passengers, including 28 Americans, died...
Adolf Hitler left Berlin that same night to survey his armies' progress in Poland, and what he saw pleased him mightily. General Heinz Guderian, the tank commander who had already swept across the 50-mile-wide Polish Corridor, the once German area linking Poland to the Baltic Sea, took the Fuhrer on a tour of the newly conquered territory. Hitler was amazed at the low number of ! German casualties, only 150 killed and 700 wounded among four divisions; his own regiment had suffered 2,000 casualties during its first day of combat in World War I. And he was impressed...
Many of the Poles had fought gallantly, though, and it was here in the battle for the corridor that there spread the legend of the Polish cavalry charging German armor, like medieval knights lost in a time warp. "The Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, charged them with swords and lances," Guderian recalled with some wonder, "and suffered tremendous losses." Actually, the Polish cavalry was organized to combat infantry charges, and it had proved its value when the Poles defeated the Soviets in 1920. But by the time it confronted the German tanks...
...instructions. And crowds gathered outside the British and French embassies to greet their declaration of war by singing God Save the King and La Marseillaise. The crowds' hopes of rescue were doomed, however, for the British military effort during these first days consisted mainly of dropping propaganda leaflets on German military installations (among the cautious Britons' other preparations for war: killing all poisonous snakes in the London zoo). The French attempted only one feeble probe against Germany's ill- defended western frontier. And the Poles' own political and military leaders, perhaps considering discretion the better part of valor, were already...