Word: guderian
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...Guderian's tanks raced up the coast, seized Boulogne, seized Calais, neared Dunkirk, then were ordered to halt. Guderian protested but was told that it was Hitler's personal order, an important miscalculation that has never been fully explained. "The Fuhrer is terribly nervous," Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary. "Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so would rather pull the reins...
...British were already thinking about evacuating France, and Dunkirk, about 50 miles away, was the only port that remained open to them. They hoped to rescue perhaps 45,000 men in the two days they estimated they might have left. But Guderian's tanks did not move, and more British troops kept pouring into Dunkirk. While the Royal Navy sent 165 ships, many of which could not enter the shallow harbor, London issued an emergency call for everything that could float -- yachts, fishing boats, excursion steamers, fire-fighting boats, some 850 vessels in all. The first 25,000 men reached...
...made two major blunders. The first was to delay the attack by one crucial summer month for the unnecessary foray into Yugoslavia and Greece. The second was to postpone and weaken the drive on Moscow for the sake of capturing the mines and industries of the Ukraine. General Guderian, who was leading the tank spearhead toward Moscow, pleaded for an all-out offensive, but Hitler jeered, "My generals know nothing about the economic aspects...
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...
...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, the cavalry was already surrounded, and its legendary charges were primarily...