Word: hitlerism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Almost from the day America entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, U.S. military leaders wanted to fight Hitler by invading through France. It would be risky, but if it succeeded it would open the most direct route across Europe into the heart of Germany. Eisenhower was one of the earliest and most determined advocates. In March 1942, when he was chief of the War Department's Operations Division in Washington, he sent a memorandum on strategy to the austere, brilliant head of the U.S. Army, General George Marshall. It urged that "the principal target...
...great military leader and propelling him into the White House eight years later. This was Eisenhower's invasion, the one he had planned and argued for and believed in wholeheartedly. He meant every word of the order of the day he addressed to the servicemen he was sending into Hitler's Festung Europa: "Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Forces: You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade toward which we have striven these many months...
...destroy the Allied army before it was strong enough to break out of the peninsula? By the beginning of July the Allies had landed more than 1 million troops, 566,000 tons of supplies and 171,000 vehicles. Having failed to drive the Allies back into the sea, Hitler chose to throw all he had into a decisive fight in Normandy rather than withdraw to another defense line along the Seine. But when U.S. forces under Bradley did finally surge out of the peninsula at the end of July and sweep south and east, 21 German divisions were outflanked...
...Hitler seized on the Allied hiatus to organize a 24-division counteroffensive through Belgium's Ardennes Forest in December -- and Eisenhower came into his own as a combat general. He issued the orders that cut off the Bulge -- a German penetration westward into Allied lines 45 miles wide and 65 miles deep -- and made certain it would fail. He sent the 101st Airborne to hold the key city of Bastogne, put three other divisions into the battle and ordered Patton to turn his Third Army 90 degrees to the north to cut the advancing Germans' supply lines. The German counteroffensive...
...destruction of Hitler's last reserves in the Battle of the Bulge flung open the door to the German heartland, just as Eisenhower had planned. "The war was won before the Rhine was crossed," he said later. But his strategic arguments were not over. Churchill was suspicious of the Russians and detected the first signs of the coming cold war. He told Eisenhower it was important to capture Berlin, to symbolize the Allied role in victory over Germany and to counter the strength of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower felt the city no longer held any military significance. He told Montgomery...