Word: maginot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Military Views: Rivals General de Lattre de Tassigny as one of France's best military minds. Rejects the rigid-defense, Maginot Line philosophy of fighting. "Don't sit in your trenches and wait," he says. "Punch them in the puss as soon as they show any signs of moving westward." He believes that NATO's forces, when motorized and brought up to planned strength, could quickly seize the initiative in case of attack and punch their way eastward despite enemy masses...
Died. General Alphonse Georges, 75, French military hero; of a cerebral congestion; in Paris. After battling Sahara desert tribes for 19 years, he rose to chief of staff (1935-39) of the French army, was in command of Maginot Line troops when France capitulated in 1940, escaped to Algiers, where he briefly joined De Gaulle's Committee of National Liberation. One of his most famous adventures was in 1934 in Marseille, when a Croat assassin attacked the car in which he was riding with Yugoslavia's King Alexander, killed the King (and France's Foreign Minister, Louis...
...MAGINOT LINE...
...mention Hoover by name as he condemned any plan for "an impregnable defense, a China Wall, a Maginot Line, a Rock of Gibraltar, an Atlantic and Pacific moat . . . The whole world can be confident that the U.S. will not at a moment of supreme danger shed allies who are endangered...
Pushbutton War. Talk of "revolutionary new weapons" sound uneasily like the old pushbutton warfare pipe dream once charged to the Air Force. It also was likely to give rise to some of the old Maginot Line thinking, of the superiority of the defense, and the delusion of security at cut rates. But the fact was that while the Army still had no atomic artillery under test, it did have some fine new weapons, including some that might spell the doom of the dreaded tank. Beneath all of last week's sales talk, though it was so conceitedly ebullient...