Word: maginot
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...million on everything from lettered T shirts ("Long live the O.A.U.!") to his celebrated "Project 600," the conference-headquarters complex itself. Dominating it all was a twelve-story structure built to Nkrumah's taste-the luxurious bulletproof, bomb-resistant VIP hotel, known to local wags as "the Maginot Hilton." Marveling at the spacious conference room, Kwame's official weekly Spark was awestruck. "It is in this room that the fate of Africa is to be decided," it said. "It is here that Africa, mourning for her enslaved children still under oppression, will look for comfort...
...billions of dollars, are retired without ever having been put to any but purely diplomatic use; or we might say that their purpose is precisely to render their military use superfluovis." As for Charles de Gaulle's force de frappe, Aron argues that it reflects a new Maginot Line psychology, seeking security behind a pitifully inadequate nuclear arsenal that could conceivably invite attack. Aron is not necessarily opposed to France's nuclear force if it is accepted as a hedge against the "unpredictability of future diplomacy," but he scoffs at the notion that this "symbol of patriotic pride...
...army colonel in the 1930s, he was keenly aware of his country's disavowal of that destiny. Petty partisan squabbling and interminable changes of government kept France's defenses in a shambles. While Hitler armed to the teeth, the French staked all on their grande illusion, the Maginot Line. Risking his career, De Gaulle badgered his superiors to create a mechanized army capable of swift, massive attack. Only Hitler took his advice. France's capitulation, he writes, was the expression of a "profound national renunciation...
Tanks & Tablecloths. Many veterans of the fighting blame France's defeat on General Henri Navarre, his government's commander in chief for Indochina. But Navarre, a World War I infantryman, only personified the Maginot mentality of most French career officers. Though warned that it would be fatal to fight a conventional engagement from a fixed base, Navarre concentrated 17 battalions in the North Viet Nam outpost, which lay in a ten-mile-long river valley. His strategy was to draw the Communist Viet Minh guerrillas into a set-piece battle in which French heavy weaponry would prove decisive...
...News from 1920 to 1947, a blithe spirit who taunted his publishers with such expense-account items as 10? for wolfbane after covering a wolf hunt, and tickled his readers with such feats as hiring a taxicab during the "phony" war of 1939 to tootle past France's Maginot Line and inspect the Nazis' Siegfried Line; of pneumonia; in Chicago...