Word: marshall
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...victories over the Western Allies in the spring of 1940. The Dutch army was crushed within a week, and Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, leaving the immense wealth of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the charge of a few colonial bureaucrats. France collapsed in a month, and Marshal Petain's feeble puppet regime, based in the French resort of Vichy, had other worries than French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). Britain, threatened by a Nazi invasion, could devote little more than some Churchillian rhetoric to the defense of Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong and Burma...
...year-old "Field Marshal" asked his wife Jean to bring him his Bible, and he read in it, as he did every morning, for about 10 minutes. It brought him little comfort. At this moment of crisis, facing a threat that imperiled his life, his command and his whole world, America's greatest living military hero, the bemedaled veteran of bayonet charges through no-man's-land in France, seemed paralyzed. When he did go to his nearby headquarters, he issued no orders to his forces. Officers seeking instructions found themselves barred from his presence...
...early November, amid their second big push toward Moscow, the Germans were already suffering their first severe cases of frostbite. Soviet General (later Marshal) Georgi Zhukov reportedly noted that the enemy was perhaps too efficient: its soldiers had been supplied with the correct size boots. Russians, he said, knew enough to wear oversize footwear -- the better to stuff with wool and straw to protect toes against the cold. A popular Russian caricature of the time had the Fritzes -- as German soldiers were less than affectionately called -- wrapped in anything they could grab out of occupied civilian homes -- including women...
Harvard students know the system well: every time they vote for their Undergraduate Council representative of their class marshal they are presented with a list or candidates and the option of voting for "as many or as few" candidates as they want...
...there can be authentically healthy levels of narcissism, and that's a goal of therapy. But the groups I'm dealing with are those that only appear to be healthy. They marshal resources and legions of loyal people, and they are very influential. But they carry in them a germ seed, or they are affected by their success in a manner such that they ultimately implode. They get to a point in life beyond which they can't go further. I've written much about this problem in a book called The Success Syndrome...