Word: mile
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...some 2,300 V-1s hit London that summer, killing 5,400 civilians more or less at random. But this new terror weapon failed to achieve Hitler's hope of somehow reversing Germany's military fortunes. On June 23, the Soviets launched a gigantic midsummer offensive across a 300-mile front east of Minsk and demolished 28 German divisions within a month. On July 20, Hitler's own Wehrmacht officers turned against him. Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg planted under Hitler's conference table a bomb that was supposed to kill the Führer. A shaken and partly deafened Hitler...
...supposed to be early in May, but when British Field Marshal Sir Bernard L. Montgomery took up his post as Eisenhower's deputy for ground forces that January, he immediately balked at the preliminary plans for a 25-mile-wide invasion front. He told Eisenhower, who already had strong misgivings of his own, that the front must be much broader, about 50 miles, so that the Allies could land at least five divisions, instead of the planned three. The planners said they did not have enough landing craft for such an expansion. Get them, said Montgomery. That was impossible...
...German side, Rommel had some 500,000 men strung out along an 800-mile front from Holland to Brittany, and he knew only too well how vulnerable they were. Since the bulk of German power was committed to the Russian front, his 213,000-man Seventh Army, charged with defending Normandy, was an untested force, filled out with middle-aged conscripts and unreliable recruits from Eastern Europe. Only 70,000 of the defenders were stationed near the targeted beaches. The Luftwaffe's fighter defenses had been seriously depleted in two years of air battles, and the remnants were...
...Dday, the Americans held the ridge of cliffs overlooking Omaha Beach, and had pushed about a mile inland. They had landed two-thirds of their forces and suffered more than 90% of their casualties there. East and west of Omaha Beach, the landings had gone much more successfully. The U.S. 4th Division had seized Utah Beach with relatively little opposition and joined forces with the paratroopers who had been dropped near Ste.-Mère-Eglise. The British and Canadians had overwhelmed their three beaches and advanced about three miles inland toward the city of Caen. All told, the Allies...
Another unit of 225 Rangers under Lieut. Colonel James Rudder was dispatched to Pointe du Hoc, a 100-foot-high promontory four miles west of Omaha and ten miles east of Utah. Their assignment: to knock out six heavily defended German 155-mm guns that could command both beaches. They fired rocket-propelled grappling hooks up to the top of the cliff and then began the fearful climb up ropes and ladders. The Germans splattered the oncoming Rangers with machine-gun fire, grenades, even boulders, and they managed to cut several of the ropes on which the Rangers were inching...