Word: nevers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...undefended Paris facing the almost unthinkable prospect of Nazi occupation. The Parisians responded with wild flight. With cars, ( bicycles, baby carriages, nearly 2 million of them (some 65% of the city's population) choked the roads to the south. "I fly over the black road of interminable treacle that never stops running," author-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote of watching refugees from his plane. "Where are they going? They don't know. They are marching toward a ghost terminus which already is no longer an oasis...
...maneuverable. (The British also had some secret weapons: a radar warning system that the Germans greatly underestimated, and the Operation Ultra computer that broke most German military codes, particularly those of the Luftwaffe.) The outnumbered British fought with a kind of desperation that inspired Churchill to say of them, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many...
...shall fight on the seas and oceans . . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." And again on June 18: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, 'This was their finest hour...
There had never been any period of "phony war" during what came to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Though Donitz's undersea fleet was small -- his 56 U-boats in 1939 included only 22 large oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without warning but also seeded Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship...
...Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941, he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states...