Word: oder
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...Russian drive slowed as it approached the Oder. An unseasonal thaw made the going tougher for Red Army vehicles. Magnificent Autobahnen (express highways) enabled the Nazis to switch reserves quickly from one threatened spot to another. But the respite was only temporary. All along the Oder's east banks tremendous Russian forces were gathering like water behind a dam. German propagandists demanded a last-ditch stand, coined a slogan, "Victory or Siberia." Best bet: Siberia...
Last week the citizens were part of the Army. The Volkssturm men who felled trees, dug trenches and fashioned barricades from bomb rubble were simply civilians with red arm bands. Women rode on the antiaircraft guns pulling out for the Oder front. The "mayor," this time, was clubfooted Paul Joseph Goebbels (Gauleiter of Berlin), who screamed defiance over the radio: "Factories will be blown up and the whole capital scorched...
...First White Russian Army guns. They were trained, as Berlin knew, on the ancient fortress of Küstrin and five-times-stormed Frankfurt, the last two strongholds on the direct road to Berlin. Red Army soldiers, locked in a mighty tank and infantry battle in the "Oder quadrilateral" (the big bend in the river near Frankfurt), could see the pall of smoke that hung over Berlin...
...tons of shells bored holes in the grey, low-hanging clouds and burst in sprays of red-hot fragments. On a 140-mile front, north & south of the Küstrin-Frankfurt sector, Zhukov kept the skies alight with his massed artillery as he fought to reach the Oder...
Possible Pause? He might well pause to regroup before assaulting this formidable river barrier (the bridge across the Oder at Frankfurt is 900 feet long), after his steel-tipped surge of 225 miles in 23 days. Lieut. General Patton had raced across France, some 300 miles in six weeks, before he ran out of gasoline...