Word: perekop
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Preparation. Last November the Russians began to probe the enemy defenses on Perekop ("Cross-Ditch"), the six-mile-wide northern corridor into the Crimea. One by one, Red scouts mapped the German fire points : 200 in the first line, more in the rear. Other units made ready to cross the Sivash (also called the Putrid Sea), the stagnant, shallow western corner of the Azov Sea. Then the commander, rotund General Feodor Tolbukhin, expert horseman and veteran of Stalingrad, waited...
Execution. Early last week the time came. A tremendous artillery barrage erased German defenses at Kerch and Perekop, cleared paths for the two armies from north and east. The defending troops (including many Rumanians) fell back swiftly, then broke. Soviet columns raced across the dusty mid-Crimean steppe at 50 miles a day - and better. Russian cavalry slashed at the flanks of retreating elements, cut into main bodies. Red tentacles curled and spread all over the Vermont-sized peninsula...
...field commander. In the summer of 1940, his armies broke through the Somme line in France. A year later he became an army commander in Russia when Ukrainian guerrillas killed his chief, Colonel General Eugen Ritter von Schobert. For yet another year, Manstein marched from victory to victory-Odessa, Perekop, Kerch, Sevastopol. But victory was tinged with pain: his two boys, both lieutenants, died in action. And the sands of luck were running...
...extreme south, a Russian column this week captured Perekop, the Crimea's bridge to the Ukraine and the Germans' last land route of escape...
...south the Germans threw their greatest effort against a little swampy neck of land only four miles wide. They were determined to crack the Perekop Isthmus and overrun the Crimean Peninsula, no matter what the cost...