Word: pocketing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...would continue to strike toward Stettin, Berlin's Baltic port. Nazi troops slowed the Russians just short of the towered walls of Stargard, Stettin's outer fortress. But there were not enough Germans to meet all the drives now threatening to sew up Pomerania in a giant pocket. East and south of Stettin the Russians made steady advances in other thrusts...
Thus Marshal Stalin had entered the Big Three conference with the key to Europe in his trousers pocket. The Big Three's award to Russia of an administrative slice of eastern Germany was almost academic. Stalin had also realized one of the oldest Bolshevik dreams...
Pressure in the South. Far to the south, Major General Jean Joseph Gabriel Delattre de Tassigny's French First Army (including American divisions), closed a pincers, cutting the Colmar pocket in two. Of some 10,000 Germans, all that were left of the 25,000 originally in the pocket, many were locked in the circle, others were pinned against the Rhine, whose bridges were being hammered by Allied planes. Allied troops entered Colmar...
...Russian power would not be denied. By this week the Red Armies had accomplished what no Junker could have believed possible. Rokossovsky, striking swiftly, enveloped the Germans with the bear's left arm. It reached the Baltic 43 miles southwest of Königsberg, enfolded Elbing, created a pocket 85 miles deep. The Russians had done another impossible: they had broken through the "impregnable" German defenses in the Masurian Lakes area, had narrowed the pocket to an average width of 40 miles. Inside was what remained of a Wehrmacht force of some...
...sealing off the East Prussian flank to their main drives toward the Reich proper, the Russians already had a victory of the first magnitude. If they could complete the liquidation of the pocket as speedily, the victory would be even greater. It would shorten the Russian line by some 300 miles, release thousands of Red Army troops, might provide first-rate ports for Russian supplies...