Word: polish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von Brauchitsch sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzig; the Eighth and Tenth Armies striking over the Vistula plain toward Warsaw; the Fourteenth Army driving across Silesia toward Cracow -- 1.5 million men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, the 2,700 fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armored divisions...
...control of the skies: the Junkers-87 Stuka dive bomber, which plunged down to blast road junctions and railroad lines; it also had a device that emitted screams to spread terror among its victims. And then there were the heavy bombers. General Wladyslaw Anders, who would eventually lead the Polish exile army through the battles of North Africa and Italy, heard the ominous drone of Heinkel-111s overhead and later remembered that "squadron after squadron of aircraft could be seen flying in file, like cranes, to Warsaw." At 6 a.m. those deadly cranes began raining bombs on the unprepared...
...several key buildings and intersections. From the harbor, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, which had arrived a few days earlier on a "courtesy visit," began emptying its 11-in. guns at the Westerplatte peninsula, where the Poles were authorized to station 88 soldiers. The only real resistance came from the Polish Post Office on Heveliusplatz, where 51 postal workers barricaded the doors. When the Storm Troopers blasted open part of the building, the Poles retreated to the cellar; the Nazis sprayed them with gasoline and set them afire. By nightfall, Danzig had, said its local Nazi leader, "returned to the Great...
...attack was glacial in its formality. Not until 10 a.m. did the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, summon the German charge d'affaires to ask if he had any explanation for this "very serious situation." The charge admitted only that the Germans were defending themselves against a Polish attack...
...this point, even with fighting under way all along the Polish frontier, it was still conceivable that Hitler might once again achieve his goal without a major war. Italy's Benito Mussolini, who had promised to join Hitler's side in case of war, telephoned Berlin to say that he wished to remain neutral; Mussolini had been telling the British and French all that week that if they , would agree to a new four-power conference (much like the one at Munich that had carved up Czechoslovakia the previous year), he might be able to arrange some kind of compromise...