Word: pripet
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...pall of smoke was reported over Leningrad. A cloud of dust hid the battlefield north of the Pripet Marshes. A German reporter in a Stuka said well: "There is nothing but confusion beneath us." In those seven days one fact stood up gaunt and real as the remains of a bombed wall. The Russians admitted on the third day that they had lost 374 planes while they had shot down 381 German planes...
Green Fields, Blue Sky. Terrain and season defined the campaign. The easiest area for attack was the central plain just above and below the vast Pripet Marshes. The two main German drives developed there - one headed for Minsk and Moscow, the other for Kiev and the Ukraine (see map) - over land flat as a billiard table, through fields still too green to be burned, under a sky clear enough for half-blind pilots. The weather would stay fine for three months, within which the Germans intended to attain their objectives...
Below the Pripet Marshes, the offensive went more slowly, because before it could roll, the formidable frontier fortress of Przemysl had to be stormed. And near Luck the Russians offered up a Gargantuan tank battle...
...make sure A. Hitler did not forget to stop when he reached Russia, and to collect his slice of Poland without fighting, reopen the trans-Poland rail line from Minsk to Berlin, if & when the conquest was complete. Between the Poles and Stalin still lay the Pripet Marshes where they could hole up for the winter, await the outcome of their Allies' effort in the West...
...East Poland's defenses are not concentrated. Only five fortified cities piece out the distances not protected by the morasses of the many-branched Pripet River, to stave out the Red Army which last week growled ominously (see p. 35). Should the Red Army move west, Poland would desperately need Rumanians, Turks and Greeks to help man its eastern marches...