Word: rails
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Politically, sentimentally, in prestige, Paris would be a tremendous victory. But militarily, Paris was a tactical objective, already partly taken. Paris was the hub from which rail and road spokes radiated all over northern France; to the south, west and northwest most of them had already been cut. Its further importance was that it was a center of wire communications and administration, a storehouse of German arms. Its ring of airfields could be quickly put to Allied use. But Paris as a strictly military victory was overshadowed by one behind it and one beyond...
...outstanding Soviet success of the week was achieved below Warsaw on the Vistula, where wily, leathery Marshal Konev captured the important rail town of Sandomierz, destroyed the Nazi garrison of three divisions, enlarged his bridgehead across the Vistula to 1,600 square miles. Adolf Hitler was said to have called Konev's position "a pistol pointed at the German empire...
Last week Vichy was the hastily fortified ghost capital of a rapidly dissolving Government. Outside the town, French Forces of the Interior were in control. Telephone & telegraph lines were cut, road and rail traffic halted. Inside, the futile skeleton of what had been Marshal Petain's Government click-clacked through motions of governing which were really a dance of death...
...footballer, studied the huge map of northern Italy in his headquarters, noted that the wide Po River had remarkably few bridges. All the German supplies for the fighting front, all the raw materials for war industries in the Po Valley, had to funnel through some two dozen rail and road spans. Major Mallory drew his plan, presented it to his commander, Major General John K. Cannon of the Twelfth (Tactical) Air Force...
Next day the bombers returned, found German pontoon bridges mending some of the gaps, smoke pots placed for protection. Wind waved the smoke aside. At the end of 72 hours, 28 bridges (rail and pontoon) were out. Said Uncle Joe, one of the war's great tactical air-forcemen: "This is an outstanding feat in the history of aerial warfare...