Word: ranking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from Churchill. Manstein's Junker ancestors had fought for two kaisers and one czar. Young Manstein was commissioned in the exclusive Potsdam Guards, finished World War I with the rank of captain. In World War II, he served brilliantly as chief of staff to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in the invasion of Poland; in the summer of 1940, by then in command of an army of his own, Manstein broke through the French line on the Somme. When Hitler launched his attack on Russia, it was Manstein who commanded the southern German army group, won a string...
Coping with female students, he reported, could be literally overwhelming. "When [a professor] meets them coming down the sidewalk toward him three abreast, they refuse to break rank and simply push him off into the grass . . . They invariably park their bicycles right in front of the door or the steps and let you fall over them as you come out. If you survive that, they ride down upon you from the rear as silently as Indians...
...Hoagy can almost support his family (a wife and two young sons) on the income from Stardust, written in 1929. Says he: "It's practically an annuity." He still felt "like a rank amateur" after his first long-haired composition, but he confessed he was already at work on a second. This one, he said, would be about the California redwoods and would be "sort of austere, with an ecclesiastic, cathedral-like quality . . . 'Lofty' I think would be a good word...
Cadets spend time learning to play trombones, trumpets, accordions, euphoniums, graduate with the rank of probationary lieutenant. After a year of correspondence study and strict probation, they are commissioned as second lieutenants with the legal standing of ordained ministers. From there they advance through the field ranks: first lieutenant, captain, major; through the staff ranks: brigadier, lieutenant-colonel, colonel, lieutenant-commissioner, commissioner...
...Commissioner Pugmire goes to the office with him two or three mornings a week. As is the army rule, she holds the same rank as her husband. Their five children are all married, but to the commissioner's deep disappointment, none of them followed him into active army service. One reason they didn't, he thinks, was because of the shock of coming back to the U.S. after their early years spent in the Orient. "The clash of life in the U.S., after the quiet of the Far East," he says, "was very exciting to them...