Word: rears
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...described the new invaders as traveling peaceably along the same Ukrainian roads as the fugitive Poles. It was a mass movement of occupation rather than of conquest, although performed the same way as the crashing German onslaught-mechanized forces piercing far ahead, infantry on slower trucks bringing up the rear. Conjunction of the west-moving Russian horde with the east-flowing Germans was awaited tensely. Would they embrace each other? Or would they quarrel over their prey? The answer soon came: the Nazi Air Force cooperated heartily with the Soviet spearheads to bomb and flatten even the slightest resistance...
...Stuff. Until 1917, each side attacked or defended linear fronts. In attack their tendency was to stretch and strain. On defense they tended to crack. Sent to the rear, Colonel Lossberg proceeded to construct a new kind of major fortification, based on zonal defense. He built what the Allies called the Hindenburg Line. It was not Hindenburg's and it was not a line. The Germans called it the Siegfried Stellung (Siegfried Position...
Built of wire, wood, earth and some concrete, the Siegfried Position consisted of barbed wire entanglements, behind which came intrenchments and pillboxes connected with secondary intrenchments. Behind these were independent forts and strong points. From these, reserve troops, stationed far enough in the rear to be out of reach of enemy artillery, could be thrust out in any direction in counterattacks when the attacking enemy was exhausted by its advance. At this point the zonal defense system became an ideal means of launching a powerful offensive...
...kitchens carved from the side of the tunnel and could mount to their hidden outside fighting positions through a maze of upward warrens. No sooner had the Americans seized one mouth of the tunnel than the Germans poured out of their surface positions and riddled them from the rear. The Americans finally cleared the area but not before the 107th Infantry had lost 337 men killed and 658 wounded, the heaviest loss on a single day for any U. S. regiment...
Unlike the solid, continuous Maginot Line, the Siegfried Position carries on the old Lossberg concept of defense in depth and swift counterattack from a protected rear. A break-through would be the signal for the great rear fortifications to open up with heavy artillery fire (spare gun-barrels as well as a large supply of munitions are cached in deep caverns connected by tunnel railways). Mobile troops, hitherto protected, would thrust out at the invading flanks. The cushion-&-spring force would be terrific...