Word: retreats
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Germans were learning, as their fellow sufferers had learned on the Eastern Front, that retreat for an army without air cover is an inferno, that no devils in hell could be worse than the pursuer's ground-hugging planes, stabbing and jabbing with cannon, rockets, frag mentation bombs and machine guns...
What Manner of Man? Guderian's appointment to replace bumbling, Nazified Colonel General Kurt Zeitzler surprised military observers in the Allied capitals (and perhaps in Germany as well). The choice raised puzzling questions. Why did an Army everywhere in retreat need a tank specialist as its top planner? Was Guderian to be the strong man for the Army, or a figurehead for Hitler himself? Was his main job military (to revise Army strategy) or political (to hold the lid down during a ruthless purge of "unreliable" elements)? Was Guderian himself politically reliable, as far as the Party was concerned...
...that enveloped pockets of stunned German tankmen and infantrymen. They had collected more than 10,000 prisoners; more thousands were streaming in from some of the German's best divisions. There was a good chance the reeling Germans could not stop short of the hills below Avranches (their retreat was so speedy in the last 20 miles to Avranches that they had almost no time to employ their specialty: mine sowing...
...Field Marshal Busch told me that Hitler had forbidden any retreat and ordered that every foot of ground be defended. Although in my opinion this order was erroneous, I was compelled to obey...
...Bread;" "No Meat;" "No Gasoline" said the signs in the French shopwindows. As the Nazis dashed toward Paris, French soldiers lay by the roadside, nursing bloody feet which were blistered by retreat. Most of them were beaten men, but some drunken soldiers shouted: "We're waiting for the Bodies!" Meanwhile Simone, Novelist Feuchtwanger's 16-year-old Burgundian heroine, lay in her attic room poring over the story of St. Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orleans, Simone read, had heard mysterious "voices" bidding her save France by fighting the invader. Soon Simone began to hear the voice...