Word: rhine
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Citizens piled up 330,000 sandbags to seal off doors, windows, garages and cellars. Altogether, six German states along the Rhine, Main, Mosel and Nahe were engulfed by the rampaging rivers, barely more than a year after the Christmas 1993 floods. From Bavaria to the Dutch border, the washouts brought normal riverside life almost to a standstill and kept the Bundeswehr busy deploying rescue teams in rubber dinghies. Waters lapped at the doors of Bonn's new parliament building, and smaller sections of Frankfurt were also overrun. Shipping was suspended entirely along the lower reaches of the Rhine, the world...
Clear, brown or in between, water in tidal-wave volumes was sloshing over the banks of the Rhine and other major rivers, drowning vast stretches of northwestern Europe. In a week when happiness was a dry attic, a crow flying over the countryside would have needed not only its own rations but pontoon landing gear. Torrential rains had combined with unseasonable melting of Alpine snows to surcharge waterways funneling into the Low Countries. Though the Dutch remained mostly dry, the largest evacuation ever mobilized in the Netherlands cleared 250,000 people from their homes in Gelderland and Limburg, two southern...
...Dutch crisis was most dire, but Europeans elsewhere were also scrambling to escape the second epic deluge in 13 months. Upriver, in Germany, the Rhine rose to 10.69 m at Cologne, equaling the century's record height dating from 1926. Overflows turned the riverside Altstadt, or old town, a tourism and entertainment quarter, into a Venice North. Murky waters gurgling through the medieval byways filled the basement of the Philharmonic Center. Still, the music managed to triumph. Pumps labored through the evening to keep the concert hall dry, and the orchestra, like the band on the Titanic, played...
...Supreme Commander thought a swift, narrow-front drive straight into Germany was a bad strategic idea. He was certain it would be cut off, counterattacked and defeated. He never even considered deviating from his own strategy: an advance to the Rhine along a front stretching from Holland to the Swiss border. That way the Nazi forces would be defeated west of the Rhine, and the Allies would cross into Germany proper with relative ease...
...destruction of Hitler's last reserves in the Battle of the Bulge flung open the door to the German heartland, just as Eisenhower had planned. "The war was won before the Rhine was crossed," he said later. But his strategic arguments were not over. Churchill was suspicious of the Russians and detected the first signs of the coming cold war. He told Eisenhower it was important to capture Berlin, to symbolize the Allied role in victory over Germany and to counter the strength of the Soviet Union. Eisenhower felt the city no longer held any military significance. He told Montgomery...