Word: ruhr
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...industrial hedgehog of the Ruhr, the watery flatlands of The Netherlands and the stream-scalloped woods and plains of northwestern Germany, the fighting last week was a sample of what the Allies may expect in many a pocket. It was several kinds of warfare: hard battling against solid centers of resistance, Indian-stalking of night-raiding guerrillas, bashing down of villages where civilians, even boys less than ten years old, sniped and fired Panzerfaust rocket charges at tanks...
...Ruhr, Wehrmacht resistance was collapsing swiftly. U.S. Ninth and First Army units, driving from the north and the south, bisected the pocket at Hagen. Ruhr civilians had learned by the examples of ruined Dortmund and flattened Paderborn that to resist was to be destroyed. Essen (pop. 659,871) gave up with little struggle; the Yanks found hundreds of drunken civilians reeling in the streets...
...Allied patrol crossed the Ruhr River to parley with the German major commanding Duisburg, and called on him to surrender. He said nein. Nowhere else around the perimeter was there any visible inclination to give...
...Ruhr industries were lost to Germany; but the war was much too far along for the Allies to sit back and wait for the loss to take effect. So long as Germans held the Ruhr, they 1) blocked several east-west trunk rail lines and highways, thus complicating the Allied supply problem; 2) kept the Allies away from the Ruhr's coal; 3) held a base for possible guerrilla war in the Allied rear; and 4) tied down at least five infantry and one armored division, identified in dispatches, and probably several others as well...
...week's end, the pocket was not much smaller than when the week began. The Allied commanders evidently decided that the Ruhr must be reduced at all costs-even the cost of delaying the push deeper into the heart of Germany. The Ninth Army redoubled its efforts, smashed into Dortmund, Gelsenkirchen and Essen...