Word: rundstedts
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Rundstedt's failure to achieve that objective lay the American opportunity. Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley fought to seize it, apparently had won enough time by this week to make the first moves in his countermeasures. Up from the Saar area came large forces of Lieut. General George S. Patton's tank-heavy Third Army to strike at the Germans' southernmost penetration at Arlon and to drive into the German flanks in northern Luxembourg. The Nazi drive slowed; Berlin said Patton's blow was in heavy force...
Upon Patton's success or failure this week might hinge the difference between long stalemate and a possible U.S. victory. The essence of Rundstedt's gamble was in keeping his center corridor open. If it could be closed by breaking the flanks' anchors, Rundstedt's gamble would be lost, perhaps totally...
Bulges and Wedges. The wedges were the crux of the Americans' recovery from Rundstedt's initial successes. They were also by this week the crux of U.S. hopes to pinch off the bulges. The wedges had been held, in great part, by small units of U.S. troops who kept their heads in the first break, stood their ground, died rather than retreat. There were infantry men in foxholes who fought until tanks ground over them...
Those were the timesaving, small-scale battles that held the breakthrough from becoming a Blitzkrieg in the 1940 sense. Some of them might have a proud place in the annals of World War II-historians might say that here or there Rundstedt's drive had been fatally slowed...
...continued, steady, losing retreat. Adolf Hitler had withdrawn into the shadows and Heinrich Himmler was Germany's Man of 1944. Himmler had held the people and the Army in line while he squeezed them for the last ounces of German strength. Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, the cold, wily Junker who mounted the December counteroffensive, was the Man of the Hour...