Word: rundstedts
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When war came, he gave plenty of soldiers the fatal chance. He was not one to hoard lives. In Poland he had to do more fighting than General Gerd von Rundstedt, but by losing far more men he went just as fast. In France, too, his central armies of Group B suffered relatively high casualties. In Russia he won Germany's greatest victories (Bialystok-Minsk, Smolensk, Bryansk-Vyazma) and suffered the greatest losses. Last week he was still sending men to glorious, spendthrift death...
Brilliant Nazi Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt had smashed across the Dnieper at two points. He drove southward from the Gomel sector and took Chernigov, 80 miles to the northeast of the Ukraine's capital, Kiev, whence he was in excellent position to get in Kiev's rear, and complete its encirclement (see map). Even more dangerous to Russian hopes was his capture of Kremenchug, 160 miles to Kiev's southeast. From there he could launch a north eastward drive on 150-mile-distant Kharkov, the Ukraine's big railroad junction and industrial center, threaten...
...battle line, visited the intense German Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, encountered wrecked villages, Russian war debris, black mud where soldiers had to push their car. One day they flew down to the Ukraine to see Italian troops attacking Russia under the command of German Field Marshal von Rundstedt. For a while they shared the soldiers' soup and black bread, allowed themselves to be photographed by respectful infantrymen. Flying back from the Ukraine, Mussolini was allowed to take the controls for a few minutes from Adolf's personal pilot...
...there is a type of top-ranking German general, these three are it. They look almost exactly alike (see cut}-heavily lined face, aquiline nose, snapping snake-eyes, lips tight and bitter. They are old: Rundstedt is 65, Leeb will be next month, Bock is 60. They are stiffly aristocratic: all three sport vons. None of them thinks much of the Nazis: Leeb and Rundstedt both retired temporarily in 1938, reportedly for political reasons, and ascetic Bock hates sensuous Goring. But all of them love soldiering and have a consuming sense of patriotic duty...
...Rundstedt, the oldest, is also the best. Before the Nazis came to power, he was a stanch royalist, a faithful Hindenburg man. Now he is the Nazis' high priest of strategy. Belittlers of Chief of the High Command Wilhelm Keitel used to say that Keitel was such a coxcomb that he wouldn't even listen to Rundstedt. Rundstedt is easily the most experienced German commander. He alone of the present crop of generals was an Army Corps Chief of Staff in World War I. He will go down in German history as a hero because...