Word: springs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...September night 84 barges were hit. Hitler was finally convinced. On Sept. 17 he formally decided "to postpone Sea Lion indefinitely." But the Battle of Britain went on. Between July and November, the Germans lost 1,733 aircraft, the British 915. Though the blitz continued until the following spring, costing about 30,000 lives in London alone, the essential result was that for the first time, Hitler's military power had been beaten back...
...boats in 1939 included only 22 large oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without warning but also seeded Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, with a loss of 833 lives...
...Hitler's moment of supreme triumph, in the spring of 1941, he boldly made his supreme error, the error that was to destroy him. He decided to invade Soviet Russia. Exactly why he made this catastrophic miscalculation will never be known for sure. In part it was ideology. He had begun his political career by attacking the Bolsheviks, and he dreamed of Germany's finding Lebensraum by colonizing the vast lands to the east. He had written in Mein Kampf: "When we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states...
Having won everything, Hitler still could not be satisfied. The following spring, deciding that he now wanted more than just the Sudetenland, he held a conference with Czech President Emil Hacha in Berlin (Bene had resigned and gone into exile after Munich). Hacha was 66 and suffering from heart trouble, so it did not help to have the meeting begin at 1:15 a.m. on March 15, 1939. Hitler told his guest that the Czechs were still guilty of "Bene tendencies," and therefore the Wehrmacht would invade Czechoslovakia at 6 that morning. The only question was whether the Czechs would...
...both the rulers and the peoples of Britain and France, this was an agonizing time. Again and again they had gone through brink-of-war crises over Hitler's insatiable and megalomaniacal demands, over his rearming of the Rhineland in 1936, his annexation of Austria in the spring of 1938, his claims on the Czech Sudetenland in the fall of 1938, his seizure of Bohemia and Moravia in the spring of 1939. In each crisis, the threat of war had reawakened the nightmarish memories of World War I, when tens of thousands of men had been slaughtered in meaningless offensives...