Word: stalins
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...against risking any military provocation of Japan. Another is that he and Philippines President Manuel Quezon thought the Philippines might somehow remain neutral in the erupting Pacific war. Still another theory is that MacArthur temporarily suffered the kind of breakdown that sometimes afflicts commanders in crisis -- as happened to Stalin when the Germans invaded in June...
...Europe, both sides welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hitler, pleased that the industrial bulwark of the Allies was now preoccupied with an Asian enemy, almost immediately declared war on the U.S. Churchill and Stalin were relieved that America was finally a combatant...
...beginning of December 1941, German troops were in Istra, a suburb only 15 miles west of Moscow. Ever since Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa at 4 a.m. on June 22, 1941, his forces had swept through Stalin's European empire. They took the half of Poland that had been partitioned to the Soviet Union in 1939, stripped off the Baltic states that Moscow had annexed just a year before, seized Belorussia, and were marching south into Ukraine. Stalin's generals were stunned. They had believed the idea of blitzkrieg was an unreliable bourgeois strategy. No one had expected such a lightning...
...spite of what seemed to be inevitable doom, in spite of hundreds of thousands of fleeing party apparatchiks, Stalin remained in Moscow. In a speech on Nov. 6, 1941, the eve of the 24th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover, he cast the enemy as beasts. "It is these people without honor or conscience, these people with the morality of animals, who have the effrontery to call for the extermination of the great Russian nation." Patriotic Russians would never let that happen. "No mercy for the German invaders," he said. In Red Square the next day, he again sought to rein...
...tyrant's appeal transfigured a shell-shocked country. Suddenly a hopeless cause became the Great Patriotic War. Even those who hated Stalin -- like the novelist Victor Nekrasov -- remember rushing into combat crying "Za rodinu, za Stalina!" (For the motherland, for Stalin!). The reanimated Russians could also count on a perennial ally: Father Winter...