Word: storming
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Plievier's finest writing is in description of single horror scenes--the mobs of wounded men on the Gumrak landing strip, who storm each Junkers transport as it lands in the desperate hope of being flown to safety; the freezing corridors of a field hospital, where the wounded are left to die because there is no medicine; the group of high-ranking generals squatting in a dugout with nothing to do but talk because their units have been wiped out; the early-morning battle in the snow, in which an infantry battalion is shot down to a man between...
Dreadful Spew. The Portland was a 291-ft. side-wheeler, trim with white and gold paint, and to Boston's fond eye, as slick as a schoolmarm's leg. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, 1898, many families were returning to Maine after holiday visits to Boston. Despite storm warnings, the skipper decided he could make Portland ahead of the blow. Shortly after dark, with 176 people aboard, he cast off. The Portland disappeared down the channel into a swirl of snow...
Next morning, in a slatch in the storm, surf watchers on the tip of Cape Cod saw the Portland, among the snarled and yelping seas, just off the treacherous Peaked Hill Bar. The storm closed in, and the day wore on. That night, the sea suddenly belched forth a dreadful spew of trunks, mattresses, chairs, stateroom doors and barrels on the sands near Race Point. The bodies came more slowly, rolling inertly in the surf. Explained a coast watcher: "The bodies do not float as woodwork does, but the tide and waves push and roll them along the bottom until...
...woman I love"; here, as the dirigible Hindenburg explodes in flame above Lakehurst, N.J., the announcer's gasp, "It's terrible . . . it's terrible! . . ." There are the soothing phrases of Neville Chamberlain, returned from Munich; the hysterical scream of Hitler, punctuated by the thunder of his Storm Troopers' "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!"; the uninflected, almost casual voice of Joseph Stalin promising death to the invading Nazis, and the stentorian challenge of Churchill, rallying his little island against a continent...
...phrase coined by oldtime cowboys to describe a storm that turned them blue with cold...