Word: todt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...British capital. At Mimoyecques, near Calais (95 miles from London), Allied troops found 50 smoothbore gun barrels, each 400 feet long, sunk 350 feet into chalk hills. The installation was partly protected by 18-ft. concrete roofs, impervious to bombs. But steady air attack had slowed the Todt Organization's construction of the site until it was too late. Also found were seven other elaborate installations on the French coast. At least one was for another secret weapon, still a secret...
...civilian Home Guard had "stood down," Heinrich Himmler spoke of new forces arising in the Reich. The best-publicized of these is the Volkssturm or Home Army. Promulgated in Hitler's name, the Volkssturm decree summoned all "able-bodied" males between 16 and 60 except those in the Todt (construction) organization, or in police and security units. Himmler's aim was for three million Volkssturm soldiers; perhaps one million have already been mobilized...
...Fatherland. But the soil of Germany was different from the soil of Russia and its neighbors. In the homeland the Germans had built deeper, more elaborate defenses, had strengthened them for the last year with more than a million men of the Todt organization. Swedish reporters talked learnedly of a new German "rolling defense" fathered by Field Marshal Heinz Guderian, eastern front commander, now fully restored to Adolf Hitler's fitful favor. Already emplaced in whole provinces, enormous masses of movable concrete bunkers of eight to 15 tons, called "scorpions," formed "tank landscapes." Before them were six or eight...
...troops had been fighting inside Cherbourg for 26 hours. But on the city's perimeter were Maginot-type forts, begun by Vauban in the 17th Century, improved by Napoleon in 1808, perfected by Todt in the 1940s, which still blazed with bitter resistance. Spectacled Major General Manton S. Eddy, commander of the 9th Division, stood with one of his regimental commanders on a hillside near Octeville, on the southwest approaches to the port...
...Lower Level. Schlieben's small, holdout groups achieved a few hours more delay. Time & again U.S. troops cleared one level of a Vauban-Todt fort, only to have Germans emerge in their rear from a lower level. Schlieben's tunnel system at first yielded 300 Nazi moles; from the sub-basement finally came 500 more...