Word: valleyful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Spring Valley, Calif...
Night had fallen. The President's train coursed northward through the moonlit Shenandoah Valley, bearing him back to Washington from Charlottesville. At the State Department in Washington, a message marked "Personal for the President" awaited him. It was French Premier Paul Reynaud's last appeal for "clouds of war-planes." The U. S. had no such clouds to give. At Charlottesville. Mr. Roosevelt had already said: the U. S. would throw into World War II. on the Allies' side, all that it had except its man power...
...meet the Germans' mechanized attacks, which they launched first across the flat, marshy but (with Hitler's usual weather luck) now fairly dry lower Somme Valley at Abbeville, Amiens and Peronne...
Weygand had his men disposed flexibly in depth-the approved "accordion" pattern of defense against mechanized power. Behind the front line were carefully camouflaged batteries of anti-tank and heavy machine guns, spaced fairly widely down the valley and highway pathways of assault. Successive, deeper rows of similar weapons were spaced more & more closely until they were backed finally by batteries of 75-mm. field guns, weapons able to knock out heaviest tanks when fired pointblank. The defense plan was to let heavy tanks push back into this final network, to have the advance units destroy motorcycles, armored cars, troop...
Meantime the main waves of Germany's attack rose higher between Noyon on the Oise River and Soissons on the Aisne. The Oise valley was Hitler's broadest, easiest approach to Paris. To command it fully his forces had to storm the high bridge called Chemin des Dames-just north of the Oise-Aisne Canal, and then win a foothold on the Aisne's south bank, to converge on Compiegne and the scene of the 1918 Armistice's signing. This they accomplished by the battle's fifth evening, with appalling loss of life...