Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Young General Galland probably saw little of Hitler, except on such ceremonial occasions, but as inspector general he fought mightily for development of the jet-powered Messerschmitt 262 as the only possible defense against the Allies' vast fleets of bombers. Hitler, against the advice of his best airmen, ordered the jets used as bombers, not fighters, and also opted to throw Germany's resources into making guided missiles-the put-putting V-1 and the rocket-powered V2. By late 1944 Galland, like his fellow airmen, was perfectly able to see that Germany, without enough defense against...
...Vorkuta, but when he learned the conditions, Nicholas decided that it was "too much to demand of any man that he should live there." The Soviets let the native Komi remain there, virtually ignored until 1942, until the invading Nazis captured the Donbas coal mines. Then, gathering a vast horde of war prisoners, refugees from the Baltic states and the Ukraine, the Russians built a railroad to Vorkuta and began mining coal in its permanently frozen ground...
Today, in a vast area, there are 40 pitheads, serviced by the camps of the Vorkuta complex. There are an estimated 235,000 people in the Vorkuta complex, some 12,000 of them guards, technicians and officials, about 105,000 of them prisoners, and another 120,000 of them prisoners freed from the camps but forbidden to leave the area. Vorkuta supplies about 6% of the Soviet Union's coal production...
There are compensations-of a kind. In the vast Soviet prison system, Vorkuta is classified as a "polar camp," which means that prisoners get better food. The daily ration includes 800 grams of bread and two warm dishes, usually oatmeal, thick soup or beans with fat. There is meat twice weekly, fish four times. Movies, usually Russian, are shown three times a month. Pravda is pasted on the wall...
Tree farms, ranging in size from small, back-country wood lots to the vast forests of big logging firms, now cover 33,692,964 acres, an area bigger than New York State. Some 3,500,000 of these acres were set aside for farms last year for the first time. In the South tree farms cover 21 million acres from North Carolina to Texas. Florida has one gigantic farm of 800,000 acres owned by St. Joe Paper Co., and Texas has 3,400,000 acres producing fast-growing Southern pines for U.S. construction and pulp mills. But the biggest...