Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...killed at Verdun died over a period of 299 days...
Best bet was that Gamelin had been put on the shelf, joining the spiritual company of his old chief General Joseph Jacques Cesaire Joffre, who in World War I bungled at Verdun, and General Charles Louis Marie Lanrezac, who boggled at Charleroi...
...middle age who saw what took place last week in Belgium and northern France said that it was more terrible to endure for two hours than all 299 days in 1915 when 278,000 Germans and 460,000 Frenchmen died on the blasted hilltops of Verdun. For this 1940 war was vertical as well as horizontal. To the old curtains of shell and rifle fire were added machine guns spitting from the sky, bombs bursting suddenly upon fields and highways, the unearthly roar of airplane motors drowning even the outcries of men. Fleets of land battleships crushed walls and swept...
...inevitable. Prime Minister Churchill (who named the fight then raging "The Battle of the Bulge") flew to Paris for a meeting of the Allied War Council. Premier Reynaud announced that the moment had come for "a change of men and methods." He called Marshall Pétain, hero of Verdun, to be his adviser, himself took charge of the Defense Ministry...
Shining symbol of French courage and resistance is aged Marshal Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Petain, who not only repelled the Germans at Verdun in 1916 but restored the spirit of victory in the French Forces in the dark days of '17. More than once in the past five troubled years the old man has been talked of as the man to rally a united France. Times had never been worse than they were last week when the legendary defender of France, firm and erect at 83, returned from his Ambassadorship to Spain to become Vice Premier in Paul...