Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Early in World War I Manstein was severely wounded. On recovery he fought at Verdun, drew attention by his energy, will power, harshness. He remained with the army after defeat, served on the hush-hush postwar General Staff, helped to build up the Wehrmacht for the war of revenge...
Ernie Mott's middle name is Verdun, because his tosspot, philandering artist father was killed at Verdun in World War I. Ernie's mother keeps a secondhand furniture store, lends money and receives stolen goods on the side. Ernie is apprentice to a lithographer, is fired for laziness and ineptitude, becomes a hanger-out at the Fun Fair, a penny arcade replete with peep shows, pinball games, shooting gallery and a change girl named Ada -"a proper, right, straight up smasher of a bride" with yellow hair, red fingernails and a close-fitting sweater...
...husky, keen-faced, long-nosed man, he is one of the Red Army's ablest tacticians. His myaso-roobka (meat-grinder) concept has dominated Soviet military thought since 1941, has bled Germany white of her young manhood. Sokolovsky's antidote for Blitzkrieg is slow, continuous grinding, a Verdun multiplied a hundredfold. The advance on Smolensk delights him; only two years ago he had trod this very road in retreat...
...wonderful but far more typical The Little American, in which German soldiers battered at the stateroom doors of the foundering Lusitania in their eagerness to get at U.S. Red Cross nurses. Such films were reportedly shown on hospital ceilings and in rude theaters 90 ft. under the blasts of Verdun. It is hardly surprising that veterans turn up, now & then, who remember dugouts gratefully named Keystone Kottage, Vitagraph Village...
...start of World War I, Colonel Pétain, 54, was about to be retired. A careful planner and able artillery tactician, frugal with the lives of his men, he rose to command of the Second Army at the defense of Verdun in 1916. To him was credited the line: "They shall not pass." When the armies of the Crown Prince were crushed in 130 days of fighting that covered an advance of only four miles and cost 300,000 lives, Pétain emerged as a legendary hero. But numerous French leaders of the time later accused...