Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...retreating Germans . . . My advice to Charlie is to take heart. I predict that by the end of the month we'll be in complete control of Paris, Marseille will capitulate. Bulgaria will petition for an armistice, and Rumania will surrender and switch to the Allied side. As Verdun. Saint-Mihiel and Dieppe fall, the Russians will take over the entire Ploesti oilfields...
Well before Dienbienphu's day of defeat came, many Frenchmen at home had given up. "Verdun?" said the moderate left-wing newspaper Combat bitterly. "Verdun was a position which could be held at all costs because the entire future depended on it ... But what does Dienbienphu mean for the French fighting man? ... An obsessive, slow and stubborn war. A terrible kind of war for which the French were not made-because they have clear intelligence, and like to know for what they are fighting. They are impulsive, and need to have a little glory stirring their flags, a little...
...hills around it. Every hill and every valley was a network of barbed wire and dug-in strong points; with its 12,000 French troops, air-supplied by a constant shuttle of planes, Nasan was like a military anthill. French officers likened it to the classic French position at Verdun, the great turning-point battle of World...
...Here died at 95 the hero of Verdun, a convicted traitor of World...
Died. Henri Philippe Omer Benoit Joseph Pétain, 95, Marshal of France, hero of Verdun in World War I, symbol of French defeatism and defeat in World War II; in Port Joinville, Ile d'Yeu, where he had been since June 29, when his life prison sentence for treason, already commuted from death, was commuted again to confinement in a hospital. To the end, Pétain insisted that, as Premier in 1940, he capitulated to the Nazis and then collaborated with them to "spare" France. "You may judge me according to your conscience," he told the court...