Word: verdun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Verdun was the most destructive and in many ways the most crucial battle of World War I, a war that, as its 50th anniversary nears, is just now beginning to generate in Europe the same post-mortem re-examinations that the U.S. Civil War centennial recently unleashed here. Author Alistair Horne, an ex-Guards officer and British intelligence expert, has stitched together scores of eyewitness accounts by generals and common soldiers to make vivid sense of the battle's indescribable confusion...
...battle came about largely through mischance. Initially, the Germans did not intend to take Verdun. And the French could have abandoned it in the early stages without too great a strategic loss. But soon the possession of the small provincial town on the Meuse came to be a symbol of national resistance. As a result, the fighting crept bloodily on for ten months-from Feb. 21 until late December of 1916. When it was over, Germany had lost its last chance of winning the war. The French army and France itself, Horne argues, may not even today have recovered from...
Germany's commander in chief, Erich von Falkenhayn, conceived of the Verdun battle as a device to draw in the French and "bleed their army white." He systematically refused to release reserve divisions, which on several occasions would have allowed hapless Crown Prince Wilhelm, who commanded the Verdun army, to win the battle and so bring an end to the carnage. Falkenhayn's plan specified that the French would lose three to five men for every German who fell. He died, after the war, still insisting that this is what happened, though the facts, brought to him from...
...world's few elite organizations, comparable to the U.S. Marines and Britain's Brigade of Guards. To its own members (over the years the majority have been German or Slav), the Legion is an unparalleled string of battles, from Constantine in 1837 to Sebastopol, Magenta, the Somme, Verdun, Narvik, Bir Hakeim, Cassino, Dienbienphu, and Algiers in 1960. Its flag, "whose staff bends under the weight of its glory," is one of the most cited and decorated of all the world's regimental standards...
...asylum. A year ago. Jean Clement, 62, owned a 600-acre farm in Algeria. Today he is a grocer in Montpellier on the verge of bankruptcy. Complaining that his store is boycotted because he is a pied-noir (European of Algeria), Clement says angrily: "My father was killed at Verdun. I helped liberate France in 1944. I'm as good a Frenchman as anyone in Montpellier, but the animosity of the local population is terrible...