Word: vitebsk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This was not the fault of the war, although this was the blackest of weeks for the enemy on both sides of the world. The steady flow of huge headlines-Cherbourg, Saipan, Vitebsk-could neither blot the Republican convention off the front pages nor out of Americans' minds...
...bald Armenian Colonel General Ivan Bagramian and Colonel General Ivan Chernyakhobsky, a 32-year-old Jewish tank expert who helped to defend Voronezh in 1942, launched thrusts north and south of Vitebsk which bypassed that stout Nazi bastion by 15 to 25 miles. Then they closed the gap behind it, cutting off five German divisions. At week's end Stalin announced that Vitebsk was in Russian hands...
...Wehrmacht fought for Pskov with skill and fury: beyond it lay Estonia and Latvia, and then the Baltic, washing Germany's own shores. But not even Pskov's fate worried the Germans as much as the Russian threat to the Vitebsk-Rogachev line, and to Minsk, the kingpin of the German defense system in the north...
...though the conditions varied, the time element remained fairly constant. Minor pushes lasted four days to two weeks. (Their aim: a local objective, a test of the enemy's strength, a feint.) Major offensives lasted an average of two to four weeks (on the Vitebsk front, 19 days; Orel, 30 days; Smolensk, 25 days; the first offensive into Poland, 27 days; the thrust into Estonia, 21 days...
...Forest. A little fleet of cars took the party ten miles out the Vitebsk road to Goat Hill, overlooking the Dnieper. A light snow was falling on the slender, leaning birches, the bare oaks, the tall evergreens and the huge mounds of frozen sand with the black boots sticking out. Kathy and her companions stumbled over the rough ground, past pits the size of tennis courts, to where Dr. Victor Prozorovsky, senior medical expert of the Atrocities Commission, stood on a freshly turned heap of red sand. He was directing Red Army men as they hacked out frozen, mildewed Polish...