Word: hitler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day), the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire, and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified...
...France, again just as in 1914. By contrast, a strong armored offensive right through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes could lead to a breakthrough all the way to the English Channel. The Allied armies would be encircled and cut off; all France would lie open. Manstein's memorandums never reached Hitler, but the two men met at a dinner, and the Fuhrer was so impressed by the general's bold plan that he ordered it adopted...
Guderian's tanks raced up the coast, seized Boulogne, seized Calais, neared Dunkirk, then were ordered to halt. Guderian protested but was told that it was Hitler's personal order, an important miscalculation that has never been fully explained. "The Fuhrer is terribly nervous," Chief of Staff Franz Halder wrote in his diary. "Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance and so would rather pull the reins...
...into deserted Paris on June 14. Reynaud fled to England, leaving the government in the hands of Marshal Henri Petain, 84, who was still revered as the man who had defended Verdun during World War I under the watchword, "They shall not pass." But on June 17 he asked Hitler for an armistice. Hardly noticed in the debacle was an appeal from London one day later by an obscure French general named Charles de Gaulle, who, in a speech that was to become the rallying cry for the Resistance, asked all Frenchmen to fight on under his leadership: "France...
...Hitler's terms seemed mild: Germany would occupy and rule the northern half of France and its Atlantic coast; the southern half could remain an autonomous state under Petain, with its capital in the sleepy resort town of Vichy. But he insisted that the armistice be signed in Compiegne, just outside Paris, in the same railroad car where Marshal Foch had made the Germans sign the armistice in 1918, the site marked by a stone tablet placing blame for the war on "the criminal pride of the German empire." CBS correspondent William Shirer, who was standing nearby, reported that Hitler...