Word: stalingrad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...purges of military professionals, Zhukov was Chief of Staff when Hitler first trained his guns on the U.S.S.R. In 1941 the marshal smashed the myth of Nazi invincibility by engineering the defense of Moscow with a flood of Siberian troops, and later won the great battles of Stalingrad, Leningrad and the Dnieper. An icy strategist and disciplinarian, he pushed to Berlin, sustaining a million casualties, and returned to Moscow as Russia's savior. Annoyed by Zhukov's celebrity, Stalin downplayed the marshal's achievements and farmed him off to bush-league posts in Odessa and the Urals...
...trusted instrument of the Soviets. During the Spanish Civil War he went to Spain and helped liquidate the Communists who deviated from the Stalinist line. During the 1930s Ulbricht was suspected of fingering German Communists for Stalin's bloody purges. He fought in the Battle of Stalingrad in his own way-by directing propaganda appeals to undermine the morale of the German soldiers. Sentimentality was foreign to him. Though he had a brother in New York City and a daughter by his first wife (he and his second wife Lotte had no children) in West Germany, he failed...
...Germany's blitzkrieg against France in 1940; of a heart attack; in Irschenhausen, West Germany. Von Manstein was named a field marshal by Hitler in 1942 for his victories in the Crimean campaign against the Soviets and dismissed two years later for advocating a strategy of retreat from Stalingrad. Tried by the British, he was imprisoned for war crimes. Upon his release, he became a consultant to the West German government, advocating a citizens' army with universal conscription for his country in the postwar...
Charles de Gaulle, leader and symbol of victorious Free France, visited Russia in 1944, and his hosts took him to visit the battlefield at Stalingrad. De Gaulle pensively surveyed the terrain, then turned to the Russians and said: "A great people-[pause] the Germans." The story, perhaps apocryphal, tells much about the man: his frosty independence, his detached historical perspective, his ability to deliver the calculated shock...
...stories of his wounds and France's disgrace in the Franco-Prussian War, le Général had a profound respect for the abilities of the Germans. On a visit to the Soviet Union in 1945, De Gaulle stopped off to see the battlefield at Stalingrad. For a long time, he stood mute before the incredible destruction. Molotov waited for his comment. Finally it came. "Un grand peuple," De Gaulle said somberly. "Un grand peupleles allemands...