Word: bridgehead
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...Communist enemy was showing signs of attrition. Time & again he failed to take advantage of situations where the U.S. forces were exposed to serious damage and possible breakthrough. For example, while his Changnyong bridgehead was being cut to shreds (see Battle of Korea), the North Koreans in a smaller bridgehead to the north did nothing to help...
...such windfall as the Remagen bridgehead fell into Walker's lap, but he crossed the Rhine at Mainz without fanfare, in assault boats. After that, the XX Corps' hardest fighting was at Kassel, where the Germans fought wildly and vainly to prevent Allied encirclement of the Ruhr. The Reich's back was broken and the rest of the XX Corps' progress, though not bloodless, was relatively easy. After Weimar, Jena, Nurnberg, Regensburg, Walker in early May reached Linz, in Austria, the farthest point of the Third Army's advance...
...bridgehead is untenable, perhaps it should be made tenable immediately. If the concept of holding a bridgehead is now antiquated, the concept of abandoning a whole continent is certainly brand new strategy: could this be a supreme glorification of the strategic retreat...
...bridgehead in Europe: probably untenable, anyway an antiquated concept...
None of these arguments is particularly impressive. It is very doubtful whether the strongest possible Western European forces could do much to slow down an invasion from the east; even a completely equipped "Uniforce" would be terribly overmatched by whatever the Russians threw against it. The "Bridgehead" concept is getting more and more antiquated as the pace of modern war picks up; military strategists like to think that if we must fight a war, we should be able to pick a better operating area than historically vulnerable Western Europe...