Word: corridors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rich coal mines of the Saar. The Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires would be chopped up into a goulash of new nations like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. A newly independent Poland acquired parts of the German industrial area of Upper Silesia, Posen and West Prussia, providing it with a corridor to the Baltic Sea. Germany alone would be disarmed, forbidden to maintain more than 100,000 troops or have any major warships, submarines, warplanes or tanks. Germany would have to admit formally to being guilty of aggression and pay all war damages, a sum estimated at more than $100 billion (around...
...seizure of Bohemia and Moravia had two important consequences. First, Chamberlain finally realized that appeasement would not suffice to restrain Hitler. So when Hitler began talking to the Poles in that same month about the Germans' need to regain the port of Danzig, plus free passage through the Polish Corridor, Chamberlain offered the Poles an unsolicited guarantee of British military support. It was that guarantee that Hitler flouted the following September...
Without the slightest warning, Germany's General Walther von Brauchitsch sent the Fourth Army smashing through the disputed Polish Corridor, isolating the Free City of Danzig; the Eighth and Tenth Armies striking over the Vistula plain toward Warsaw; the Fourteenth Army driving across Silesia toward Cracow -- 1.5 million men in all, led by a fearsome new military force, the 2,700 fast-moving panzers (tanks) of the German armored divisions...
Adolf Hitler left Berlin that same night to survey his armies' progress in Poland, and what he saw pleased him mightily. General Heinz Guderian, the tank commander who had already swept across the 50-mile-wide Polish Corridor, the once German area linking Poland to the Baltic Sea, took the Fuhrer on a tour of the newly conquered territory. Hitler was amazed at the low number of ! German casualties, only 150 killed and 700 wounded among four divisions; his own regiment had suffered 2,000 casualties during its first day of combat in World War I. And he was impressed...
Many of the Poles had fought gallantly, though, and it was here in the battle for the corridor that there spread the legend of the Polish cavalry charging German armor, like medieval knights lost in a time warp. "The Polish Pomorska Cavalry Brigade, in ignorance of the nature of our tanks, charged them with swords and lances," Guderian recalled with some wonder, "and suffered tremendous losses." Actually, the Polish cavalry was organized to combat infantry charges, and it had proved its value when the Poles defeated the Soviets in 1920. But by the time it confronted the German tanks...