Word: soils
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Despite the dismal failure of other attempts to put submarine-borne spies to work on U.S. soil, the Germans tried again. This time they sent only two, but apparently thought their prospects well worth a lot of trouble: the Nazis took a U-boat out of service for 54 days to ship them from Kiel to Frenchman...
...Will of Man. By his labor a man imparts a portion of his life to the soil; to leave his land is thus like a touch of death. Nor does a man easily leave the soil his father and forefathers have wrested from the sea. The great basalt dike at Westkapelle had been started 500 years ago. The Germans had built pillboxes on it. Allied bombers had breached it. Commandos had poured through its gaps, in the wake of the rushing sea. Here & there, like beached sea monsters, still sprawled the rusting hulks of dead British armor...
...salt water which covered much of Walcheren (82 square miles) had undone the labor of generations. The once-rich soil would need five years, after dikes had been mended and sea pumped out, to become fruitful again. But the villagers, who remembered past floods and patient replanting, thought of life's struggle in longer terms. Of their dead fruit trees and flowering hedges they said: "Our children will live to see them again...
They were already making attempts to reclaim their soil. On dry isolated spots farmers hoed sugar beets, tended their barnyard fowl. Plank walks were set on fences above the water. At one place dike workers mended the torn sea wall in the age-old manner. A score of them hauled on the ropes of a leaden pile driver, keeping time to the chant of a greybeard...
...swimming pool at the famed old Greenbrier Hotel at White Sulphur Springs, paralyzed men exercise their flaccid limbs. In the wards, men with legs scarred by vein surgery and men with tantalum plates in their skulls read books on diesel engines, cattle raising, soil conservation. (They cheerfully show their wounds to anyone willing to look.) In the recreation hall, some of the wounded watch the Army training film Baptism of Fire and hear the day's war news. A man in the occupational-therapy department is absorbed in making a set of four-leaf-clover buttons of clay...