Word: unreal
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years the U.S. has heard, in vast doses of oratory, that it could beat Hitler without fighting him. Now somewhere a mighty battle was raging, somewhere in some unreal thicket of unpronounceable names somewhere in the suburbs of Moscow. Each day the great armies clashed and retreated, were encircled, imprisoned, wiped out, again .encircled, again wiped out; each day innumerable unreal tanks were destroyed, attacked again, again destroyed; each day 100 airplanes were shot down, flew over again, were again shot down. Each day the Germans advanced, the defense stiffened, finally the Government fled...
Looking up from the unreal war news in his paper, a citizen could turn up images of U.S. life as disjointed as the visions of a fever: a 16-year-old boy, running away with two girls, 15 and 14, confessed killing a North Carolina carpenter because he wanted his automobile . . . in Raleigh, N.C., an obstreperous elephant, being put out of its misery, refused to die, sagged on its legs for 40 minutes while a prison warden pumped over 100 shots into it with a submachine gun . . . in Boston, showgirls demonstrated the V for Victory campaign and, incidentally, the unreality...
Reporting by official and neutral news agencies was dreamy, unreal, ridiculously ironic. D.N.B. told of Alpine troops fighting on Ukraine's plains; Tass described Germans rushing into battle "in a drunken condition," Rumanians being pushed into battle at the bayonet's point; and though there had never been such vastnesses, the world's press was overfed with vignettes -a number of Russian peasants capturing three parachutists, two planes dropping eight bombs which killed a postman and burned two barns at Tammisaari, Finland...
Speaking of Libya, the Prime Minister candidly admitted that "technical mistakes and mischances occurred. . . . Our armored forces became disorganized. . . .But anyone who supposes there will not be mistakes in war is very unreal and foolish." Referring to Greece, he said: "Hitler has told us that it was a crime . . .on our part to go to the aid of the Greeks...
...most U.S. citizens, still not fully awake to the threat of Europe's war, the possibility of a bombing attack is as remote and unreal as an invasion from Mars. Yet military men know that such an attack might, become real. They also know that even a minor raid might cause catastrophic mass hysteria. Sixty minutes of hokum in an Orson Welles broadcast three years ago gave them a rough idea of what could happen...