Word: wehrmacht
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Berlin in 1945. It blithely crushed revolts in various satellite countries, moved into Cuba, Africa and Afghanistan. Prussia-Germany? In the old days, only the rich could afford real coffee; the masses had to make do with a blend of burnt barley and chicory. But that stuff took the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow and Cairo...
Memory has truncated the liberation of Western Europe into 11 months of steadily grinding the Wehrmacht with fresh replacements and endless supplies from America's factories. Even the Battle of the Bulge is generally regarded as a momentary setback to an inevitable Allied victory. Ambrose, founder of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, hears a different story from the veterans--especially those who were ordered to advance continuously through the Hurtgen Forest despite appalling losses. The 28th Division alone suffered more than 6,000 killed and wounded, many by falling branches cunningly blasted from towering evergreens...
Four months later, with Father again at the front, Mother was still hesitating. Soviet tanks were only a few kilometers from our town. In the early morning hours of May 7, Father made the decision for her, in absentia. A three-axled Wehrmacht truck arrived at our door, barely visible in the blacked-out street. Mother shook us out of bed and hustled us downstairs. We brought two rucksacks and a baby carriage; there had been no time to pack more. Two soldiers bundled us into the truck. It was already crowded with other refugees and their gear -- suitcases, sacks...
...fighting vehicles, refugee carts, and overloaded cars powered by wood gas, all headed west. At the eastern end of the span, panic erupted when military policemen announced that it was about to be closed. Somehow our truck was allowed to pass, but even as we inched across the bridge, Wehrmacht sappers were attaching charges to its stone arches, and moments after we reached the other side, we heard the dull explosive thump that indicated the span had been blown. A few minutes later and we would have been blocked on the other shore...
...eventually told me that Peise was in Father's outfit and that Father had asked him to pick us up after the truck was ordered westward. What Peise's real mission was -- if any -- no one knew. It seemed strange that he had orders to go west when the Wehrmacht needed every man in the east. The sergeant shed no light on the question. He drove the truck with singular determination, fatigue cap pushed into his neck, submachine gun slung across his chest, eyes on the road...