A good many pages of the first section are taken up with an account of the dogged determination of the prisoners to write to their wives and families -- even when it becomes clear that the Germans are simply allowing the letters to blow away in the wind.

Caesar occupied the town first and defeated the Germans before its walls, slaughtering most of the German army as it tried to flee across the river ( 1. 36ff ).

Eisenhower's first struggles however were with Allied leaders and officers on matters vital to the success of the Normandy invasion ; he argued with Roosevelt over an essential agreement with de Gaulle to use French resistance forces in covert and sabotage operations against the Germans in advance of Overlord.

The Germans attacked Russia on 18 February ; the offensive led to a rapid collapse and retreat of the Russian troops and to signature of the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk by the Bolsheviks on 3 March 1918.

Haller, scorer of the Germans ' first goal, acquired the ball and was seen holding it as he collected his runner's up medal.

The first use of poison gas on the Western Front was on 22 April 1915, by the Germans at Ypres, against Canadian and French colonial troops.

For the first time, the term " Kingdom ( Empire ) of the Germans " ( Regnum Teutonicorum ) was applied to a Frankish kingdom, although Teutonicorum at its founding originally meant something closer to " Realm of the Germanic peoples " or " Germanic Realm " than " realm of the Germans ".

Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways.

Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways.

It was not until 1567 that the first portrait of Gutenberg, almost certainly an imaginary reconstruction, appeared in Heinrich Pantaleon's biography of famous Germans.

* 1942 – World War II: the Germans test fly the Messerschmitt Me 262 using only its jet engines for the first time.

In 1897, the first official census in this area indicated that Latvians formed 68. 3 % of the total population of 1. 93 million ; Russians accounted for 12 %, Jews for 7. 4 %, Germans for 6. 2 %, and Poles for 3. 4 %.

It was quickly taken by the Germans during the Battle of Maastricht in May 1940, but on 14 September 1944 it was also the first Dutch city to be liberated by allied forces.

* 1990 – The Germans in the German Democratic Republic are called to the first democratic elections in this former communist dictaturship.

The original line construction did not cover the area chosen by the Germans for their first challenge, which was through the Ardennes in 1940, a plan known as Fall Gelb.

At first, the Margrave defeated Mieszko's forces ; subsequently the Duke's brother Czcibor defeated the Germans in the decisive stage, inflicting great losses among their troops.

Unfortunately not a whole lot of very old buildings are left in town: first the Americans carpet-bombed it in February 1944, later the Germans shelled it for about five months after the liberation in September 1944, and finally there were a lot of very rigorous city planners in the 1950s, 60's and 70's who finished what the Americans and Germans started.

The east Baltic world was transformed by military conquest: first the Livs, Latgallians and Estonians, then the Semigallians, Curonians, Prussians and the Finns underwent defeat, baptism, military occupation and sometimes extermination by groups of Danes, Germans and Swedes.

The Livonians, who had been paying tribute to the East Slavic Principality of Polotsk, at first considered the Germans as useful allies.

Subsequently the Germans were dealt major defeats first at the Battle of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942 – 43, and then in the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943.

In 1840 the first spa opened in Kuressaare ( then known as Arensburg ), and the town became a resort for Russians and Baltic Germans.

During the 1930s and all through World War II, British, Japanese, Italians and Germans developed and extensively used oxygen rebreathers in order to fit out the first frogmen.

Although the Germans put considerable effort into the first surface-to-air missiles ( SAMs ) after 1943, they did not have enough time to develop operational-level weapons before the war ended.

The Germans also developed a series of teleprinter encryption systems, quite different from Enigma.

The device was developed for use as part of the Germans ' Kehl radio control transmitter system used in certain German bomber aircraft, used to guide both the rocket-boosted anti-ship missile Henschel Hs 293, and the unpowered pioneering precision-guided munition Fritz-X, against maritime and other targets.

* Revolver cannon were developed in World War II by the Germans as the Mauser MK 213 to provide high-caliber cannon with a reasonable rate of fire and reliability.

In World War I, in the last year of the conflict, the Germans developed the Bergmann MP 18, a small, hand-held automatic weapon with a ' rifle-like ' form ( including a wooden stock ).

Gas-to-liquids ( GTL ) is a developing technology that converts stranded natural gas into synthetic gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel through the Fischer-Tropsch process developed during World War II by Germans.

Germans developed the Dräger rebreathers as of 1912.

In addition, because Patton's rapid drive resulted in a salient that was vulnerable to flanking attacks and getting trapped by the Germans, Weyland and Patton developed the concept of using intensive armed aerial reconnaissance to protect the flanks of this salient.

The course of the second Battle of the Atlantic was a long struggle as the Germans developed anti-convoy tactics and the British developed counter-tactics to thwart the Germans.

Paddy Griffith wrote that the bite and hold system kept moving until November ; the BEF had developed a workable system of offensive tactics against which the Germans ultimately had no answer.

The first practical design of a submarine-based launch platform was developed by the Germans near the end of World War II involving a launch tube which contained a ballistic missile and was towed behind a submarine.

A significant settlement developed in 1710, when 1200 Germans were brought to Livingston Manor, which is now known as Germantown.

The Germans overran the forward Anzac defences and a mêlée developed from which the Anzacs emerged victorious.

The Germans quickly developed plans to launch a pre-emptive operation, following the adage that the best defence is a good offense, intent on capturing the northern section of the Zouave Valley along the northernmost portion of the Canadian front.

An alternative model of the nation-state was developed in reaction to the French republican concept by the Germans and others, who instead of giving the citizenry sovereignty, kept the princes and nobility, but defined nation-statehood in ethnic-linguistic terms, establishing the rarely if ever fulfilled ideal that all people speaking one language should belong to one state only.

The Germans developed a " doctrine of autonomy " the forerunner of both blitzkrieg and modern infantry tactics using groups of Stormtroopers who would advance in small mutually covering groups from cover to cover with " autonomy " to exploit any weakness they discovered in enemy defenses.

Two large ethnic groups soon developed: Germans from both Russia and Germany ( the latter called Reich Germans ) and Hollanders who had come from the eastern United States.

It was feared that British Prisoners of War might be used as hostages by the Germans, and attempts were made to make radio contact with the prisoners to get information about such a situation if it developed.

Gobineau's basic concept, as further refined and developed in Nazism, places the black Aboriginal Australians and " African savages " at the bottom of the hierarchy, while the white Northern and Western European Aryans ( consisting of Germans, Finnish, Swedish, Icelanders, Norwegians, Danish, British, French, Northern Italians, Irish and Dutch ) were at the top ; white olive-skinned Southern Europeans ( consisting of the Spanish, Southern Italians, Greeks and Portuguese, i. e. those of what is called the Mediterranean race, which was regarded as another subrace of the Caucasian race ) in the upper middle ranks ; Slavs ( Even though the Slavs are white and of Indo-European ancestry, the Nazis placed them lower on the scale because they were regarded as primarily of the Alpine race rather than the Nordic race, and thus fit only to be peasants.

The Germans developed even odder designs, like the Bachem Ba 349 Natter, which launched vertically and thus eliminated the need for an airbase.

In 1918, the Germans developed delayed-action fuzes that would later develop into more sophisticated versions during the 1930s, as Nazi Germany began its secret course of arms development.