Crossword clues for ardennes
ardennes
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Ardennes \Ardennes\ n. 1. a wooded plateau in the Champagne-Ardenne region of France; the site of intense fighting in World Wars I and II.
Wikipedia
Ardennes is a department in the Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region of northeastern France named after the Ardennes area. Its prefecture is the town Charleville-Mézières. The inhabitants of the department are known as Ardennais or Ardennaises.
The Ardennes (; ; ; ; also known as Ardennes Forest) is a region of extensive forests, rough terrain, rolling hills and ridges formed by the geological features of the Ardennes mountain range and the Moselle and Meuse River basins. Geologically, the range is a western extension of the Eifel and both were raised during the Givetian stage of the Devonian (419.2 ± 3.2 to about 358 million years ago) as were several other named ranges of the same greater range.
Primarily in Belgium and Luxembourg, but stretching into Germany and France (lending its name to the Ardennes department and the Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region), and geologically into the Eifel—the eastern extension of the Ardennes Forest into Bitburg-Prüm, Germany, most of the Ardennes proper consists of southeastern Wallonia, the southern and more rural part of the Kingdom of Belgium (away from the coastal plain but encompassing over half of the kingdom's total area). The eastern part of the Ardennes forms the northernmost third of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, also called "Oesling" (Luxembourgish: Éislek), and on the southeast the Eifel region continues into Rhineland-Palatinate (German state).
The trees and rivers of the Ardennes provided the underlying charcoal industry assets that enabled the great industrial period of Wallonia in the 18th and 19th centuries, when it was arguably the second great industrial region of the world, after England. The greater region maintained an industrial eminence into the 20th century after coal replaced charcoal in metallurgy.
Allied generals in World War II felt the region was impenetrable to massed vehicular traffic and especially armor, so the area was effectively "all but undefended" during the war, leading to the German Army twice using the region as an invasion route into Northern France and Southern Belgium via Luxembourg in the Battle of France and the later Battle of the Bulge.
Usage examples of "ardennes".
The three armies in which the generals held command would soon attack in an area known as the Ardennes, the sector of the front straddling the Belgian border due west of Koblenz.
Utilizing total surprise, shielded from the powerful Allied air forces by bad weather predicted for December, they would slice through the thin American line in the Ardennes and turn northwest.
It would be the French campaign of 1940 all over again: then German tanks had plunged through the Ardennes and all the way to the English Channel, splintering the British-French coalition, demoralizing the French Army and driving the British off the Continent.
Its armies had closed to the Siegfried Line, the main German defensive position in the West, and at one point, at Aachen, north of the Ardennes, they had punched a large hole in it.
Inevitably, as a stream flows around a rock, the main thrusts of the Allies had bypassed the hilly, forested Ardennes region, located at roughly the midpoint on the Western Front.
Most of the Ardennes sector was the responsibility of Major General Troy Middleton, whose VIII Corps was the weakest of the three corps making up the American First Army.
Although American patrols had managed to spot three more enemy divisions than usual opposite the Ardennes, much of the German buildup for Operation Christrose went undetect- ed.
The thick forests rimming the Ardennes concealed 1,900 pieces of artillery and 970 tanks and assault guns to be used in peeling back the American front line.
The Ardennes in winter has the look of an old-fashioned Christmas card-steep hills crowned with forests of fir trees, narrow winding rivers, and picture-book villages and quaint old stone castles tucked into deep valleys.
To German Field Marshal Walther Model, however, ordered to drive a quarter of a million men and thousands of tanks, trucks, and guns through the Ardennes in a matter of days, there was nothing charming about it at all.
Ironically, it is precisely because its terrain is so difficult that the Ardennes has a long military history.
The Ardennes covers part of Luxembourg and most of the lower corner of Belgium that separates Germany from France.
Some sixty miles from the Our, on the western edge of the Ardennes, is the Meuse River.
The roads in the Ardennes were as narrow and crooked as the rivers, full of hairpin curves and steep grades.
There was not a single good highway that went straight through the Ardennes in the direction in which the Germans wanted to go.