Word: aegean
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...brunt of the best attack that could be mounted by 40 divisions of Germans. Under these conditions the Allies had virtually no reserves except a British tank division which backstopped the line wherever it weakened. The British and Anzacs held the anchor position on the right wing at the Aegean coast where the best road and the only railroad led south to Athens. Time & again they were outflanked on the land side and forced to retire from threatened positions...
...first three of these threaten Turkey. Samothrace and Lemnos can be used to choke the Dardanelles, and Mytilene lies very close to Turkey's west coast. The others threaten British shipping in the whole Aegean. Britain can have no power north of Crete now except naval power, and the occupation of these islands-and probable occupation of more later-threatens to clear Britain out of the whole region...
...corollary of this was that Turkey's Aegean flank was bare. Turkey's Black Sea flank was also bare now that Germany controlled the entire length of the Danube. So giant pincers on Turkey (see map) seemed to be in the blueprints. It might be no more than political pincers, to make Turkey come to terms. After the Balkan fight, Turkey might be induced to give in. But if necessary, the great pincers might be used militarily...
...Stukas swooped across the Aegean skies like dark, dreadful birds, but they dropped no bombs on the monks of Mount Athos. The motorized Nazi hordes rumbled across the Salonikan peninsula, but they did not invade its 40-mile-long eastern cape where the holy and historic Mount towers in misty beauty above monasteries perching like fabulous castles on crags above the sea. Surrounded by flower-scented glens and gorges, veiled with pine and cypress and chestnut, are great Lavra Monastery, Vatopédi, Simöpetra, bastioned Dionysiou (which proudly possesses the brain and right hand of Saint John...
...Outlook. These efforts showed that the Germans were preparing for an attack on the line from the coast of Albania to Fiorina, to the Aegean near Mount Olympus-the line on which the Greeks and British had prepared to make their major stand. The Greeks surged down from Salonika on the eastern end of the line, and this week the British announced that they had been obliged to retreat-but not without inflicting heavy casualties...