Word: albania
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...Many little groups of four or five guerrillas in the frigid, snowy hills were said to add up to a large force commanded by former Albanian Major Ali Mehmed, who fled his native country when the Italians took over in 1938. Major Mehmed was reported to have returned to Albania quite recently by parachute from an unidentified plane...
Norway's and Albania's rumors and events gave special interest last week to remarks by Pundit Walter Lippmann of the New York Herald Tribune. Said he: "The 'new order' proclaimed by the Axis is merely a fancy name for the territory that the German Army is able to occupy. . . . There is no single example of the voluntary participation of any nation in the new order. . . . [It] displays not one single attribute of an order-not custom, consent, legitimacy, legality, moral authority, or even a mere partnership of give and take. The nearest analogy...
Snow sifted last week through the mountain peaks and troughs of perpendicular little Albania. It laid a white blanket over thousands of stiff dead Italian soldiers on bleak slopes and in forested ravines from Porto Edda, where many of them had landed, northeastward to Lake Ochrida and the east-west gorges of the Shkumin River, where Italian commanders strove to make a stand against the relentless, amazing Greeks. Most Italians abhor cold as they do the sharp Greek bayonet, which Rome last week plaintively called a "barbaric and inhuman" weapon...
...Albania, to improve the shattered discipline of the routed, retreating Blackshirts, hurried fierce, sporting Achille Starace, former Secretary of the Fascist Party, now chief of the Fascist Militia. Mussolini's mouthpiece, Giovanni Ansaldo, took pains to announce over the radio: "We must win the war in the Mediterranean with our own Army, quite alone." Crown Prince Umberto himself condoned with the families of the first victims of the Greeks...
Unless Germany should suddenly throw in some effective air power, Italy's payoff in Albania, now that snow was falling, looked at best like a stalemate for some months, a lasting disgrace and a drain on the entire Italian military establishment. If, operating from their new strongholds in Crete, British naval power could gain mastery of the Adriatic, past minefields and submarines, the entire Italian expedition, including last week's reinforcements, might be annihilated, or forced to execute a sorry withdrawal like the British from Norway...