Word: albania
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...morning last week, two hours before dawn, the boom of a gun broke the almost rural silence of Tirana, the small capital perched in the mountains of the tiny Kingdom of Albania. Boom followed boom until 101 had shaken the sleeping town. A son and heir had just been born to King Zog I and his Hungarian-American consort, Queen Geraldine. The man-child was named Skander after the great Albanian patriot who in the 15th Century stood off the Turks during some 30 years of hard fighting...
Forty-eight hours later the bed-ridden Queen lying in Tirana's temporary Royal Palace could hear the roar of whole flights of planes overhead-planes that could not possibly be Albania's, since the country had only two. They dropped no bombs but leaflets fluttered down in the spring breeze announcing that "friendly" Italian troops were arriving that day to take over the country and "reestablish order, peace and justice." At four Albanian seaports, the nearest one (Durazzo) only 25 miles from Tirana, warships soon hove into sight, began bombarding. Troops were landed. A skirmish...
...armed Fascist legionnaires had overcome this petty resistance and pushed their way up the steep mountain grades to the Capital. In two days they had occupied all the important points of the country, with casualties of only 21 killed, 97 wounded. The Albanian Army vanished into the fastnesses of Albania's Dinaric Alps where, unless the Sons of the Eagle (as the Albanians call themselves) have changed since the Turks dealt with them for five centuries, they can be expected to put up a guerrilla warfare until Kingdom Come...
...into neighboring Greece. Lodging in a primitive little inn at Fiorina, across the frontier. Her Majesty through her Hungarian grandmother, Countess D'Estrelle D'Ekna, released an appeal to the world: "I left my husband leading his troops-his poor insignificant little Army-into battle. What could Albania do against such armed might as that which ground down...
...Peace, † which made out no case for giving him, any more than Pius XI, such a special designation. Last week the Holy Father spent his first Holy Week in office, a week made notable by the fact that his neighbor Benito Mussolini chose Good Friday to invade Albania. On Easter Sunday Pius XII made a radio address to the world: "There can be no peace so long as treaties which have been solemnly sanctioned have lost that security value which constitutes the foundation for reciprocal trust...